In this book, William Powell and Ochan Kusuma-Powell provide a practical map to navigate some of the 21st century’s most complicated instructional challenges: How do you help all students succeed when every classroom is, in effect, a global classroom? And what does a successful education look like in a world that is growing smaller and flatter every day?
Drawing on research and years of experience in international schools, authors William Powell and Ochan Kusuma-Powell identify five critical keys to personalizing learning for students who have wildly different cultural, linguistic, and academic backgrounds:
- Focus on your students as learners through systematic examination of their cultural and linguistic identities, learning styles and preferences, and readiness.
- Focus on yourself as a teacher and investigate your own cultural biases, preferred teaching style and beliefs, and expectations.
- Focus on your curriculum to identify transferable concepts that will be valuable and accessible to all students and further their global competence.
- Focus on your assessments to ensure cultural sensitivity and improve the quality of the formative data you gather.
- Focus on your collegial relationships so that you can effectively enlist the help of fellow educators with different experiences, backgrounds, skills, and perspectives.
