As teachers and as parents, we take pride in helping our children mature into thoughtful and caring global citizens, engaged with the world around them and eager to help others whenever and however they can.
It’s especially great to get unsolicited testimonials from other people about our students, as was the case with our recent Service Day and Global Experiential Week activities.
Sophomores in Ms. Berkey, Ms. Concannon, Ms. Drown, and Mr. Lee’s advisory groups worked as teacher assistants at Burr Oak Academy in Calumet Park on Service Day. They cleaned the playgrounds and tutored Kindergarten through 5th grade students in math, reading, Mandarin, Spanish, physical education, and bilingual education.
“I commend you for the manner in which your students interacted with our students,” Burr Oak’s principal wrote. “Morgan Park Academy’s mission statement states that the Academy ‘prepares the global leader of tomorrow to make a positive difference in the world.’ Today, thirty-three of your students reflected your school’s mission and made a difference for 840 students.”
Mr. Kowalsky and Ms. Danielewicz’s juniors picked up litter in the Kickapoo Woods that day.
A park visitor who met the group emailed us to express his gratitude for their service, calling them “excellent examples of engaged young people.”
And perhaps most heartwarmingly, we heard from a mom who met our fifth-graders at the International Youth Hostel during Global Learners Week. She said our students (pictured above) were warm hosts for her and her young daughter, welcoming them to join them for dinner and games.
“It was really a lot of fun to be around such great children who were insightful, funny and just overall great kids,” she wrote. “It was a wonderful way for me and my daughter to spend a great evening.”
As spring blooms here on campus, I was excited to see our students and faculty embrace our core global values of service and environmental sustainability during our Earth Day and Service Day activities last week. Director of Sustainability Sarah Haskins, Director of Service Learning Jim Kowalsky, and all our faculty really came up with some great projects this year.
We also heard recently from author and former independent school head Paul Chapman about his new book, “Greening America’s Schools, 2.0.” Paul visited us last fall to learn about our sustainability initiatives and we were thrilled to be a resource for his profiles of best practices at private and public schools nationwide. I can’t wait to read it!
Our students are growing up in a digital age. Even our oldest here at Morgan Park Academy don’t remember a time before the Internet, and many don’t remember a time before cell phones. How did we ever get questions answered before Google?
We are at a point where our technological capabilities exceed our laws, and certainly parents and schools only recently have had to start to planning for what children can find and do online nowadays.
Social media, in particular, has forced us into unchartered waters, prompting the creation of policies and guidelines to help students and parents navigate an online world that sits outside our school’s physical boundaries, but still well within our mission of educating the whole child.
The Internet, generally speaking, lasts forever, and we know colleges and employers now look to social media and other web sources for information on applicants, taking into account the positive or negative representations of a candidate they find there.
Ivester’s book had some great basic tips, including:
See what search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo bring up for your name or your child’s
Turn on your profile review feature on Facebook
Limit the number of old posts floating around the web
Having too many social media connections with “friends” you barely know can reveal too much personal info to too many people
Set up a Google Alert for online mentions of your name
Post neutral profile content
The bottom line, for both students and parents: Manage your online reputation, or someone else will.
One of my favorite links I’ve seen this week came from Keith Shahan, the president of the Independent Schools Association of the Central States (ISACS). He suggested we fend off the Chicago Winter Blues by tracking the coming of spring through this year’s hummingbird migration map:
Sure enough, the hummingbirds were spotted [a few weeks ago] on the Gulf of Mexico coast, their first appearance since last fall when they departed for their winter home in Central America. Your students might enjoy following the hummingbirds’ progress this spring, or even contributing to the tracker by submitting sightings. The hummingbirds should reach our most northern schools by the first week in May.
As Upper School and Middle School students head out into the world next week and our Lower Schoolers get ready to explore the world closer to home, I am both proud and envious of the experiences our teachers have created for our students. Our Global Scholars mission promise has required us to think out loud, together, about what it really means for our students to be prepared for a global future.
It brought to mind for me the keynote address I heard a few weeks ago at the annual Heads of School conference hosted by the Independent Schools Association of the Central States (ISACS).
Dr. Yong Zhao spoke about the Globalization of Education, citing technology and globlization as two significant forces that will continue to transform not only our lives, but those of future generations. He posed provocative questions, shared current data, and discussed some of what he is working on as Associate Dean for Global and Online Education at the University of Oregon’s College of Education.
It really got me thinking about what kind of education we really are trying to give our students here at Morgan Park Academy. Our children will need to interact within a global world. They will need to be equipped to function across geographical and political boundaries, and those of language, culture, and religion. I think this is something that the Academy is uniquely qualified to do, and Project Week and our Global Learners and Lower School Global Explorers weeks are a prime example.
