a letter from marjorie tiven
Something new and exciting is going on in classrooms around the world.
Through our program, Global Scholars, students ages 10 to 13 are learning and practicing global competency with international peers. They engage in cross-cultural dialogue in online discussion boards and work with their classmates to complete hands-on projects that explore similarities and differences among their countries and communities. Over the past eight years, more than 90,000 public-school students from 110 cities in 37 countries worldwide have taken part. Some 40 percent of students are from the United States and 60 percent are international.
Global competency is critical in preparing students to solve any global problem. In many schools, education is focused locally, with limited engagement beyond the four walls of a classroom. Yet students are entering a world where problems are connected to one another, and where they are expected to compete and collaborate in a global marketplace upon graduation. The purpose of global competence education is to prepare students for this world, by equipping them with the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviors that they will need to confront the global issues we face, from food insecurity to pandemics.
In the Global Scholars e-classroom, student conversation drives discovery and provides evidence of learning. Over the course of a school year, students meet peers from 8 to 10 different cities and investigate a global problem together in the online discussion boards in our e-classrooms. They conduct research, create projects guided by our curriculum, and post and reply to one another in the discussion boards. At the same time, their teachers meet their international counterparts in interactive, live professional development videoconferences and in our educator discussion boards. This model is grounded in project-based learning, features a curriculum with assignments that prompt students to examine their personal experiences as citizens of their cities and the world, and builds on student dialogue as a primary resource for learning.
The need for global competency is universal, so our model is targeted to all kinds of learners. The interactive Global Scholars program capitalizes on the things that matter to students ages 10 to 13: their interest in one another, enjoyment of digital tools, and curiosity about their own lived experiences. This forms an accessible foundation for sophisticated student learning. Engaging in constructive dialogue with people from many countries and cultures, researching complex problems, and developing thoughtful, equitable solutions that address the needs of entire communities—these are difficult tasks for adults, yet our educators report that students this age are accomplishing them in Global Scholars classrooms every day.
The program’s champions are its veteran educators, school leaders, and students. They have long provided anecdotal evidence that Global Scholars students and educators are engaged, enthusiastic, and are developing global competency. A London teacher told us his students run down the hallways so they won’t be late for Global Scholars class. A New York City middle-school principal said he wants to wallpaper the corridors with our Student Learning Outcomes so teachers can see them every day. Three large school districts, each with more than one million students, have requested enrollment across their schools.
In this report, we detail new evaluation evidence that affirms the anecdotal testimonials. Global Cities has defined what students should learn to become globally competent adults, developed curricula to teach these learning outcomes, trained educators to teach this complicated subject matter, created metrics to assess hard-to-measure student learning outcomes, and analyzed the data from our discussion boards. This research has produced empirical evidence showing that students are learning, as well as what they are learning, where in the curriculum they are learning, and how they are learning. This analysis shows the value of discussion boards as a source for student learning and assessment.
Our important findings address four global learning outcomes. The evidence for Global Engagement shows students acknowledging their ability to change the world and demonstrating that they were willing to do so. Appreciation for Diversity was demonstrated by thousands of students from dozens of cities worldwide, showing they could interact with one another in ways that were respectful, inquisitive, and substantive. Students who grasped the complexities of global issues and recognized their importance, starting with a foundation of geographic knowledge, showed their growth in Global Knowledge. And the Cultural Understanding data showed that these 10- to 13-year-olds, just beginning to develop a sense of self and their own cultures, were understanding and appreciating cultural differences.
To assess this new and different approach to teaching and learning, we designed an original methodology. It was developed jointly by Global Cities, Inc. and Out of Eden Learn (OOEL), a digital exchange provider and an active research project at Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Project Zero. At OOEL, the work was led by Liz Dawes Duraisingh and Carrie James with Christina Smiraglia, Sarah Sheya, and Devon Wilson. The codebook we produced was further tested for reliability and validity by the evaluation research firm Glass Frog Solutions, led by Rebecca Casciano and Erica Chutuape.
This report presents how we measured what students learn and our innovative way of teaching global competency through direct peer connections. Not only are the findings supported by the data, they are reflected in the voices of students. As one Mumbai Global Scholar said, “I still cannot cease to be amazed by the diversity of thinking among people and the millions of ways of interpreting a simple sentence.
Marjorie B. Tiven
President and Founder, Global Cities, Inc.