september 2019Innovative Learning Newsletter

Global Scholars
Camille Edwards, Coordinator

Global competency is the ability to live, learn, and work with others whose way of life and values differ from our own. To be prepared for a diverse, interconnected, interdependent world, teachers guide their students’ mastery of skills like collaboration, communication, problem solving, and technology.

The Global Scholars curriculum is project-based (investigating, hands-on, authentic, real-world challenges, over time), technology-integrated (using applications for learning beyond knowledge about hardware and software), interdisciplinary (combining traditional academic subjects like Math, Science and Writing to solve real problems), student-centered (teaching methods that shifts instructional focus from the teacher to the student) and includes social/emotional learning (acquiring skills to understand and manage emotions, set/ achieve positive goals, develop resiliency, self-management, and decision-making skills).

Global Scholars provides opportunities for students in many different cities worldwide, to participate in the same learning activities and gain shared knowledge about a complex concept, globalization, in a password-protected, digital platform. Students study and find solutions for common global issues like climate change, ethnicity, and water availability. The curriculum challenges students to investigate their world, consider different perspectives, communicate ideas and collaborate on actions to improve their community while positively influencing international changes. Teachers’ instructional focus is to prepare students to become the next generation of global citizens as they guide them through classroom and online activities.

Teacher list

To see a list of all participating middle schools go to https://www.browardschools.com/Page/48031 (Links to an external site.). View the growth of the Global Scholars program by school and student participation in the August Newsletter.

Broward Schools considers the program to be successful based on informal indicators of the student, teacher, and school performance. This quantitative and qualitative data is collected through student and teacher surveys, classroom visits, student reflections, administrator/teacher anecdotal comments and e-classroom observations.

Students

More than 1,350 students participating in the 2019-2020 school year, 5.5 times more students since the start of the program in 2015-2016
About 25% of this year’s students have participated in Global Scholars previously
More than 86% of students completed the Global Scholars 2018 – 2019 Pre-Program Survey
An average of 78% of students complete the Global Scholars 2018-2019 Post-Survey

Teachers

50% of 2019 – 2020 teachers have taught Global Scholars for more than one school year
100% teacher completion rate for 2018-2019 Global Scholars Pre and Post Surveys
Survey responses and anecdotes support teachers’ opinion of a positive impact on student achievement

School Schools

50% of all participating schools are offering the program in more than one grade level
20 of 22 participating schools had 80% or greater completion rate on the 2018-29 Pre-Survey
50% of the participating schools had 80% or greater completion rate on the 2018-19 Post-Survey
81% of participating schools completed a Community Action Project
75% of participating schools participated in the District’s Second Annual Global Scholars Showcase

Global Cites Inc., a Program of Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Global Scholars provider, developed an evaluation framework to measure and demonstrate the impact on student learning. By defining global competency and describing learning outcomes they hope to inform the work with a common vocabulary and shared standards for Global Scholars teachers globally.

The framework categorizes the learning outcomes within the areas of knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behavior. The framework has four global learning outcomes and five general learning outcomes.

Global Scholars Framework

To learn more about the student learning outcomes and the framework to evaluate the impact of global learning you can read the white paper from Global Cities Inc. titled Evaluating Global Digital Education: Student Outcomes Framework at https://tinyurl.com/y6dnjx7y . The Global Learning Outcomes matrix with the corresponding indicators are available to you at https://tinyurl.com/yyq5be84 .

Using this framework, Broward’s goal is to measure students’ growth, progress, and improvement opportunities. In monitoring this program, the District will continue to collect and analyze data that answers questions such as:

What is the students’ participation/completion rates?
How many schools continue to grow the program by offering Global Scholars to multiple grades?
What encourages students to continue to be Global Scholars during their middle grades?
How well are Broward’s students performing in the e-classroom?
Why are students dropping out of the program and why?
What are teacher retention rates?
What professional learning opportunities and support is required to retain teachers?

Broward County Public Schools is committed to developing global competence as an essential part of students’ academic requirements to prepare them for economic and cultural interdependence. Continue to watch us grow in our monthly article in this Innovative Learning newsletter.

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