In a world where cultures and economies are increasingly intertwined, preparing students to become career-ready global leaders is essential. As educators, we have the unique responsibility to equip our students with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to thrive in a global society. Global teaching practices foster these abilities by embedding intercultural understanding, global awareness, and critical thinking into schools and classrooms. These practices are integral to the Global Leaders framework, ensuring students develop career readiness skills while addressing real-world challenges. With these strategies, students develop the competencies needed for future careers, many of which don’t yet exist.
This guide will walk you through what global teaching practices are and how they can be integrated in your school, providing practical strategies and resources to help your teachers develop informed and engaged global citizens. By the end, you’ll have actionable steps to take back to your teachers and access to additional resources.
What Are Global Teaching Practices?
Global teaching practices are strategies designed to cultivate key competencies in students, such as communication, flexibility, curiosity, empathy, intercultural understanding, and self-awareness. These competencies prepare students for their future careers and empower them to make meaningful contributions to their communities, both local and global. Students build competencies and develop as global leaders in inclusive, relevant, connected, and empowering classroom communities.
In our work with our school partners, we emphasize these global teaching practices:
- Inclusive Classrooms: Fostering a welcoming environment where all backgrounds are respected and valued.
- Building Relevance: Making global issues and current events relevant to students’ lives and studies.
- Student Agency: Encouraging students to take ownership of their learning.
- Making Connections: Promoting understanding of global interconnectedness and community engagement.
Inclusive Classrooms
Creating inclusive classrooms involves fostering welcoming spaces where all students feel valued and heard. This can be achieved with strategies for integrating different cultural perspectives, supporting all learners, and encouraging student collaboration.
These strategies include things like using a wide range of literature, media, and discussions to represent and celebrate varied cultural perspectives. Books, films, and other media introduce students to global themes, helping them develop empathy and a nuanced understanding of the world.
Example Strategies:
- Literature and Media: Choose resources like A Long Walk to Water to introduce students to global issues through different cultural lenses. Stories from varied backgrounds help students develop intercultural understanding and empathy, key competencies strengthened through global teaching practices.
- Classroom Discussions: Incorporate activities that encourage students to share and listen to each other’s perspectives, fostering a welcoming environment where all voices are valued.
Building Relevance
Building relevance means connecting global themes directly to students’ lives. This approach equips teachers to bring real-world global issues into the classroom, linking students’ learning experiences to current events and societal challenges both locally and globally. It helps students understand the importance of their roles in a global community. Cross-disciplinary projects and thematic units are effective ways to create these connections.
Example Strategies:
- Cross-Disciplinary Projects: Use projects to explore global issues from different academic perspectives. For instance, a project on protecting land ecosystems might include:
- Science: Studying environmental impact.
- Social Studies: Understanding policy roles.
- Language Arts: Writing persuasive essays.
- Thematic Units: Design units focused on global themes like human rights or sustainability, with lessons that explore the themes from various angles. This holistic approach deepens students’ understanding and highlights the relevance of each subject.
Student Agency
This practice focuses on empowering students to take charge of their learning by encouraging them to ask questions, explore topics of interest, and make decisions about their learning pathways. It builds students’ confidence as they develop the skills to become independent, globally aware thinkers.
Fostering a sense of agency gives students ownership of their learning, encouraging curiosity and critical thinking. Inquiry-based learning, where students ask questions and research topics of interest, is particularly effective for exploring global themes. Take a look at this in action in the responsible consumption project students at Heritage Middle School launched.
Example Strategies:
- Student-Centered Approach: Guide students as they ask questions about global topics. For example, they could explore questions like “What causes global poverty?” or “What efforts can help improve health around the world?”
- Research and Exploration: Provide resources and frameworks for students to research their questions, and encourage them to present their findings through presentations, debates, or essays.
Making Connections
Making connections means linking students’ learning to local and global communities, helping them understand the impacts of their actions on the world around them. Teachers are encouraged to help students understand the importance of building relationships and connections. This global teaching practice involves service-learning projects, collaborations with local and global organizations, and exploring how global issues affect everyday life.
Example Strategies:
- Service-Learning Projects: Encourage students to engage in projects that connect classroom learning with real-world action. For example, students at West Oxford Elementary participated in a community garden project to address local food insecurity, learning about global hunger and making a tangible difference in their community.
- Global Partnerships: Establish partnerships with organizations and communities to provide students with opportunities to address real-world needs, reinforcing their understanding of global responsibility and community engagement.
Practical Tips for Getting Started with Global Teaching Practices
Starting Small
If your school is new to global teaching practices, start with small, manageable changes. Begin by incorporating just one global teaching practice. For example, if you want teachers to start with building relevance in their classrooms, the first step can be to survey students on issues that are important to them, either local or global.
Collaborate as a School
Once you’ve identified the local or global real-world issues that resonate with your students, work collaboratively with your colleagues to design interdisciplinary projects that address these topics. This can be done as a school-wide project, or individual grade level or classroom initiatives.
Utilize Available Resources
Leverage the wealth of resources available from organizations like Participate Learning, Oxfam Education, and the Global Oneness Project. These organizations offer lesson plans, project ideas, and teaching materials focused on the integration of real-life local or global issues in the classroom. The Global Leaders Blueprint for a Better World is an excellent tool for guiding educators through implementing real-world global challenges in the classroom.
Incorporate Student Feedback
Encourage teachers to seek regular feedback from students on what they find engaging and meaningful. Use this input to guide methods for integrating global teaching practices, ensuring that learning experiences align with students’ interests and have a lasting impact.
Global teaching practices open the door for students to develop critical global competencies while engaging in meaningful learning experiences. By fostering inclusivity, building relevance, encouraging student agency, and promoting real-world connections, educators can cultivate global competencies and guide students to become career-ready global leaders.
Explore how our Global Leaders framework transforms classrooms into environments where students become career-ready global leaders. Download our Global Leaders case study to see this framework in action and begin your journey to empower students with the skills they need to thrive in a connected world.
This post was originally published on February 28, 2017 and has been updated.
