NEOJIBA: From Instruction to Empowerment, A New Pedagogical Model?
Author: Mariana Herwans (Brazil)
Editor: Deborah Wanderley dos Santos
The Academy of Impact Through Music, in partnership with The Global Leaders Institute, are strengthening the global music education community by providing a platform for AIM Firebird alumni to share their impactful global case studies, aiming to foster knowledge exchange and inspire further innovation in music education worldwide.
In late 2025, the leadership of NEOJIBA, one of Brazil’s largest and most successful music for social change programs, was reviewing a compelling internal report from teaching artist Mariana Herwans. Her six-month pedagogical pilot with a beginner oboe class had produced remarkable results in student autonomy and self-regulated learning, all with zero additional budget. The report was more than a success story; it was a powerful proof of concept for a model that could fundamentally deepen the organisation’s impact. This left NEOJIBA’s leadership with a critical decision: should they treat Herwans’s project as an isolated success, or should they attempt to scale her metacognitive teaching model across the entire organisation—a move that would require a massive investment in teacher training and a profound cultural shift?
BACKGROUND
Founded as a state-funded initiative under the Secretary of Justice and Human Rights, the Children and Youth Orchestras of Bahia’s State Centre (NEOJIBA) is a cornerstone of social development in the region. Its mission is to promote the social integration of children and young people from low-income communities through the proven vehicle of collective musical practice. The organisation’s traditional pedagogical approach, like many in the El Sistema-inspired field, has been teacher-centric, focusing on efficiently preparing students for high-quality orchestral performances through demonstration and repetition.
THE ORGANISATIONAL MODEL AND A HIDDEN CHALLENGE
NEOJIBA operates at a significant scale, managing a network of orchestras and educational centres. Its value proposition is clear: providing free, high-quality music education as a means to instill values such as discipline, cooperation, and solidarity. Success is highly visible in the form of impressive public concerts and the sheer number of youths engaged.
However, beneath this success, teaching artist Mariana Herwans identified a systemic weakness. While students excelled at reproducing teacher-led instruction, they often struggled to apply their skills to new musical contexts. This dependency on the teacher limited their long-term growth and agency, revealing a potential disconnect between the program’s method (instruction) and its ultimate mission (empowerment). This passive learning model produced competent ensemble musicians but did not consistently produce autonomous, self-regulated learners.
THE STRATEGIC CHALLENGE
The core challenge facing NEOJIBA is not one of reach or quality, but of pedagogical depth. The traditional, teacher-led model is highly effective for preparing large groups of students for performance, a crucial factor for maintaining public support and satisfying funders. Yet, this efficiency comes at a strategic cost: it risks fostering the very dependency that social empowerment programs aim to overcome. The organisation has reached a point of maturity where it must consider evolving its core “technology”—its teaching methodology—to better align with its mission of developing empowered, self-sufficient young citizens. This presents a classic dilemma: how to innovate at the core of the organisation without disrupting the operational efficiency and impressive results that are central to its brand and funding model.
A NEW FRAMEWORK: THE METACOGNITIVE MODEL
Herwans’s six-month investigation with five beginner oboists offers a potential solution. Her approach was a replicable pedagogical model built on two psycho-cognitive pillars: metacognition (the ability to monitor and direct one’s own thinking) and self-efficacy (the belief in one’s capacity to improve). The model systematically integrates simple, yet powerful, new practices into daily instruction. These include using inquiry-based, open-ended questions; requiring students to summarise lessons in their own words; implementing “descriptive annotation” where students write out solutions on their scores; and structuring individual lessons around a student-led, problem-solving framework.
The results were transformative. Students demonstrated a marked increase in their ability to self-assess, transfer knowledge to new challenges, and take ownership of their learning process. Crucially, the pilot was resource-neutral. It required no additional funding or time, only a fundamental shift in the teacher’s role from an instructor who provides answers to a facilitator who guides thinking.
VALUE-ADDED CONCEPT
The success of the pilot raises the multi-million-dollar question: what would it take to scale this from one oboe class to the entire NEOJIBA system? The primary challenge is not financial but human.
- Teacher Training and Buy-In: The model demands a profound shift in a teacher’s identity. Scaling it would require a massive, ongoing professional development program to retrain hundreds of teaching artists, many of whom are products of the very traditional system this new model seeks to evolve.
- Cultural Resistance: The teacher-centric model is efficient and deeply ingrained. A new approach that cedes control to students could be perceived by some as less efficient, too slow, or a threat to the high standards of performance NEOJIBA is known for.
- Measuring Success: The organisation’s current KPIs are likely tied to enrolment, attendance, and performance quality. The metacognitive model would necessitate new, more complex evaluation tools to measure student agency and self-regulation—metrics that are harder to quantify for funders and stakeholders.
DECISION POINT
With Mariana Herwans’s report offering a compelling vision for a more impactful future, NEOJIBA’s leadership must decide how to proceed. They see the transformative potential but are keenly aware of the immense challenge of system-wide change.
Champion the Innovator. This approach would be to formally support Herwans’s work as a “pedagogical laboratory” within NEOJIBA. She could be tasked with mentoring a small, voluntary cohort of interested teachers, allowing the methodology to be tested further and spread organically through a peer-to-peer network. This is a low-risk, incremental approach that avoids systemic disruption.
Mandate the Transformation. This approach would be to commit to making the metacognitive model the new pedagogical standard for all of NEOJIBA. This would involve launching a bold, multi-year, top-down initiative to retrain all teaching staff, develop new curricular materials, and realign the organisation’s culture and evaluation systems around the central goal of student agency. This is a high-risk, high-reward strategy that bets on profound, systemic change.
The decision rests on a fundamental question about how large, successful organisations should handle innovation. Should NEOJIBA nurture it in isolated pockets, allowing it to grow slowly from the ground up, or should it embrace the immense risk and disruption of a system-wide transformation to more deeply and authentically fulfill its mission?