Elementary School
Future Ready Goals for Primary School Students
Introduction
Educators are being challenged as never before, they are being asked to prepare students for a rapidly globalizing world of exponential technological change that no one understands. The big question for K12 educators is how do you prepare students for a rapidly globalizing world of accelerating technological change in a serious-minded way? One World’s answer is straightforward, connect your students to students from around the world so that your students build the kind of global mindset they are going to need to deal with the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Dr. Reimers of Harvard explains this strategy more fully in this article:
He also makes clear that globalization is deeply transforming the context of the lives of many people around the world and that “Those who are educated to understand those transformations and how to turn them into sources of competitive advantage are likely to benefit from globalization, but those who are not will face real and growing challenges.
One World’s global competence programs use a “head-heart-hand” approach where we seek to
- Educate for global awareness
- Connect through good Character
- Empower through Service-Learning
In our view building global competence is an essential 21st-century competency without which is hard to imagine how we can address the challenges of our day as Jeff Sachs makes clear in his book Commonwealth:
In the twenty-first century, our global society will flourish or perish according to our ability to find common ground across the world on a set of shared objectives and on the practical means to achieve them. – Jeff Sachs
This is the number one goal of One World 2050 – build a set of shared objectives and deliver the practical means to achieve them.
We think that building global competence should start in elementary school or even preschool as is it is at this early that youth begin to learn to collaborate and participate in groups. We, therefore, emphasize the building of global competence as the first future-ready competency to build over your K5 student’s 12-year learning career.
Building Global Competence in Pre-school Settings: One World – A Global Citizenship Education Program in Guerrero, Mexico
JoAnne Ferrara, Joseph Carvin, and Rita del Pilar Zamudio Ochoa
Goal #1
Graduating Global Citizens
Our Global Competence Programs Over the last decade, we have built up a global learning community of educators committed to providing their students with opportunities to virtually travel the world and connect with educators and students from around the world to learn with and from one another. The end goal of this community is to help build global citizens by helping them develop their capacity to be globally competent.“The 21st Century isn’t coming; it’s already here. …Public schools must prepare our young people to understand and address global issues…so that all students can thrive in this global and interdependent society. A coalition for international education cautions that “global competence in the 21st Century is not a luxury, but a necessity. Global competence must become part of the core mission of education – from K-12 through graduate school.”
The New York State Blue Ribbon Commission for Graduation Measures has also made clear the need for global competence education as can easily be seen from their 7 attributes of a portrait of a New York State graduate:
- Global Citizens
- Culturally Competent
- Socially-Emotionally Competent
- Effective Communicator
- Critical Thinker
- Innovative Problem Solver
- Literate Across Content Areas
While education thought leaders have long called for educators to build global competence they have not always had the tools and opportunity to do so. We, therefore, want to encourage your educators to take full advantage of the global learning community we have built up over the last decade to help your educators and students build global competence. The end goal of our global learning platform is to encourage your educators to view One World educators from across the world no differently than their fellow educators down the hallway.
Building Global Competence:
Via Virtual Exchange
Our Global Learning Community
Over the last decade, One World has built up a global learning community to connect educators and students from around the world to learn with and from each other. Our goal with our virtual exchange programs is to help you help your students see beyond their local community and connect with students from around the world.
Virtual Exchange Formal Curriculum
Our formal VE Formal Curriculum (6-lessons) covers three units with six lessons both synchronous and asynchronous that generally take 9-10 hours to deliver over the school year.
Virtual Exchange Global Celebrations VE Global Celebrations (Holiday)
Our VE holiday program brings students and educators together to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month, the end-of-year holidays, Chinese New Year, Valentine’s Day, Black History Month, Sustainability, and Earth Day.
Delivering Virtual Exchange
Interactions with our global partner classrooms can be delivered via our formal 6-lesson curriculum, via our Global Holiday Celebrations curricula, or on a standalone or customized basis where we work with you to connect you to a country in our network of your choice on a topic of your choice.
