Becoming a Globally Competent School Leader

Ariel Tichnor-Wagner

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781416628507
• eBook ISBN: 9781416628538
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Professional Development

Schools today face a crisis of relevance.

Issues that people everywhere face—climate change, disease, hunger—require interdisciplinary solutions. Yet schools are still predominately organized by single-subject courses and narrowly focused high-stakes tests.

By contrast, our students need to develop a range of academic, social, and emotional competencies to solve issues that transcend national borders; live peacefully among neighbors in a culturally, politically, racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse society; and thrive in a global, knowledge-based economy. Youth and adults alike know this; it's time for schools to catch up.

Global competence—the set of dispositions, knowledge, and skills needed to live and work in a diverse, global society—helps educators balance social-emotional and academic learning goals. To that end, school leaders play a critical role in designing and scaling relevant global learning experiences for both students and teachers.

Becoming a Globally Competent School Leader details how school leaders can implement change by aligning aspirational initiatives to existing ones, generating will across school stakeholders, wrangling resources, and creating capacity.

This book offers a holistic approach to school leadership, one that grounds education in the complexities of the real world and aims to prepare all students to understand, engage with, and influence what happens in that interconnected world.

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Chapter 1

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Leading with the World in Mind

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One child, one teacher, one book, one pen can change the world.

Malala Yousafzai

Consider what the world looks like for our children in schools today. They are hyperconnected digital natives who have only known a world where, with a touch or swipe of a pocket-sized screen, we can instantly communicate with anyone, anywhere; find whatever information we need; and buy any product we want. Although this technology has all but eliminated geographic divides, it has also introduced invisible digital barriers, filtering what we see through conscious and subconscious social, cultural, and political leanings. We don't think twice as we walk down supermarket aisles and see shrimp from China, peppers and avocadoes from Mexico, and bananas from Costa Rica. We take the inexpensive cost of our clothes for granted—a price that is kept low through a carefully orchestrated global supply chain of raw materials, labor, and distribution. We have lived through natural disasters and unpredictable weather patterns barraging huge swathes of our planet. It is no wonder that political and military leaders describe the only world that our youth have ever known as volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.

What will our world look like when our youngest students graduate? Will they be navigating a dystopic reality where robots rule supreme, water has overrun once-populated urban centers, and nuclear warheads fly through the sky? Or will they feel secure, knowing that they'll be able to provide for themselves and their families, that violent conflicts between nations and ethnic groups are declining, and technology is being harnessed to protect the planet's environment and natural resources? The jobs, climate, and international alliances in our not-so-distant-future are anyone's guess.

What does all of this have to do with schools?

Everything.

Society writ large has long seen schools as vital institutions for preparing students for citizenship and careers. Education historian David Labaree (1997) wrote that schools occupy "the intersection between what we hope society will become and what we think it really is" (p. 41). In the early years of the United States, public schools were forged as spaces for political socialization for democratic participation in a republican government and for creating a national culture and sense of patriotism in a country with diverse religious, ethnic, racial, religious, and political groups. Over the years, schools have also been seen as a silver bullet for improving society's many ailments and as economic engines that bolster the human capital of nations and increase competitiveness for jobs and wealth in a global economy (Labaree, 1997; Spring, 2010; Tichnor-Wagner & Socol, 2016). The exact goals of school may be contested—a way to socialize youth for democratic citizenship, bolster economic growth by creating a knowledgeable and well-trained workforce, or provide individuals with a chance to compete for jobs in a competitive marketplace. But there is agreement that education should equip students with the requisite knowledge and skills for the world outside the schoolhouse doors as engaged citizens and productive workers.

Nevertheless, in many ways, how students experience school has not caught up with the world in which we currently live. One-fifth of the way through the 21st century, our system of schooling is still locked in early 20th-century thinking. Issues that people everywhere face—climate change, spread of diseases, food insecurity—require interdisciplinary solutions. Yet schools are predominately organized by single-subject courses and high-stakes tests that emphasize core subject areas of reading, math, and science. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 65.5 million residents speak a language other than English at home. Yet schools in the United States are predominately monolingual. Researchers estimate that only 3 percent of elementary school students are enrolled in some form of bilingual education (Goldenberg & Wagner, 2015). Even foreign language courses are in short supply. Only 20 percent of U.S. students are enrolled in foreign language programs, and only 15 percent of public schools offer them (American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 2017).

As education historians David Tyack and Larry Cuban (1995) argue, "Change where it counts the most—in the daily interactions of teachers and students—is the hardest to achieve and the most important" (p.10). With that in mind, what should teaching and learning look like to remain relevant and engaging and to truly prepare students for the world? And how can educators lead the necessary changes to make that vision a reality?

