I have been working with a group of educators from Louisiana who are examining the list of 21st Century skills students need and assessing their system’s current practices.

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills defines:

Global Awareness

–Using 21st century skills to understand and address global issues
–Learning from and working collaboratively with individuals representing diverse cultures, religions and lifestyles in a spirit of mutual respect and open dialogue in personal, work and community contexts
–Understanding other nations and cultures, including the use of non-English languages

I am writing this blog in my hotel room in Istanbul, Turkey. Today I had the opportunity to work with students, teachers, administrators, and parents at the Enka School and to visit Tohum Otizm Vakfi, a school for autistic students in Istanbul.

While I was at Enka a group of high school students were in a meeting with students from England and Yemen, working jointly examining environmental issues.

Connecting with international educators always expands my thinking and learning.

The following on twitter caught my eye:

Very exciting 2connect 5th graders (USA) w/High School students from China 2day.Will be talking about Christopher Columbus & other explorers.

It was tweeted by Silvia Tolisano’s whose blog on Becoming a Globally Connected Teacher examines, questions, beliefs, and strategies for your consideration.

Here is a set of questions we created for an initial exploration in the Louisiana schools.

Using 21st century skills to understand and address global issues

• Perception- What would you see/hear walking through a classroom that suggests global issues are addressed?

• Analysis- Take 15 minutes to walk through our school and make a list of observations that suggest a global perspective.

• Same/different– How are our classrooms the same and different re global indicators?

• Where did you see the most indicators?

• Analysis- Why are the most found there?

• Induction-What do you conclude about global perspectives being present in our school?

• Analysis- List global issues that you believe are or should be of interest to our students?

• Appraisal- What are the top two issues regarding importance and interest?

• Evaluation- How much effort would you want to invest in generating instruction within your curriculum that includes one of these areas of global perspective? Why?

• Ideas– In groups of common content generate 4 ideas for building global perspectives into a student work project.

• Ideas– In groups of mixed content share your ideas, identify a possible cross curricular project.

• Prediction- What’s the best thing that could happen if we do this? What’s the worst? How big of a risk are we willing to take? How can we modify the idea to limit the risk to an acceptable level?

• Action– who will do what by when?

How does your school expand students’ global awareness?