Last year, Sarah Sisco enrolled in the Inspire Citizens’ Master Teacher Endorsement for global citizenship, now called the Global Citizenship Certificate (GCC). What she experienced has completely transformed her approach to planning her school’s strategic initiatives for school improvement.
Read MoreIf you could walk through the doors of the Primary School at the Inter-Community School Zurich (ICSZ), you would find yourself in an atmosphere of creativity, inquiry and innovation. This is a place where leaders and educators care deeply about students and cultivating a sense of wonder of the world.
Read MoreThe Inspire Citizens Global Citizenship Certificate program (previously named the Master Educator Endorsement) is a dynamic series of professional learning courses designed to equip and inspire K-12 educators to engage students in meaningful and impactful global citizenship learning.
Read MoreWhen Shari Wejsa, a high school teacher in northwest New Jersey, heard about the Inspire Citizens’ Eco-Photography summer course, she signed up right away. A history teacher with a creative bent and interest in interdisciplinarity, she was excited to channel some of her summer into learning about connecting with nature in ways she could share with her students.
Read MoreThe American Embassy School of New Delhi (AES) in India had a goal: they wanted to embed a meaningful service learning experience in every grade level of the school from pre-kindergarten to grade 12.
They knew they needed help to make this happen and leaders reached out to Inspire Citizens. What has transpired? An incredible partnership, a lot of enthusiastic teachers and quite a bit of professional learning magic.
Read MoreCOJOWA school in Colombia has developed a thorough and purposeful strategic plan with service learning at the heart of transforming values into action.
Read MoreInspire Citizens has teamed up with the Digital Citizenship Institute (DCI) to promote and share what’s going on with this summer’s Eco Photography camps for teachers and families. Marialice Curran, DCI founder and executive director, says the course is perfectly aligned with DCI’s pillars for digital citizenship.
“I love that the Inspire Citizens Eco-media courses specifically speak to the pillars of what we do at DCI, and also about being balanced and knowing how to prioritize your time on and offline,” says Marialice.
Read MoreThis past year, middle school teacher Julia Fliss expanded her focus to include the Inner Development Goals (IDGs), five categories of 23 skills and qualities of human inner development and growth. The IDGs were created as a response to the SDGs, as leaders from a variety of different sectors realized that how we think and feel impacts our ability to work towards targets for the SDGs. The IDGs encompass five broad categories of “being, thinking, relating, collaborating and acting”. Read more about how her students in Colorado are engaging with global citizenship from both inner and outer perspectives.
Read MoreGrade 5 students at the Western Academy of Beijing (WAB) have a special opportunity to get creative with their International Baccalaureate PYP exhibition. Art has taken center stage and has become a frame for expressing a synthesis of student learning.
Intrigued? This novel approach to the PYP exhibition is worthy of your attention.
Read MoreColleagues Angelia Crouch and Pim Arora at the Western Academy of Beijing were playing golf one day when a casual conversation sparked the genesis of a multi-layered, interdisciplinary learning experience.
“This story starts with the grade 9/10 design team,” explains Pim. “The design team is close-knit and we were evaluating our units. There’s a design unit that focuses on clocks, where students design and create clocks. At the end of that unit, I found myself disposing of 100 clocks that students didn’t want to take home. This became a great opportunity to to rethink the unit, the more responsible use of our resources, and how me might design a learning experience around a concept that is relevant to the lives of all of us.”
Read MoreKerry Craig is the Outdoor Learning teacher at the International School of Prague (ISP) and she is thrilled to see how this new program is growing roots and gaining momentum.
“We’re looking at the Sustainable Development Goals throughout the school and we’re about to start the PYP (Primary Years Program) and MYP (Middle Years Program),” says Kerry. “It’s new at our school to use a sustainability lens at these levels and we want to do this intentionally, to create embedded and integrated learning experiences throughout the program. I can see how our Outdoor Learning program is going to play a key role.”
Read MoreThis July, Inspire Citizens is offering an Eco Photography camp for teachers, a month of fun and meaningful professional learning that will get you outside, viewing the world through a creative lens, and that will also equip you with skills to introduce your students to Eco Photography.
