How might global education curriculum evolve to our new reality?

Global education has always been about transcending physical and geographic boundaries, making connections between individual experiences and transnational issues, and learning to work together to bring about the world that ought to be.

Now more than ever, we are witnessing the necessity for educational programming that develops the capacity and disposition to understand and take action on issues of global significance.

Join a task force of talented and innovative educators working together to rapidly design and iterate new ways to meet the objectives of global citizenship education.

Over the course of 2 weeks, you will join a team of 4-6 educators from a diverse set of schools, working together in a series of virtual collaborations. Following the precepts of design thinking, each team will develop prototypes for programming that support learner agency, facilitate learning across differences, and demonstrate results to different stakeholders.

With regular feedback and input from experts and learners around the world, each team’s work will be compiled into a companion workbook for Fernando Reimers’ forthcoming publication Educating Students to Improve the World.

Cohort Kickoff Dates: April 15th and May 1st

Time Commitment: 10-12 hours over two weeks

Cost: Free for educational professionals

Be part of developing the future of global education.

Key Sessions

Teams of 4-6 participants, led by a facilitator from Envoys, will establish their own working schedule to move through the process of ideation, prototyping, and creation.

We meet virtually and discuss our unique learning environments, determining the commonalities and differences in our global strategic plans and setting the stage for the work to come. We create usable norms to aid our processes for collaborative work, and make visible our respective personal and professional goals.

We delve into the various models and studies around global competency, seeking clarification on the skill-sets that matter for success now and in the future. From cultural competency to increasing language fluency to building empathic outlooks, we work to understand what has been proven(so far) to work for all the things that
we try to achieve.

We then push ourselves to consider ‘what next?’ through a series of empathic interviews with learners, educators, and professionals from around the world, learning about their needs and their dreams for what students need to know to be globally aware and globally competent.

The team comes together to draft working objectives on what students need to thrive in a fast changing environment and to be of value in the world to come. These ‘lighthouses’ provide key touchpoints as the team moves into the bulk of the design and creation phase.

This phase comprises the bulk of the task force’s work. Facilitated discussions on designing effective learning contexts, including both structured and unstructured pathways for transformational learning experiences, lead to the rapid creation of prototype curricular interventions.

Guidelines for 10-12 hours of content provide initial structure for creation, with teams provided with autonomy to adapt according to their own innovation.

Using a series of ‘microlessons’, participants test out their lesson and activity designs with their colleagues, receiving a mixture of warm and cool feedback. Each team uses the results of their tests to iterate and improve their curriculum, making robust teaching plans and learning activities. Participants are further tasked with creating ‘teaching guides’ to allow others to use (and further iterate) on their work.

Each team shares their work, noting both the results and crystallizing the lessons learned along the way. Each curricular project is then compiled into a companion workbook for Fernando Reimers’ forthcoming publication Educating Students to Improve the World, and shared during the upcoming Virtual Think Tank on Global Education