The Promise of International Education

The United States finds itself today at the heart of a significant paradigm shift. Its role as the only world superpower is waning as other prosperous countries gain significant influence in global affairs. The U.S. will increasingly share responsibility with multiple players for addressing complex issues in trade, health, the environment and security.

Our state, too, is at a critical point in its history - a moment when our role as a manufacturing giant in basic industry is shifting to an economy based on innovative new products in sectors that were not imagined even a decade ago. Decisions are being made that will determine whether Ohio prospers or stagnates during the 21st century. Education plays a critical role in these decisions.

There is a strong consensus among at the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) and among its many partners in business, the nonprofit sector, foundations, government, higher education and community organizations that Ohio must continue to plan strategically and take action to prepare students for success in the 21st century.

At the policy level, the State Board of Education has adopted as a long-term priority a statement titled Education in the New Global Economy which charges the ODE with ensuring “that Ohio’s students are prepared to compete in the new global economy by engaging stakeholders in strategic conversations about the changing role of education, improving standards and assessment and benchmarking student achievement against international standards.”

In 2006, with support from the Longview Foundation, the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) convened the International Education Advisory Committee (IEAC), a group of educators, business leaders, foundation representatives, policy-makers and community organizations who believe that Ohio must actively strategize and take action to prepare students for success in the world of the 21st century. The group adopted the following mission statement: “To provide Ohioans with the necessary knowledge, abilities and opportunities to thrive in a global society.”

After gathering input from stakeholders at a statewide summit in April 2007, the IEAC began work on a strategic plan by defining international education as a comprehensive approach mission and goals statements. These include:

1. Ohio citizens will understand the global context and diversity of relationships among themselves, their communities and the world.
   
   Global Context: Students see and experience relationships among themselves, their communities and the world. Issues are not seen as existing in a vacuum, but within a complex, dynamic web.
2. Ohio educators will deliver global content as a component of a world-class education and will create systems to support it.
   
   Global Content: Students learn about the geography, history, economics and culture of other world regions. They can communicate in more than one language. Standards are internationally benchmarked, and assessments are aligned.
3. Students will become global thinkers with 21st century skills, so they can think critically and creatively across disciplines, manage complexity, embrace technology and value diversity.
   
   Global Thinkers: Students think critically and creatively across disciplines, manage complexity, embrace technology and value diversity. They can work effectively in cross-cultural environments, using information from sources around the world.
4. Ohio citizens will achieve greater economic prosperity and improved quality of life.
   
   Global Systems: Ohio’s education system is benchmarked against the highest-performing systems in the world. Ohio educators are connected to communities of practice that extend around the globe and that bring innovative ideas and practices to our schools.

The Ohio Department of Education working with the IEAC strategic plan and partners facilitates, supports, and actively participates in numerous initiatives designed to enhance international education opportunities for Ohio’s students and larger education community. An overview of these initiatives and resources can be found here. These initiatives serve as a kind of infrastructure, useful in building our global capacity and networks. It enables Ohio to compete based on its unique strengths and increasingly, to leverage important interdependencies through collaboration.  

  

Contact information:  Ryan Wertz, Interim International Education Coordinator

Author’s Background Information: Ryan Wertz serves as a world languages consultant and the acting international education coordinator at the Ohio Department of Education. His work supports the efforts of K-12 teachers of all content areas who seek to internationalize educational opportunities for their students across the curriculum. Prior to assuming his current responsibilities at the ODE, Ryan spent the better part of a decade working with middle and high school students as a classroom Spanish teacher.  He attributes many of his professional and personal successes to the rich experiences he had while serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Philippines (1989-90) and Panamá (1991-94) and while training future Peace Corps volunteers in Costa Rica (1996).  He also identifies the two years he spent studying abroad as an undergraduate in Luxembourg and Spain as the primary catalysts for embarking on an internationally-focused career in education.  Ryan obtained his B.A. from Miami University, where he double-majored in Diplomacy and Foreign Affairs and Political Science.  He obtained his M.Ed. in Foreign Language Education from The Ohio State University.

Technology and the High School Student

How has technology changed the way you have learned since you began school? Think about different tools you use on a daily basis. How have these tools enhanced your learning?
Please use your secret name, write 3-4 sentences and respond to one other post.

The Importance of Creativity

Reprinted with permission from Columbus Museum of Art Blog
by Cindy Meyers Foley
Director of Education, Columbus Museum of Art

The July 10 Newsweek article, The Creativity Crisis, outlined clearly the fear that many of us in education/the arts knew was inevitable.  In essence, the Torrance Creativity Test—the gold standard in creativity assessment and taken by millions worldwide—is showing that since 1990, American creativity scores have been falling.  Intelligence (IQ) and creativity scores had kept pace with each other in America for generations, but in the last 20 years, creativity scores have fallen off track while intelligence scores continue to increase.  This decline is especially significant for K-6 grade children, for whom the results are interpreted as “most serious.”

