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Upon acceptance of the rationale in teaching globally competent students, the decision to adopt a global perspective in any curriculum design is an exciting and more than a little daunting undertaking. This page is designed to enhance a nascent teacher perspective with self-evaluation tools of a beginning strategy. Asia Society, OxFam Resources, and US Department of Education provide rich resources for all levels of commitment. Once teachers, instructional coaches, and administrators delve into global education resources, it is hard to imagine teaching any other way. Broadening students' global perspectives and nurturing lifetime engagement in the world becomes a strategy as well as a goal.
The Global Education Checklist (document 1 at left) a self-assessment survey, provides educators, students, administrators, and community stakeholders with a tool to gauge the current qualitative and quantitative evidence of global competence. Additionally, the checklist provides a way to pinpoint specific goals for teacher development. Administrators choosing to adopt the competencies as school-wide goals, teachers progressing toward more relevant curriculum, or teams searching for appropriate local -global project based learning opportunities maintain control of scope and sequence to match the comfort level of all participants. Global education is not a method or delivery system for content. Nor is it the latest trend in best practices. Global education meets the needs of students who come of age in 2020, enter the work force prepared with critical thinking and communication skills matching the work environment, and who are prepared to face the issues of a rapidly changing technological, increasingly inter-connected global community in the 21st century. The Global Leadership Rationale (document 2 to the left) illustrates the ease with which global perspective standards integrate with content standards across curriculum. The document provided contains grades 2-5, 8(ages 12-14), 10 (age 15), and 12 (age 16-18). The Performance Assessment (document 3 to the left) from Asia Society provides a template enabling teachers to focus creative energy on the content of performance assessments more than the structure. The term 'position paper' is somewhat misleading because the resource provides developmental performance tasks appropriate for students at all levels. |