A 21st Century Education Grounded in Our World

A Crisis of Relevancy

Schools today face a crisis of relevancy. There is a disconnect between the skills and knowledge students feel they need to navigate and shape the current realities in which they live and what schools are currently offering. The result is, inevitably, student disengagement. A 2015 Gallup Poll found that only half of adolescents felt engaged in school, and one in five reported that they were actively disengaged (Gallup Inc., 2015). This disengagement, in turn, can lead to lower academic performance and higher dropout rates.

On Friday, March 15, 2019, millions of students skipped school in order to protest for action around climate change. That same day, Terry Godwaldt, the director of the Centre for Global Education in Edmonton, Canada, spoke to a group of educators at a global leadership summit at ASCD's annual Empower conference and asked a simple yet profound question: "Why do students have to step out the classroom to make change?"

The answer is simple. Schools are not doing enough to address the realities that students face in their current and future lives. The following section delineates some of the economic, social, and environmental realities that swirl around schools yet deeply affect the everyday lives of youth.

Economic Realities

When students graduate, they will compete for jobs in a global, knowledge-based economy. As Linda Darling-Hammond (2010) illustrates, "Globalization is changing everything about how we work, how we communicate, and ultimately, how we live. Employers can distribute their activities around the entire globe, based on the costs and skills of workers in nearly any nation that has built an infrastructure for transportation and communications. Customers in the United States buy their clothes from China and the Philippines and have their questions about the new computer they bought answered by workers in India" (p. 4).

One in five jobs in the United States is tied to international trade. From 1992 until 2016, trade-dependent jobs increased by 148 percent, covering a wide range of industries from agriculture to manufacturing to financial services to higher education (Baughman & Francois, 2018). Products we consume as part of our everyday lives—the fruit in our refrigerators, the phones in our pockets, the cars we drive to work—depend on global supply chains. As automation and artificial intelligence take over manual jobs once performed by people, the need for schools to focus on what makes us uniquely human—emotional intelligence, storytelling, the arts—becomes more acute.

Cultural Pluralism

Migration is as old as humankind. Today, of course, it is happening at a far faster rate than with our ancestors, who took tens of thousands of years to traverse continents by foot. Globally, over 244 million people live in a country different from where they were born. The push-and-pull factors that drive people to move across boundaries are complex, though many migrants are driven by prospects of work. Global displacement has also hit record numbers, with the number of refugees displaced by war, persecution, a profound lack of economic security and opportunity, environmental degradation, and natural disasters topping over 22 million (International Organization for Migration, 2017). As people migrate, they carry with them their languages, religions, values, foods, and other cultural signifiers, therefore adding new richness to the diversity of already pluralistic societies.

In the United States, about one in four children under the age of 18 are first- or second-generation immigrants (Child Trends, 2018), and nearly one in four public school students speak a language other than English at home (Zeigler & Camarota, 2018). Shifting migration patterns over the past few decades have resulted in an increase in immigrant populations—and from a greater diversity of places—in previously homogenous states, cities, and towns. For example, historically speaking, a majority of immigrants ultimately settled in only a handful of states (California, New York, Florida, Texas, New Jersey, Illinois, and Massachusetts). However, since 2000, immigrants have increasingly moved to the central and southeast regions of the country, where immigration rates rose by double the national average (Terrazas, 2011). In these communities, schools have suddenly become microcosms of newly diversified communities.

What "diversity" looks like over time has also changed. The first European colonizers who arrived to what is now the United States in the 17th and 18th centuries mainly spoke English, German, French, Dutch, and Spanish, and they brought with them enslaved Africans with rich and varied cultures and languages that survived through the shackles of slavery. The land these colonizers settled was by no means an empty wilderness but a landscape of over 15 million people representing more than 500 indigenous groups and many more dialects (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014; Garcia, 2009). The mid to late 19th century saw a stripping away of indigenous people from their lands and culture, as the U.S. government forced assimilation through education. Beginning in 1879, the U.S. government established boarding schools for Native American children that prescribed an English curriculum and forbade native languages.

Stringent immigration legislation in the late 19th and early 20th century limited the number of newcomers, heavily restricting those from southern and eastern Europe, China, and the rest of Asia and favoring northern European stock. It wasn't until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that these quotas were removed and more immigrants began arriving from Asia, Africa, and South and Central America. Today, a diverse immigrant community in the United States includes representation from around the world and every continent. Spanish speakers account for almost 80 percent of all nonnative English speakers in the country; over 400 other languages and dialects represent the rest (U.S. Department of Education, as cited in Garcia, 2009).