Why is this catastrophic?  The authors of the article do a spectacular job of drawing us a picture of the impact, and I encourage you to read the full text.

When I read the article, I was struck by the statement that the arts don’t “own” creativity.  I absolutely agree with this.  No one discipline owns creativity!  But on the flip side, those of us in the arts must communicate the ways that quality art education CAN generate creative thinkers.

All of us, including those in the arts are also guilty of not INSISTING on the skills necessary for creativity within our schools, businesses and families. We can no longer blame TV and video games that suck our children away from creative activities nor can we sit back and watch our schools systematically move further and further away from the creative development of our students.

On a good note, Ohio has the potential to change the way creativity is fostered throughout Ohio’s schools.  Last June in State House Bill 1, two provisions were passed that make way creative developments in our schools. http://bit.ly/cnqeUZ. One provision, the Harmon Commission, will recognize creative learning environments. The other provision will bring about the development of a Center for Creativity and Innovation in the State Department of Education. Ohio is the only state to include creativity in current legislation.
But the schools cannot accomplish this alone.  Informal learning environments, like the Columbus Museum of Art, must play a critical role in fostering and championing creativity. To do so . . .

1. We must shift public opinion away from narrow stereotypes of creativity. Artists embody a way of thinking that needs to be nurtured in all children and adults.
2. The CMA will celebrate and reward the unconventional teachers and schools that despite challenges continue to foster risk taking, questioning, curiosity and imagination in their schools.  
3. Museum programs will model creative learning for our families and schools. We must communicate how we think about imagination, critical thinking and innovation in everything we do.

The Columbus Museum of Art values creativity (it is one of our 5 Core Values.)  In January of 2011 the museum will open an 18,000 square foot Center for Creativity to address the bullets above.  We believe one institution can make a difference. We must.

Please note that the the Partnership for 21st century Skills has developed a skills map for the arts- showuibg the integration fo skills that can be learned through the arts the map can be found at http://www.p21.org/documents/P21_arts_map_final.pdf.

CMA will host a creativity summit, October 14-18, 2010. More information can be found at http://www.columbusmuseum.org/specialevents/creativity_summit_2010/

New Forecast Signals

Originally posted to "Future of Ed Blog", March 17th, 2010
by Jillian Darwish

Several times a week we update this blog with an in-depth look at emerging trends, their application, and “big picture” implications. As background to this work we are constantly researching new resources and “signals” to add to the Forecast database that provide great examples of the “future that is already here.”

Every so often, we will highlight some of the things our team is uncovering. Here are just a few things we have found interesting lately.

The Metaverse
SitePal, a company that designs speaking avatars for websites has created a free web-based tool that that converts text to speech in 20 languages. This might be a really interesting foreign language for adaptive technology tool for an innovative teacher.

Platforms for Resilience
Citizen Schools is a nonprofit organization built on the recognition that students spend just 20% of their time in schools, that every community is blessed with tremendous learning resources, and that people learn by doing. In their own words, they “mobilize a second shift of afternoon educators, who provide academic support, leadership development, and apprenticeships: hands-on projects taught by volunteer experts. Citizen Schools is at the forefront of a movement to educate children, strengthen communities, and increase access to the American Dream.

Smart Localism
As part of the Platforms for Resilience conversation, we are witnessing a growth in smart localism. A new example of this trend comes as backlash to the recent financial meltdown. Check out Move Your Money, a volunteer movement described as thousands of people pledging to “move their money away from the casino-style Too Big To Fail banks and give their money to community banks and credit unions.”

Shadow Schools
School of One has completely reorganized the classroom and learning experience. A profile for every student is created based upon assessments, and parent and teacher surveys. This data creates an initial hypothesis for how each student learns best. Utilizing a complex learning algorithm, the individual profile is married with a database of different types of learning opportunities including teacher-led instruction, small group learning and more. The algorithm produces a daily “playlist” for students and teachers that move them through a variety of different types of learning experiences customized to meet the individual needs of learners.

What interesting developments have you seen?

Robert Redford, Myths, and the Future

Orginally posted on "Future of Ed Blog", June 26th, 2010

by Jillian Darwish

“She saved my life,” Robert Redford said in his remarks this afternoon to begin the 2010 Americans for the Arts Half-Century Summit. He was speaking about the teacher who brought him an easel to use in class as a solution to his continuous doodling and distraction. He went on to challenge the audience to dispel the persistent myths about the arts, namely that they are a trivial pursuit and that they are unrelated to the economy.