At our gala auction last weekend, parents, alumni and Academy friends were the first to view this video about what being World Ready means to us. Seeing our students, young and older, packing their backpacks for their educational journeys got me thinking about what else we put in those backpacks to make sure our students are World Ready. What other essential items do they need to carry with them on their journey through our school and beyond?
The first thing I’d pack for any student is our faculty.
With seven hours in the school day, and 180 school days in a year, they really only have these kids for 14 percent of their daily lives. Yet we know that children carry with them throughout their whole lives, the memory of a teacher who really “got” them – a mentor, role model, confidant, who helped them discover who they were meant to be and who gave them courage to life lives of purpose.
The second thing I’d pack in that backpack is a brilliant, diverse body of students.
You will hear me say in the video and it bears repeating: Our student body is intentionally diverse. We believe that cultural, economic, racial, national, and gender diversity brings different perspectives, values, and backgrounds. Diversity also means different learning styles, and leading styles, so that students and faculty learn to be great leaders when they can be and good followers when they should be.
Diverse groups are more innovative, more creative and come up with the best answer time and time again over the lone expert. “WE is always smarter than ME” is a great tagline, and it’s why we teach our students to harness the power of this incredible peer group.
I’d also pack a facility for collaboration, team work, and rigorous debate.
If rigor is looking at a problem from multiple directions, multiple angles, multiple solutions and testing them – then collaboration is the easiest way to generate rigor. We need to give our students the skills, knowledge and power to sit at the same table and solve big problems.
That’s why, instead of sitting in rows like the industrial revolution, we sit around tables and talk about ideas and learn together. We are increasingly a global knowledge-based economy and there is no shortage of this commodity at the Academy.
Communication also has to go into the backpack.
To be World Ready is to be an effective communicator, no matter what language is required. Mono-cultural, mono-lingual kids are at a big disadvantage. We want our students to strive for language competency and fluency, to truly appreciate another language and culture. With home stays, hosting students, service projects and immersion travel, we bring the world to our students and our students to our world.
Item five is cultural fluency – and there really is an app for that!
One of my new favorite iPhone apps is called Culture GPS, and it’s an app to help navigate through intercultural differences. It uses five dimensions of national culture, first identified by Dutch professor Geert Hofstede:
• individualism vs. collectivism;
• masculinity vs. femininity;
• avoidance of uncertainty;
• long-term orientation vs. short-term orientation;
• and power distribution throughout society.
We think a lot about dimensions like that, because cultural fluency is the hallmark of a true 21st Century leader. We want kids to be at ease in their own skin, with compassion to walk in others’ shoes, and at ease beyond your front door, our campus and our national borders.
Another crucial item for the backpack is creating an intentionally moral climate.
The culture within the walls of our school is hugely important. We have an intentional moral curriculum, that influences how our students treat each other, what they say, knowing that they are listened to, and knowing how they listen to others.
We want our students to be physically and emotionally fit to deal with life’s stresses and difficult decisions in a healthy manner. Students who are World Ready will have to be ethical leaders – people who have the ability to not only distinguish right from wrong, but to make informed choices between two rights.
We also must pack a commitment to the care and stewardship of the planet and its people.
Sustainability is an institutional commitment. To do this, we need to educate students about their responsibility as global citizens and as stewards of our planet. They need to see that there is responsibility that comes with the privilege of living in a land of plenty, with resources to feed and clothe ourselves and attend a great school.
Finally, the backpack has to include a global curriculum.
Global Studies at the Academy isn’t just a stand-alone program; it is really a mission promise that we are preparing children to take up the challenge to be independent thinkers and global leaders. Our definition of Global is not reserved to food, flags and festivals — although those are some of the ways we celebrate our differences. We provide resources and activities in support of instruction that can help carry learning in the direction of world understanding and in the direction of personal self-knowledge, with students discovering their strengths, passions, and where they truly shine.
The UN has declared today, October 11, as the first International Day of the Girl. The day reminded me of the privilege we all have to go to school, to have food, shelter, and a life largely without violence and without fear of repercussions for speaking our minds.
Such was not the case for a 14-year-old girl from Pakistan who has spoken out against Taliban militants’ attempts to ban education for girls. For her efforts, Malala Yousufzai was shot on the way to school.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Archbishop Desmond Tutu took the opportunity today to speak out about child marriage. View the video on YouTube here. They underscore the long road ahead for some half a billion young women and girls in developing parts of the world.
Robert Walker, president of the Population Institute wrote about the tragedy in the Huffington Post, and so poignantly writes:
As tragic as the shooting of Malala Yousufzai was, we must turn our collective outrage into constructive action. On this day, the first International Day of the Girl, let us all resolve to turn her personal tragedy into a global rallying cry for girls, their education, and their right to pursue their own hopes and dreams, free from the tyranny of gender inequality.