Renewed diversity has also caused a backlash against pluralism. Far-right nationalist populism has returned to the mainstream of politics in Europe, the United States, and Latin America, fueled by anti-immigrant and anti-foreign tropes and corresponding with a rise in hate crimes against religious, racial, and ethnic minorities. Youth are coming of age at a time of two competing visions of the future: one that rejects pluralism and one that embraces and empowers indigenous, immigrant, and other cultural groups as equal contributors to a diverse democracy.

Borderless Threats

The sustainability of our planet—and all of us—depends on cooperation among nations and the ability of people across geographic, cultural, and political divides to effectively collaborate and find solutions. Take, for example, the issue of climate change—or what many circles now call the climate crisis. Scientists predict that global temperatures will reach 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels between 2030 and 2050 (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2018). Though the impacts have been and will continue to be felt on all of Earth's ecosystems (e.g., extreme temperatures, heavy precipitation rates, extreme weather conditions, sea level change, species loss and extinction), future risks to health, livelihoods, food security, water supply, human security, and economic growth can be mitigated if the warming levels out at 1.5 degrees.

Reducing the effects of climate change will involve multilevel and cross-sectoral actions; contributions of public and private funds; new government policies; and education, information, community, and technological approaches (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2018). The Paris Agreement, signed in 2016 and currently ratified by 125 nations, works on doing just that—by having nations agree to enact policy meant to limit greenhouse gas emissions and thereby curtail global temperature change (United Nations Climate Change, 2019).

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals identify 17 global challenges that countries around the world face, with ambitious targets for attaining those goals. Goals include the elimination of poverty and hunger, good health and well-being among all people, access to high-quality education, gender equality, access to clean water and sanitation, proliferation of affordable and clean energy, availability of decent work and economic growth, industrial growth, an emphasis on innovation and infrastructure, reduced inequalities, growth of sustainable cities and communities, responsible consumption and production, climate action, protections for life below water and on land, and a strengthening of peace, justice, and institutions (United Nations, 2019).

Young people around the world are actively supporting these goals. The youth-led climate strikes in March and September of 2019, which has morphed into the weekly #FridaysforFuture movement to protest climate destruction, is but one example. Schools have an important role to play in helping students develop the skills, methods, and tools to advocate for a sustainable future.

Globally Competent Teaching and Learning: A Rigorous and Relevant Instructional Response

Against this backdrop, what outcomes should schools be striving for? Students need to develop a range of academic, social, and emotional competencies if they are to solve issues such as climate change, disease, and violent extremism that transcend national borders; live peacefully among neighbors in a culturally, politically, racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse society; and thrive in a global knowledge-based economy. Youth already know this; it's time for schools to catch up.

Instead of one-dimensional measures of student success, schools need to focus on fostering the cognitive, behavioral, and social-emotional attributes students will actually need to survive and thrive in the real world. As stated in the culminating report of the Aspen Institute National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development (2019),

There is a remarkable confluence of experience and science on one point: Children learn best when we treat them as human beings, with social and emotional as well as academic needs…. Children require a broad array of skills, attitudes, character traits, and values to succeed in school, careers, and life…. These social, emotional, and academic capacities are increasingly demanded in the American workplace, which puts a premium on the ability to work in diverse teams, grapple with difficult problems, and adjust to rapid change. (p. 5)

Global competence is a framework that fits this bill and helps educators balance social-emotional and academic learning goals. It is the set of dispositions, knowledge, and skills needed to live and work in a diverse, global society. Multiple definitions and frameworks around global competence exist (e.g., Mansilla & Jackson, 2011; OECD, 2018; Reimers, 2009a; UNESCO, 2015), but they all coalesce around the following social-emotional, cognitive, and behavioral domains:

1. Social-emotional: Dispositions of empathy, perspective recognition, and appreciation for diverse cultures.
2. Cognitive: Understanding global issues and trends, critical thinking, and problem solving.
3. Behavioral: Intercultural communication and collaboration, communicating in multiple languages and taking action on issues of local and global importance.

Figure 1.1 provides definitions of these v...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Leading with the World in Mind
• Chapter 2. The Globally Competent School Leader
• Chapter 3. Starting from Within
• Chapter 4. Garnering Political Will
• Chapter 5. Wrangling Resources
• Chapter 6. Growing Global Competence in Yourself
• Chapter 7. Globally Competent Leadership Throughout the System
• References
• About the Author
• Related ASCD Resources
• Study Guide
• Copyright