Key points:
- Linking students from diverse cities and nations helps them learn from and with each other
- Lifelong learning from K-12 to career
- 4 keys for unlocking student curiosity and critical thinking
- For more news on global learning, visit eSN’s Innovative Teaching hub
Picture this: a seventh-grader in Madrid is discussing how her class is developing an approach to water scarcity with peers in Mumbai, Buffalo, Buenos Aires, and Astana. You could think of it as a virtual roundtable rivaling a U.N. assembly, except the diplomats are 12 years old.
This is the magic of the virtual exchange program Global Scholars program, which we’ve spent the last decade nurturing through Global Cities, a program of Bloomberg Philanthropies. As the founder and president of Global Cities, I’m thrilled to announce an expansion of our partnership with Madrid, Spain’s public schools, an effort that will help even more young people from develop the elusive but essential skills of global competency–the knowledge, capabilities, attitudes, and behaviors they’ll need as adult citizens to navigate an interconnected world where borders and barriers matter less than the problems they will collectively face. The OECD’s 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) demonstrated that students worldwide need to further develop global competency, which is not correlated to other areas of academic performance and therefore must be directly taught.
As the world becomes more complex and today’s young people will soon be tasked with addressing the shared issues our world faces, global competency is an urgent need.
Yet, the OECD’s 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) demonstrates that students worldwide need to further develop global competency, and that global competency is not correlated to other areas of academic performance and therefore must be directly taught.
The existing Global Scholars program has already built connections among nearly 127,000 students ages 10 to 13 in 119 cities in 39 nations. Student teams–comprising 8 to 10 classes from far-flung cities in e-classrooms of approximately 300 students–have developed responses to such issues as climate change and access to clean water. They are identifying real problems confronting their own communities and exploring unique ways to address them. For example, they might interview an expert in their city to learn about the local supply chain, then exchange proposals with peers around the world for how to make these systems more sustainable.
Madrid, with its strong local leadership, is the perfect place to take the next steps in expanding this kind of educational experiment. For one thing, over 1,700 Madrid students annually already participate in our existing Global Scholars program and will continue to do so. For another, the city’s public schools are microcosms of the world, with students whose families come from different socioeconomic backgrounds and hail from Latin America, Africa, Asia, Europe, and beyond. What’s particularly innovative is how our new Madrid partnership will operate within the political boundaries of one European metropolis–explicit acknowledgment that a single community can contain multitudes. This has long been a familiar truism for Americans–sharing as we do a land constituted by immigration–but only a relatively recently recognized reality in Europe.
Madrid’s educational leadership, believing that the city’s very diversity is a source of its strength, will expand our collaboration by launching Global Scholars Madrid.They will use this new program to deliver the Global Scholars curriculum and program model to train more teachers and create additional classroom exchanges within the Madrid school district.
David Cervera Olivares, the Madrid education official spearheading this initiative, gets why this is such critical work. “Our community has benefited greatly from the Global Cities model, and we’re eager to give more students the opportunity to connect with a diverse set of peers,” he said.
He knows that having students engage with one another across neighborhoods, nations, and even continents builds cultural understanding, appreciation for diversity, global knowledge and global engagement–learning outcomes we have defined and measured–as well as general academic skills.
Our own country is based in difference, in the recognition that so much of our achievement as a nation depends on what we learn from each other. Over the last decade, Global Cities has sought to realize this vision on a global stage, linking students from diverse cities and nations so that they can learn from and with each other. We’re pleased that Madrid’s educational leadership is expanding its partnership with us to treat the rich diversity of its own student population as an exciting opportunity to teach global competency “at home.”
So here’s to Madrid’s young scholars, and to the teachers guiding them with vision and heart. They’re not just preparing themselves for a globally competent future–they’re creating it.
Picture this: a seventh-grader in Madrid is discussing how her class is developing an approach to water scarcity with peers in Mumbai, Buffalo, Buenos Aires, and Astana. Featured on eSchool News, Innovative Teaching, Teaching Trends, career, class, critical thinking, future, global, help, IT, schools, skills, young eSchool News
