teachers use a variety of approaches to partner native speakers with nonnative speakers.
Which Design Best Supports the Global Competencies I Want to Foster?
While many global competencies can be challenging to teach and assess, coupling academic goals with global competency goals will help ensure that students develop not just global knowledge but also the skills needed to act on that knowledge and engage with the world as active global citizens—and even leaders. Refer back to the global competency frameworks explored in chapter 1 (page 11) and think about your students’ age groups and subject areas. Which global competencies best match your project ideas and topics? Which feel most developmentally appropriate for your age group? Keep in mind that students may use a wide array of global competencies in the course of a collaborative partnership, but it makes sense to choose just one or two to focus on most intentionally. Try to make sure those are competencies you can both foster and assess. For example, the critical thinking involved in gathering multiple perspectives on any given topic is fairly easy to teach and assess, while empathy or humility—central goals in many global partnerships—can be much more challenging to define, teach, and recognize in student work and behavior.
There are many design strategies for global partnerships, and your choices will impact which global competencies your partnership fosters. Before you find a partner (which is covered in chapter 4, page 73, and chapter 5, page 93), it’s important to consider the following design strategies for how your students might engage with their global counterparts.
Classroom-to-Classroom Exchange
In a classroom-to-classroom exchange, students share or exchange the work produced in each classroom, often in relative isolation. Much like a physical student or teacher exchange program, many exchanges include sending students’ projects to each other. For example, two music classes might create and share videos to teach each other songs and ask each other questions. In other cases, like the Teddy Bear Project outlined in chapter 3 (page 49), physical objects are sent from one class to the other and then back again. This design strategy is particularly useful with younger students who can’t travel themselves, but also allows students at higher grade levels to share the work they’re doing. For example, students in two countries might take photographs of what they see from their windows in their homes, dorms, or classrooms, ultimately sharing final photo essays with each other. This style of partnership is often more manageable than collaboration or co-creation, as most work occurs in the individual classrooms rather than requiring regular live connections between the two groups. This design strategy is all about sharing and learning from and with each other, and it is ideal when your goal is to build students’ sense of connectedness with other people in the world.
Classroom-to-Classroom Collaboration
A classroom-to-classroom collaboration usually includes students working concurrently in two or more classrooms, perhaps on a local problem that impacts both communities, and sharing work regularly along the way. In this approach, students offer each other feedback on ideas and products, and sharing strategies and learning from each other becomes as important as addressing the local challenge itself. This approach is more complex than an exchange, as it builds in opportunities for students to see each other’s thinking and help each other improve their work. As the example from Global Partners Junior (page 56) demonstrates, this approach helps students recognize that communities worldwide often share local challenges and themes, and it gives them the opportunity to learn from other communities as they craft solutions for their own.
Classroom-to-Classroom Co-Creation
While this is the most complex approach to global partnerships, it is often the most meaningful as well. In this design, students work together between two or more classrooms to produce one collaborative product. For example, students might work together to address a borderless global challenge, such as human trafficking or hunger, that affects both communities and requires collaborative efforts. In #Decarbonize, the project on climate change outlined in chapter 3, students work in multischool teams to co-create a white paper to bring to the Climate Change Conference of the Parties. However, a co-creation partnership doesn’t necessarily require a solutions orientation; students could work together to create a piece of collaborative art, a music video, or a public service announcement to educate others, to name a few.
Nonschool Partners
Connecting with individuals doing global work on their own or through nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) can help fill gaps and bring meaningful global perspectives to your students, particularly while teachers are working to develop long-term partnerships with classrooms. Having a passionate individual connect with students is far less complex than collaborating with a classroom because you don’t have to juggle as many variables with an individual, particularly in coordinating live connections. For example, an individual can often shift schedules to connect during class, regardless of time zone differences, whereas coordinating across two or more classroom schedules can be challenging. Also, global Skype (https://skype.com/en) sessions with individuals doing important work can have just as much impact on students’ worldviews as connecting with other classrooms—and can even help students envision new career paths and avenues for creating change. In chapter 3 we explore several examples of nonclassroom partnerships, including those with an urban planner, a Navajo elder, and an international human rights lawyer, among others. The most important quality of a global speaker is his or her ability to make the topics students are learning about human, relevant, and real for their age group. Besides being easier for the teacher to coordinate, skyping in global speakers can often create high-profile learning opportunities, which increase community and administrative buy-in and get people excited about global partnerships without the expense of travel and speaker fees. Also, global speakers are usually one-off experiences that you can integrate into a larger global unit or project, which is part of why they’re easier to set up, whereas global partnerships between classrooms are richer if communication happens repeatedly over time.
What Are the Ideal Duration and Timing for the Project I Have in Mind?
Partnerships can range from a month to the entire school year, depending on the teachers’ needs and investment. Shorter projects tend to be more successful as you begin partnering with a new teacher, while longer, deeper projects can take time to develop. Many projects that start small grow into something significant, even in their first year, as the teachers get to know each other and learn to work together—and anything is possible when two or more committed partners move into their second or third year of collaboration. Often, it is best to start small, with the expectation of one or two synchronous (live) events, and one or two offline experiences, over the course of a month or two. See what might build from there.
While short projects can be meaningful, there is a difference between a global activity (one Skype call) and a true global partnership, which might include several calls and some collaborative, asynchronous communication in between. While global activities that make connections are still meaningful, you can dig deeper as you get to know each other better—and show students that global engagement isn’t fleeting or episodic, but something to work at and grow with over weeks, months, and even years. This deeply engaged mindset is part of the key to retaining partners, too, as your partner teacher is likely to sense if your intentions are brief and episodic rather than deep and committed. In their essence, global partnerships are global friendships. They are global relationships that yield richer results—and develop more nuanced global competencies—as we find ways to dig deeper over time.