Ivy Yan, an Inspire Citizens and Two Birds facilitator, and Steve Sostak (co-founder of Inspire Citizens) have teamed up to create a dynamic and engaging experience for educators.
Read MoreWhat student wouldn’t love working in a design lab to create new products, designs and prototypes? Especially a design lab complete with multiple 3D printers and machines for working with wood, textiles, jewelry and any other product you could imagine?
Students at Seoul Foreign School in South Korea have access to state-of-the-art design labs and maker spaces, and high school teacher Neil Henderson has been working with Inspire Citizens’s Aaron Moniz to create innovative learning experiences this year.
Read MoreJust as a grade 2 unit called “Be the Change” was getting underway this year, Shanghai went into a serious lockdown for Covid-19 and schools went back online. Teacher Silvina Rubiano was determined this would not derail her students’ access to a robust Empathy to Impact experience, so she pivoted to focus on advocacy and digital storytelling. The result: deep student engagement and a campaign to spread peace to all international teachers in Shanghai.
Read MoreTwo grade seven teachers at the International School of Bangkok used the power of collaboration to redesign a seventh grade unit about migration, and they couldn’t be happier with the results.
The teachers, Matt Piercy and Sabina Vogt, are experienced international educators and exemplary collaborators. They love working together and have had a lot of success combining their strengths and experiences to craft learning experiences for their students. When they partnered with Aaron and Scott from Inspire Citizens, that spirit of collaboration grew in exponential ways and the outcomes have exceeded expectations.
Read MoreFour years ago, curriculum leaders and teachers at Concordia International School Shanghai decided they needed to overhaul the elementary school social studies curriculum. They knew they needed help for this massive task, and they called on the Inspire Citizens team to lead the charge.
Read MoreWhen middle school teacher Liz Zadoo first talked to Inspire Citizens founder Aaron Moniz about how to embed advocacy into one of her grade 8 social studies units, she got so excited that she went home and spent her evening revising and upgrading her unit plan.
“I thought redesigning the unit would be a lot of work and there would be a lot of planning. When Aaron explained what advocacy could look like in the unit, I was so excited; I was able to use my existing unit plan but tweak it in meaningful ways,” says Liz.
The Inspire Citizens team is working with AES-Delhi to develop a whole-school approach to embedding service learning into curricular experiences, and this eighth grade example is one of several success stories..
Read MoreIn concert with the vision and components of the Empathy to Impact system, SIS and IC launched into meaningful explorations of global competence, creativity and imagination, systems and futures thinking, and purposeful action all interconnected to interdisciplinary concepts, knowledge, skills, processes, and strategies. The aim was to bring out purposeful and action-based applied learning — a greater demonstration of the approaches to learning in the PYP and the SIS mission of being principled, caring, and innovative global citizens in a VUCA world.
Read MoreWe see great evidence of transformative learning and engagement through developing a greater sense of vocation. We aim to be more explicit in highlighting the dynamic interdependence of the internal hopes, needs, and passions of the learner with local and/or global community needs and partners. When connected to enhanced actions, students exemplify empowered global citizens in a personal project space that calls for future-focused learning and change.
We believe personal projects, embedded into part of a school or learning community should be able to answer the following question: How might our personal projects and our entire learning community be connected to bigger stories — about the world, our place in it, and how we aim to shape a better future?
Read MoreWe need greater interdependence and flexible leadership in a volatile and uncertain world. Therefore, even as early as primary school, students can experience how communities and organizations designed as constellations are dynamic and flexible networks. Each member of the team is able to both stand out and fit in at the same time, to form something greater. When leaders find the courage to distribute rather than hoard power, creativity multiplies, trust deepens and inclusivity expands.
In 2021, we have more work than ever to do in implementing and attaining the Sustainable Development Goals and targets. These goals and targets have the power to create a better world by 2030, by ending poverty, fighting inequality and addressing the urgency of climate change. Guided by the goals, it is now up to all of us, governments, businesses, civil society and the general public to work together to build a better future for everyone.
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