Following Redford’s remarks, I participated on a panel with Eric Booth, Carrie Fitzsimmons, Jim Shelton and Christine Tebben to discuss, The Future of Arts Education.

So where do Redford’s myths and the future intersect?

We are rapidly moving to a future where fully democratized knowledge is resulting in what Jim Shelton called “commoditized expertise.” To keep our nation competitive and our shared future secure, we must:

1. Challenge ourselves to be more precise about what we mean when we use terms such as creativity and critical thinking (Thanks to Eric for the etymology lessons!);
2. Build our capacity for providing evidence as to how we develop and measure these outcomes (The references below are early signals we might build upon);
3. Move beyond simple knowledge acquisition as the aim for learning and include skills and habits of mind such as those below that will be critical to a thriving future. (The arts can play a tremendous role in building these capacities.)

Flexible Thinking: In a world in which future workers are likely to have as many as eight careers or more in their lifetimes, lifelong learning will be essential but flexibility of thought will be equally critical, enabling individuals to move seamlessly from one transition to another. (For capacity development through the arts see Artful Thinking at Harvard)

Resilience: Our Volatile, Uncertain, Chaotic and Ambiguous (VUCA) world, characterized by the pressures of bio-distress, and many others, will require Increasing attention not only to our physical health but also to our mental health if we are to cope with an increasingly stressful environment (For capacity development through the arts see the Royal Children’s Hospital’s Festival of Healthy Living )

Multiple Interpretations: The New Civic Discourse driver from the 2020 Forecast depicts a world in which continuous, bottom-up communication will be the norm, bringing an ever-widening circle of individuals with divergent views into contact with one another. If this dialogue is to be fruitful, not fractious, we will need to develop a new capacity for dialogue which includes the capacity to see multiple perspectives. (For capacity development through the arts see Teaching Literacy Through Art at the Guggenheim)

Willingness to Experiment and Learning from Mistakes: Dynamism and acceleration are hallmarks of our current age. To innovate in this world, rapid beta-building and the habits of mind such as a willingness to experiment and reframing of “mistakes” as failures, to “mistake” as learning opportunities will be required. (For capacity development through the arts see College of New Rochelle’s ArtsConnection)

Visual and Spatial Abilities: If we are to make sense of the vast amounts of knowledge we are creating, the knowledge era must become the visual era. We need to develop the capacity to bring multiple streams of information together in new ways to provide sophisticated and elegant pictures of complex situations. The Pattern Recognition driver from the 2020 Forecast has much more to say about this. (For capacity development through the arts see Winner and Hetland research)

And what will make it possible to bring these capacities into the future of learning? We need to bring our investment in education innovation in line with innovation investments in other sectors, increasing it from .3% to 3% of the total budget. We need a well-funded innovation effort that is distributed and that forms a national learning network. In this network, successful prototypes for the type of learning we seek will emerge, forming a knowledgebase and lever for national transformation.

Inspiration from Ohio

Originally posted on "Future of Ed Blog", March 30th, 2010
by Jillian Darwish

Even for an optimist, its hard not to be daunted by the challenges in the world today. However, in the midst of the crises, such as dramatic state budget cuts for education,  I see real gems of inspiration - people courageously moving forward in innovative ways and creating new kinds of outcomes. There is one such gem in Ohio I am particularly excited about right now.

It’s Ohio’s Flexible Credit Policy. Beginning Fall 2010, all Ohio high school students will be able to earn credit in three different ways.  They will be able to:

• complete traditional coursework,
• test out of the coursework or demonstrate mastery is some alternative manner,

 or (here’s where it gets really exciting)

• pursue one or more educational options, such as distance learning, educational travel, independent study, an internship, music, arts, after-school program, community service or engagement project and sports.

Thanks to this ONE policy, countless personalized, self directed, and creative learning opportunities are now available to Ohio high school students. A student might go to China,  provide occupational therapy for special needs students, take advanced economics courses, or use hospital databases for research on self-selected topics. Ohio students now have the freedom and the opportunity to be powerful creators and participants in the learning economy. 

What an terrific expression of the themes that are central in our study of emerging trends including:

• Unbundled education  - open content and curriculum, social media and communities redefine the role of schools, 
• Participatory pedagogy -  students take an active role in their own learning
• Deep personalization  -  people reject mass product and service offerings look for customized experiences

(For more on these ideas, see the recent article by  Monica Martinez that brings these ideas together with a nice articulation of the Learning Economy)

Great work, Ohio!