Virtual Exchange Customized for You!
In addition to the formal programs mentioned above, we encourage educators to take full advantage of our global learning community to propose new ideas for connecting with overseas classrooms. We are happy to customize our programs to meet your needs taking your students on a virtual trip around the world.
For example, in one of our school districts, one of the school board members worked with a language program in Mexico and asked that we connect his middle school with that program in Mexico which we did. At the Denzel Washington School of the Arts, we connected sixth-grade students in an artistic exchange where they shared performances using Padlet and then discussed their respective performances. Let us help you and your students travel the world.
Building Global Competence via One World Youth Clubs
One World Youth Clubs build on virtual exchange with a series of programs – Core Four, Service Learning, SEL/Character Education – that provide elementary school teachers with ongoing opportunities to build global competence in their classrooms.
What is Core Four?
All One World curricula incorporate a student-centered approach where we encourage elementary school students to begin to develop the skills needed to succeed in the 21st century. These skills have come to be known as the “4 Cs” – Critical Thinking, Creativity, Communication, and Collaboration. Our goal in developing our curricula is to provide students with opportunities to practice and develop the “4 Cs” in each class that is taught.
To that end, as a first step toward building enhanced global competence we encourage educators to offer One World’s Core Four lessons that encourage students to take responsibility for their classroom, agree on the values important to them, achieve their highest loving self, and understand their human connection.
Service Learning – Project-Based Learning at its Best!!
Service Learning is the backbone of our Global Competence program. It is the final component of our Head-Heart-Hands approach to education. In our view it is not enough to understand and empathize with the world around us, we must also take action.
We encourage every One World Classroom that moves forward with our Global Competence + program to undertake at least one service learning project of their choice. Here is a sample of some of the service-learning projects that students implemented pre-Covid:
For those educators interested in building a more robust, comprehensive, Service Learning experience, we have a more expansive program we call Agents of Change.
SEL/Character Education
Please note that we have also developed over 30 relevant, SEL/Character Education lessons that teachers may also want to include in their classrooms. Your educators can choose SEL/Character Education lessons from our E-C-E curriculum beyond the Core Four. These lessons include Being a Good Friend, Girls Education Around the World (Malala), and Peacemaking among others.
We also offer a range of SEL classes at the Elementary School level: SEL Guide
Program Delivery: Our recommended Approach
Remembering that elementary school teachers spend 900 hours a year in their classroom with their students, One World recommends providing 10 – 30 hours of Global Competence education directly into your classrooms each year.
3rd Grade
We recommend the introduction of Global Competence teaching in the third grade using our formal Virtual Exchange program: VE Formal Curriculum (6-lessons)
Our Formal Virtual Exchange (VE) program connects your teachers and their classrooms to educators and students in one or more regions in our global learning community, including China, Central and South America, Wales, and Nigeria.
Classroom Hours Needed: 10 hours
(For educators in New York State this is an innovative way to fulfill New York State’s Communities Around the World Social Studies requirement. Please see Annex 1).
4th Grade
We recommend that fourth grade teachers deliver our VE Global Celebrations and add our character-based Core 4 lessons.
Classroom Hours Needed: 10 to 14 hours
5th Grade
We recommend that fifth-grade Global Competence programs include VE Customized Connections, the Core 4, adding Service Learning as a school capstone project.
Robust After-School Ecosystem
All of the above can and should be supported by a strong after-school ecosystem. In the same way all students take gym in the US most schools offer sports activities after-school for those most interested. We recommend the same for Primary Schools and strongly urge after-school clubs for the environment/climate change and global competence.
Classroom Hours Needed: 12 to 20 hours
Please note that we have also developed several relevant SEL and Character Education lessons that your teachers may want to include in their classrooms. We have found that our SEL/Character Education lessons help teachers reinforce the message of good conduct required of good citizens across the globe.
