Enhance Your Curriculum With Global Competencies
1. First, Understand Standard-Based Global Education
Rethink what skills and competencies our students are learning by understanding standard-based global education. Although we are married to the Common Core Standards and our GVC curriculum guides, teachers can infuse global education standards and embed global competencies into their existing lessons/units.
The following sites have guidelines to help you integretate global competencies and standards into your lessons with an emphasis on synthesizing skills, techniques, and methodologies in global education.
Oxfam's Global Citizenship
Guide
Globaled: A self-assessment tool to help you measure your themes as based on global issues, global culture and global connections
ASCD: More guidelines for integrating global education into your lessons.
The following sites have guidelines to help you integretate global competencies and standards into your lessons with an emphasis on synthesizing skills, techniques, and methodologies in global education.
Oxfam's Global Citizenship
Guide
Globaled: A self-assessment tool to help you measure your themes as based on global issues, global culture and global connections
ASCD: More guidelines for integrating global education into your lessons.
2. Then, Globalize Your Standards
The Common Core Standards, which emphasize 21st Century Learning Skills, are easy to marry with global standards. In fact, the Common Core has embedded global standards. Let's look at a few:
A. Recognize Perspectives: Reading Literature 9-10.6: "Analyze a particular point of view or cultural experience reflected in a work of literature from outside the United States, drawing on a wide reading of world literature."
B. Investigate the World: Writing 11-12. 7.: "Conduct short as well as more sustained research projects to answer a question or solve a problem; narrow or broaden the inquiry when appropriate; synthesize multiple sources on the subject, demonstrating understanding of the subject under investigation."
C. Communicate Ideas: Speaking and Listening 11-12.1: "Initiate and participate effectively in a range of collaborative discussions with diverse partners, building on others' ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively."
D. Be Digitally Literate: Writing Standards for Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects 11-12.6. "Use technology, including the internet, to produce, publish, and update individual or shared writing products in response to ongoing feedback, including new arguments or information."
E. Conduct Interdisciplinary Lessons: Writing Standards for Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects 11-12.9. "Draw evidence from informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research." This can be applied to a project-based lesson wherein students investigate, research, plan, publish, and use their evidence to take action (reflection).
A. Recognize Perspectives: Reading Literature 9-10.6: "Analyze a particular point of view or cultural experience reflected in a work of literature from outside the United States, drawing on a wide reading of world literature."
B. Investigate the World: Writing 11-12. 7.: "Conduct short as well as more sustained research projects to answer a question or solve a problem; narrow or broaden the inquiry when appropriate; synthesize multiple sources on the subject, demonstrating understanding of the subject under investigation."
C. Communicate Ideas: Speaking and Listening 11-12.1: "Initiate and participate effectively in a range of collaborative discussions with diverse partners, building on others' ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively."
D. Be Digitally Literate: Writing Standards for Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects 11-12.6. "Use technology, including the internet, to produce, publish, and update individual or shared writing products in response to ongoing feedback, including new arguments or information."
E. Conduct Interdisciplinary Lessons: Writing Standards for Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects 11-12.9. "Draw evidence from informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research." This can be applied to a project-based lesson wherein students investigate, research, plan, publish, and use their evidence to take action (reflection).
3. Next, look at a template and model for a standard-based
global education unit for an ELA class and then integrate some of the ideas into your lessons.
Additional Models: AP Language and Composition: "Stereotypes in Popular Culture" and AP Literature and Composition: "Poetry and Social Activism"
JSEC Teachers must follow their GVC curriculum and do not have the freedom to create non-GVC units. However, global competencies can be added to any short unit or lesson within your curriculum. For instance, if students are researching a social issue or historical event, mandate that at least half their sources must be from international sites. Start by adding at least one of the following global competencies to your lessons or units:
Investigating the world while relating their local lives to everyone else's global existence,
Recognizing different perspectives,
Researching via national and international sources
Collaborating,
Completing project-based activities with their international peers,
Communicating ideas - in more than one language,
Conducting Interdisciplinary Lessons,
Being digitally literate, and
Taking action.
Investigating the world while relating their local lives to everyone else's global existence,
Recognizing different perspectives,
Researching via national and international sources
Collaborating,
Completing project-based activities with their international peers,
Communicating ideas - in more than one language,
Conducting Interdisciplinary Lessons,
Being digitally literate, and
Taking action.
4. Finally, add an advocacy component to your lesson.
Senior Advocacy students in the international studies strand at JSEC must advocate as part of their class requirement. But other classes can do so as well. For instance, an ELA class studying poetry can read poems written by survivors in a natural disaster, such as Haiti, and send letters of encouragement to the authors. In the biotech strand, students can bring awareness about genetics and forensics that have local impact on their community too.