Empowering Students to Improve the World in Sixty Lessons. Version 1. 0


Book Description

This book offers three tools to assist student, teachers and school leaders in educating global citizens. The first is a protocol to design and adapt global citizenship curriculum. The second is a protocol to design a school wide strategy for global education. The third is an actual curriculum prototype, a sixty lesson global citizenship curriculum, developed following the process presented in the book.




Creating the Global Classroom


Book Description

The book examines how to begin to think like a global educator first by examining how our own histories and experiences have formed our own cultural and professional identities and second how the varied frames by which global education can be understood – pedagogical, ideological and cosmopolitan – have shaped the field. Laurence Peters connects theory and practice about global education relevant to cultivating global awareness in primary and secondary students. Rather than seeing global education as a special field separate from the other disciplines the author encourages integration of global perspectives into everything we do. Showcasing how global awareness is a developmental issue, dependent upon the student’s ability to step outside of their own place-based comfort zone, this volume lays out a roadmap of major challenges and issues around instilling this awareness in students. This book connects theory and practice about global education relevant to cultivating global awareness in primary and secondary students. From this foundation, the book engages with the challenge of integrating global perspectives within a crowded curriculum. By convincing students and teachers alike of global education’s centrality, thinking globally becomes an integral component of learning across subject areas and grade levels, and this work encourages students to exercise empathy for the other and to develop critical skills to see through media distortions and 'fake news' so they can better resist the tendency of politicians in our increasingly multicultural countries to divide people along racial and ethnic lines.




Educating Students to Improve the World


Book Description

This open access book addresses how to help students find purpose in a rapidly changing world. In a probing and visionary analysis of the field of global education Fernando Reimers explains how to lead the transformation of schools and school systems in order to more effectively prepare students to address today’s’ most urgent challenges and to invent a better future. Offering a comprehensive and multidimensional framework for designing and implementing a global education program that combines cultural, psychological, professional, institutional and political perspectives the book integrates an extensive body of empirical literature on the practice of global education. It discusses several global citizenship curricula that have been adopted by schools and school networks, and ties them into an approach to lead school change into the uncharted territory of the future. Given its scope, the book will help teachers, school and district leaders tackle the change management needed in order to introduce global education, and more generally increase the relevancy of education. In addition, the book offers a “bridge” for more productive collaboration and communication between those who lead the process of educational change, and those who study and theorize this important work. At a time when the urgency of our shared global challenges calls for more understanding and collaboration and when the rapid transformation of societies requires that we help students develop a clear sense of relevancy and purpose, this book offers a way to pursue deep and sustainable change in instruction and school culture, so that students learn that nothing human is foreign and that they can find meaning in lives aligned with audacious purposes to make the world better.




Empowering Global Citizens


Book Description

How do we help students work effectively with others from diverse cultural backgrounds? How do we help them understand the world? How do we prepare them for work and life in an era of globalization, volatility, and uncertainty? Empowering Global Citizens offers educators and parents compelling answers to those questions. This book presents The World Course, a curriculum on global citizenship education designed to equip students with the competencies they need to thrive and contribute to sustainable development in an era of globalization. Drawing on curriculum mapping this book offers a coherent and rigorous set of instructional units to support deep learning of twenty-first-century competencies that develop agency, imagination, confidence, and the skills to navigate the complexity of our times. Drawing on a rich conceptual framework of global education, The World Course scaffolds the development of global competency drawing on project-based learning and other pedagogies that support personalization. The course expands children's horizons, helping them understand the world in which they live in all its complexity from kindergarten to high school. This is done through learning activities at the zone for proximal development for each age group, with activities that foster student agency and a growth mindset.







Empowering Teachers to Build a Better World


Book Description

This open access book presents a comparative study on how large-scale professional development programs for teachers are designed and implemented. Around the world, governments and educators are recognizing the need to educate students in a broad range of higher order cognitive skills and socio-emotional competencies, and providing effective opportunities for teachers to develop the expertise needed to teach these skills is a crucial aspect of effective implementation of curricula which include those goals. This study examines how large-scale efforts to empower teachers for deeper instruction have been designed, how they have been implemented, and their outcomes. To do so, it investigates six programs from England, Colombia, Mexico, India, and the United States. Though all six are intended to broaden and deepen students’ curricular aspirations, each takes this expansion of curricular goals in a different direction. The ambitious education reforms studied here explicitly focus on building teachers’ capacity to teach on a broader set of goals. Through a discerning analysis of program documents, evaluations, and interviews with senior leaders and participants in the programs, the book identifies the various theories of action used in these programs, examines how they were implemented, and discusses what they achieved. As such, it offers an indispensable resource for education leaders interested in designing and implementing professional development programs for teachers that are aligned with ambitious instructional goals.




Global Citizenship Education: A Critical Introduction to Key Concepts and Debates


Book Description

Global Citizenship Education explores key ideas and issues within local, national and global dimensions. Including examples and case studies from across the world, the authors draw on ideas, experiences and histories within and beyond 'the West' to contribute to multifaceted perspectives on global citizenship education. In concise chapters, the authors set out the key concepts and debates within the field. Global citizenship education is contextualized within key educational frameworks, including citizenship education, global education, development education and peace education. Edda Sant, Ian Davies, Karen Pashby and Lynette Shultz explore the different ways in which global citizenship can be taught, learned and assessed in formal and informal contexts. Including examples from a wide range of education institutions, chapters provide overviews of policy making and international practices borne out of different approaches to global citizenship education. With each chapter including a summary of key issues, an annotated list of key resources, an exercise for students and a further reading list, Global Citizenship Education will aid understanding of this complex and debated area of study.







Create a Culture of Kindness in Middle School


Book Description

Practical, research-based lessons for middle school educators to teach students pro-social attitudes and behaviors to prevent bullying. Create a Culture of Kindness in Middle School focuses on positive and pro-social attitudes and behaviors that build a respectful and compassionate school environment, while also addressing the tough issues of prejudice, anger, exclusion, and bullying. Through role-playing, perspective-taking, sharing, writing, discussion, and more, students develop the insights and skills they need to accept differences, resolve conflicts peacefully, stop bullying among peers, and create a community of kindness in their classrooms and school. Based on survey data gathered by the authors from more than 1,000 students, the book’s research-based lessons are easy to implement and developmentally appropriate. Digital content includes student handouts from the book.




Fifteen Letters on Education in Singapore: Reflections from a Visit to Singapore in 2015 by a Delegation of Educators from Massachusetts


Book Description

When a group of educators from Massachusetts traveled to Singapore to visit schools and talk to teachers, teacher educators, and school and system-level leaders in the fall of 2015, they were determined to learn how Singapore had built a high-performing education system. Singapore has transitioned from an education system focused simply on universal literacy and primary education to one that aims for universal high school graduation and post-secondary success. It has gone from a developing nation in 1965 to a first-world economy today-and it has done so largely by focusing on education. In this series of letters, members of the delegation identify the educational practices and policies that have enabled Singapore to become a prosperous knowledge economy. Many of their practices and successes could be transferred to the United States and elsewhere.