Goal #2
Engage Your Students in Solving Climate Change
Help Your Students Solve a Real-World Civilizational Challenge: Climate Change
K5 is the ideal time to introduce age-appropriate Climate Change education. Students are just beginning to engage with and understand the wider world around them. We therefore recommend that schools develop engaged, informed, 21st-century citizens-leaders, by introducing your students to action-oriented climate change education.
Indeed we have designed our action-oriented, climate change programming by incorporating the best practices of Project-Based Learning (PBL): Solving Climate Change
The Clarkstown/Uruguiana/WGC USA model – your school should be at the center of your community. Videos!!!
District-Wide Sustainability Program
We recommend that K12 schools start at Primary School and then continue schoolwide PBL programming in sustainability in Middle and High School.
One World has designed an action-oriented Sustainability Program to encourage students, educators, school administrators, and building operational staff to work together to make solving climate change an important teachable exercise. This program works with schools to Measure, Reduce, Roadmap and Offset their GHG emissions being sure to turn those efforts into a learning opportunity for the full school.
We believe the best time to launch this program is at the elementary school level as K5 students begin to better understand the world around them and their connection to it.
This program assists schools in complying with the Paris Club mandates which requires countries and schools to reduce their GHG emissions by 50% by 2030.
- Our UN inspired Climate Calculators make it easy for schools to tackle the most difficult part of this process – measuring their carbon footprint. Once schools have measured their GHG emissions, we facilitate a conversation to Reduce and Roadmap their emissions in a manner consistent with NYS law being sure to turn these discussions into a learning opportunity for all.
- Building Global Equity: We also encourage schools to Offset their carbon footprint using UNFCCC sanctioned offsets that help channel funds from resource-rich communities to invest in Green Projects that would not otherwise get built in under-resourced communities from around the world. This is a terrific way to begin to address the asymmetry between wealthy, industrialized countries that generate the bulk of global GHG emissions and the Global South. This program also provides students with an opportunity to work with one of the leading environmental organizations in the world the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) the United Nations group that organized the Paris Agreement.
To ensure the success of this schoolwide initiative please adopt One World’s Harvard-inspired six-step model.
(For New York educators please note these efforts also comply with the New York State’s 2019 Climate Change Law which requires schools to reduce their GHG emissions by 40% by 2030.)
Goal #3:
Encourage Students to Take Ownership of Their Education Study after study tells us that the number one skill set sought by employers is the capacity to learn. At the same time, students’ capacity to learn is growing exponentially with online tools like Kahn Academy and now various AI portals. As a result there has never been an easier time for students to take ownership of their education. Properly utilized, advancing educational technologies can become the big equalizer. One World has developed a series of programs to safely connect students to those emerging technologies starting with our Academic Accelerator.One World’s “As Smart As You Want to Be” is an academic accelerator which uses ChatGPT and or Kahn Academy to help your students build and develop their math skills on their own.
Building Equity with One World Programs
Our view is simple and clear: those students (and educators) that are prepared for a rapidly globalizing world of rapid technological change will have a far greater chance of success than those who are not.
The big risk in education today is that we are preparing students for a world that no longer exists. New York Times journalist Tom Friedman explains the challenge:
“Because the pace of technological change, digitization and globalization just keeps accelerating, two things are happening at once: the world is being knit together more tightly than ever …and “the half-life of skills is steadily shrinking, … meaning that whatever skill you possess today is being made obsolete faster and faster.”
Parents and K12 educators need to understand that the old learn-to-work model where students went from a K12 education to college and a lifetime of work is over.
As Friedman explains, students need to build their future value every day by taking ownership over their education. As a result he concludes
“The most critical role for K-12 educators, therefore, will be to equip young people with the curiosity and passion to be lifelong learners who feel ownership over their education.” –Tom Friedman
Finally, not only will the pace of change fundamentally change the work place, dramatic advances in medicine makes it far more likely that today’s elementary school students will live to be 100 years old or more.
