Implementing Global Fluency in the Classroom: Activities, Tools, and Lesson Ideas for Leveraging Your Classroom's Student Diversity (webinar)

This webinar was presented by Brad Gosche. First he defined what is global fluency which is the knowledge, skills and mindset needed to live and work effectively and successfully in a globally connected world. And this global fluency will have an effect in education and students. It is very important to have a knowledge about many cultures, and specifically as teachers about the culture of students. Culture will influence all aspects of our different environments, interactions, and perceptions of others and reactions to our students. And those who succeeded in this, they enhanced student's learning experience. Cultural competency in this webinar was compared between different countries, like Mexico and United States, and in an average, Mexico was the winner. One of the ways mentioned by Brad to enhance culture knowledge, is using different languages to say hello or good morning. He mentioned: Namaste, Magacca, Mahadsanid, and Nabadeey and many other different languages. Also, he mentioned a very important relationship between teacher and students, he divided the relationship into 3 different zone, danger, comfort and growth and learning zones as you can see in the picture below. He said that the best relationship is the growth and learning zone, not the comfort zone and not the danger zone between teacher and students.

Hello, 

I'm Ola Al-akara, a biology graduated student from LIU, and a biochemistry teacher at Alabrar educational center. I registered Teaching Diploma this year at LIU, to continue my journey in study, since teachers are learners too. I am so grateful and happy that I registered this semester, because the courses i'am taking are so helpful to me as a teacher and as a student. I can use for example, media and technology course in my communication with my students and my coordinators. Also, for the other courses, i'am learning to how to deal with my students. A teacher is always a continuous learner.

Teaching 

  Teaching is one of the most complex and easiest jobs at the same time. To be a teacher, this means you are going to teach students life lessons before giving them the information. To be a teacher, that means you should be a model for the students. To be a successful teacher, many skills should be learned before taking this journey, you should learn how to control your self, how to communicate with students, how to deal with bad situations, you must have first general information about such skills, although during teaching process maybe you'll face such problems or not, or maybe more complicated problems, but building up a previous background about teaching skills can be so beneficial  for you career. With years then, teaching will become a little bit easier, you had build up many years of experience which will benefit you later. 

Beliefs about intelligence and children's capacity to learn 

  Teacher beliefs should not only stay a belief, it should change into action, into a behavior, because these beliefs are not fixed, they can change. Let's start with some of these beliefs as a teacher. The teacher should belief about the intelligence and children's capacity to learn. Every student has a smart corner in his/her personality, we are all smart in anything, "Smartness is a dynamic characteristic that can be changed, it is not static". Even Howard Gardner, found that there are 9 types of different intelligence. So, as a teacher, you must belief in students capacity to learn and be smart, to invent and to reach their goals, you should work with them, support them to allow them to reach their goals.

Beliefs about learning

  "Learning is constructed as learners assimilate new experience with prior knowledge". To have a successful lesson during a period, in my science domain for example, you should always start the lesson with building up a prior knowledge about the information you are going to explain to the students. You should ask them for example for daily life examples related to the topic, it might be with them every day, but they don't even think about it. That will make the beginning of the period so attractive that the students will be waiting for what's coming up next, they will be activated from the beginning of the period. Then through the explanation, it is the teacher responsibility to create a balance between students' time receiving information and practicing skills, and their time constructing, assimilating and applying information in real life situations.  

Beliefs about teachers and teaching

   Teacher are always continuous learners, and that's why I'am now continuing my Teaching Diploma degree at LIU. In a highly technological changing world, we must always learn new things, new technology, new information, we must have a general repertoire in our heads, especially in our teaching subject, we should store as much as general information as we can, not only stick on old information, or even old teaching methods. We should always update our knowledge bases. 

Biology 

   To me, biology is the most beautiful subject in life, and teaching this subject is the most beautiful journey in life. Biology or life science is the study of life, of all living things, from the tiniest unicellular organisms, into the most complicated multi cellular organisms which are the humans. You can study what a cell is made up of, how a cell communicate with another cell, how cells perform body functions, how they give the shape for the organism, and many things...The process of learning plants, animals and humans in a detailed manner for few years is so interesting and knowledgeable. So how about continuing this study for further approaches and goals? That's so interesting for me. You can learn the behavior of everything about you, their formation, their life till death. When I started teaching this subject, I’m attracted to it now much more, the things that I've never thought about, are asked by my students. They also open your eyes to things that you must know to tell them, or things that you know but they need to have them. That's so beautiful!, and as much as you love what you are doing (teaching), as much as you will success in it, and as much as you will plant a seed of love toward this subject inside the students. 

Different abilities, different needs

   We are not all born the same, each one of us is born with certain characteristics, specific way of understanding, specific intelligence. So, in a class of more than 20 students for example, you must give the information to all students that have different ways or abilities to understand the idea. Some students might depend on vision, others to listening, some needs the experiment to be done in front of them, so you have different types of learners in the class. Here, the role of the teacher come, its the teacher responsibility to design an environment in which each member in the class can succeed. Such environment is characterized by community, mutual support, risk taking, and a higher-level of thinking for all. The teacher must influence students and motivate them, so that all of them will by encouraged in learning process.