Be it a classroom, a chat room or a war room, when do people choose to contribute to a situation? When you think about it for a moment, it’s not hard to work this out from experience. My first thoughts are:

• Trusting relationships with the other stakeholders
• A sense that:
  • you have something to offer
  • your contribution might succeed
  • one learns from any failures
• Confidence to:
  • present your ideas to others
  • communicate and relate to new people

Developing these attributes and skills takes time. If you want to empower your students to feel they can use their school time to develop as contributing global citizens, your class lessons and projects need to have the above list as a foundation. You must also allow time for this development and not expect to be able to ‘teach’ it in a week or so. The confidence to contribute is not some thing one learns but something one develops through experience and feedback. To achieve these attributes, your class activities need to regularly be student driven, where the learners work together under expectations that they, not the teacher, need to formulate the best approach. They also need to develop habits in seeking and making productive connections with the right people, wherever they are in the world. Here’s my previous post on “What is Student-centred learning?”

A networked world

Another understanding (that can be taught) is how young individuals are currently connecting globally to instigate projects and create products that are making a real difference. The examples below will showcase how becoming an active global change-maker, or a member of a change-network, can become a real possibility for anyone willing to purposely connect with others. It’s your classroom’s job to develop that will in your learners.

YOUNG PEOPLE HAVE NEW EXPECTATIONS OF THEMSELVES:

• Providing for less fortunate children 
• When disaster strikes
• Building a team for forgotten elderly
• Social health action
• The power of social “lemon’ aid

Highlight to students that being a global citizen is an awareness that one exists as a node on a network. How important one is as a node is up to the individual but every node has an important role to play.
I have found that showcasing how young people are connecting to online ‘tribes’, centred on a particular issue or topic, and how they learn from that tribe through feedback on their contributions, inspires my students. This is how much of today’s global citizens operate and how much of the significant positive change takes place.

What difference can I make?

The more you teach your class as one unit, the less your students feel like individual learners and more importantly, individuals who might impact on global issues and change. To truly become an incubator for global citizens, the teachers job in the 21st century is to cultivate an empowering learning environment where students expect to take charge of both prescribed content and global impact, through their own development of networks, projects and feedback loops. This, like anything, takes practice and from as early as possible, this is the primary role of a 21st century classroom.

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Author: Richard Wells
Teaches grade 6 to 12
Deputy Principal in a New Zealand High School
Top 40 in edublog awards 2013
Top 12 Blogger – The Global Search for Education
Known for Educational Infographics (see Posters)
and an International Speaker.
Twitter :  @EduWells

This post is written as part of The Huffington Post’s The Global Search for Education: Our Top 12 Global Teacher Blogs: A series of questions that Cathy Rubin is asking several education bloggers. I’ll be sharing the link to her post that collects all of the responses. I’m excited to be part of this group of edu-bloggers.

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