We are confident that our enrichment programs build equity like no other in that we prepare K5 students for the unprecedented opportunities and challenges of the 21st century by helping develop global citizens who take ownership of their education and know how to solve the civilizational challenges facing humanity like Climate Change.
Program Cost:
While we can deliver each of the programs mentioned above on a stand alone basis, we recommend the comprehensive schoolwide program for maximum impact. It is also delivered on the most cost effective basis in that the total cost of the program does not equate to the cost of 25% of the cost of adding one new teacher.
If you are interested in the program, please contact us and we can review our pricing. If your school does not have access to funding we are prepared to work with you to seek grant funding to pay for our services.
Harvard Inspired Schoolwide Support
One World School of Global Competence – 6 Steps
6 Steps to Schoolwide Global Competence
One World School of Global Excellence
Annex 1 Communities Around the World
Teaching global competence in third grade in New York is the overarching goal of third grade social studies instruction where teachers are encouraged to implement the Communities Around the World program:
Grade 3: Communities around the World
In “Communities around the World,” students learn about communities around the globe and about global citizenship. Students bring with them knowledge about their communities. In this course, students make comparisons across time and space, examining different communities and their cultures. Culture includes social organization, customs and traditions, language, arts and literature, religion, forms of government, and economic systems. Students are introduced to the concepts of prejudice, discrimination and human rights, as well as to social action.
Teachers should select at least three communities that represent different regions of the world, types of communities (urban, suburban, and rural), and governmental structures. The communities selected should reflect the diversity of the local community.
The key ideas, conceptual understandings, and content specifications guide the study of communities while exploring the major themes of social studies. The various world communities, Key Ideas and social studies practices may be presented in any order.
One World can connect your third-grade classes with three communities from different regions around the world like China, Central and South America, and Nigeria.
These programs also allow New York schools to reflect the diversity of their local communities by connecting recently arrived students with students and educators from their country of origin.
Annex 2 UNESCO Report of November 2021 – The Need for Global Competence
Reimagining Our Futures Together: a New Social Contract for Education
UNESCO stands for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. It is a specialized agency of the United Nations that promotes international cooperation in the fields of education, science, culture, and communication to contribute to peace and security globally. Founded in 1945, UNESCO aims to foster dialogue and mutual understanding among cultures and peoples through its various programs and initiatives.
Over the course of its 75 year history, it has only published three reports of the kind they published in November 2021. Here are some excerpts from the report:
“If anything has brought us together over the last year and a half, it is our feeling of vulnerability about the present and uncertainty about the future. We now know, more than ever, that urgent action is needed to change humanity’s course and save the planet from further disruptions. But this action must be long-term, and combined with strategic thinking…
If the report teaches us one thing, it is this: We need to take urgent action to change course, because the future of people depends on the future of the planet, and both are at risk. The report proposes a new social contract for education – one that aims to rebuild our relationships with each other, with the planet, and with technology.”
Education, the way we organize teaching and learning throughout life has long played a foundational role in the transformation of human societies. It connects us with the world and to each other, exposes us to new possibilities, and strengthens our capacities for dialogue and action. But to shape peaceful, just, and sustainable futures, education itself must be transformed.
We all have an obligation to current and future generations – to ensure that our world is one of abundance not scarcity…
As a species,we are at the point in our collective history where we have the greatest access ever to knowledge and to tools that enable us to collaborate. The potential for engaging humanity in creating futures together has never been greater.
One final observation relative to the report was the fact that the report was not intended as a blueprint for action but rather as a call to a global conversation as to how to take education forward in the 21st century. One World through its Community of Learning & Practice (COLP) has endeavored to bring educators from across the world together for the kinds of conversations called for by UNESCO.
Here is a link to the ongoing conversation: https://www.unesco.org/en/futures-education
