ST.
ANTHONY COLLEGE THE TEACHING PROFESSION
CALAPAN CITY, INC.
Information Sheet 1.9
On Becoming a Global Teacher
Being world-class does not mean going internationally and showing our best out there. Being
world –class is a passion and commitment to our profession; being world class is giving our best to
teaching. Being world class starts right inside the classroom. --- Condrado de Quiros
Introduction
Our world has been called a “ global village”. Satellite communications make possible
television, telephone and documents transmitted through fax and electronic mails across thousands
of miles in thousands of seconds. Our students can view global warfare in the Middle East, famine in
Africa, industrial pollution in Europe or industrial breakthrough in Korea or Japan through a world wide
web of the information highway.
Global education poses variety of goals ranging from increased knowledge about the peoples
of the world to resolutions of global problems, from increased fluency in foreign languages to the
development of more tolerant attitudes towards other cultures and peoples. Global education
embraces today’s challenges as national borders are opened. It paves the way for borderless
education to respond to the needs of educating children of the world they are entering. It offers new
curricular dimensions and possibilities, current scientific and technological breakthroughs for
completely new frontiers in education.
Contemporary curricula respond to the concept of this global village. The increased use of
technology in the classroom, the incorporation of the changing realities of our world’s society and the
ease of mobility of peoples of the world have become a challenge to your preparation as prospective
teachers.
Hence, future teachers like you should prepare to respond to these multiple challenges. To
become global teacher you should be equipped with a wider range of knowledge of the various
educational systems outside the country; master skills and competencies which can address global
demands and possess attitudes and values that are acceptable to multicultural communities. When
you are able to satisfy these benchmark requirements then you can safely say you have prepared
well to be a great teacher of the world.
As future teachers, think globally, but act locally. You can be a global teacher by being the best
teacher in your school.
Objectives of the Chapter:
1. Gain clear understanding of what a global teacher is in context of global education
2. Enrich your insights on global education by analyzing and comparing the education of
selected countries of the world
3. Describe multicultural diversity as an element of global education and the role of the
teacher in addressing diversity among learners
4. Identify opportunities in teacher exchange programs for the development of world class
teachers
5. Describe global application of technology in the classroom
ST. ANTHONY COLLEGE THE TEACHING PROFESSION
CALAPAN CITY, INC.
Global Education and the Global Teacher
“Benchmarking is learning the best from the best practices of the world’s best educational systems.”
This will introduce the general concept of global education and define the global teacher. This
introductory lesson will give you a clear perspective of how you would become that global teacher.
After understanding the two concepts, you will be able to prepare yourself for the succeeding lessons.
How do you prepare yourself as teachers for a challenging task of making learners of today
live meaningful lives tomorrow? As you prepare your children for their future, teachers need to
explore what the future holds. Teachers have to envision creative, innovative ways to prepare diverse
learners in their own cultural context without forgetting that they live in a global village.
To compete globally would mean to prepare teachers who are capable of changing lifelong
education needs. How do you prepare for these needs? What are the emerging technologies that will
shape the future? How can we use our technologies for best learning advantage? What will be the
jobs of the future and how should curricula be shaped to prepare students for their future?
You will be teaching in the “Flat World” or One Planet Schoolhouse”. These two terms imply
global education as a result of shrinking world due to access in technology. The internet globalizes
communication by allowing users from around the world to connect to one another.
Global Education
Global education has been best described by two definitions:
UNESCO defines global education as a goal to become aware of the educational conditions or
lack of it, in developing countries worldwide and aim to educate all peoples to a certain world
standards.
Another definition is that global education is a curriculum that is international in scope which
prepares today’s youth around the world to function in one world environment under teachers who are
intellectually, professionally and humanistically prepared.
The United Nations entered into an agreement to pursue six (6) goals to achieve some
standards of education in place by 2015 worldwide. To achieve global education, the UN sets the
following goals
1. Expand early childhood care education
2. Provide free and compulsory primary education for all
3. Promote learning and life skills for young and adult
4. Increase adult literacy by 50%
5. Achieve gender parity by 2005 , gender equality by 2015 and
6. Improve quality of education
In 2000, the Philippines committed itself to the above EFA 2015 Goals at the World
Education Forum in Dakar
James Becker (1982) defined global education as an effort to help individual learners to see
the world as a single and global system and to see themselves as a participant in that system. It is a
school curriculum that has a worldwide standard of teaching and learning. This curriculum prepares
learners in an international marketplace with a world view of international understanding. In his article
“Goals of Global Education”, Becker emphasized that global education incorporated into the
curriculum and educational experiences of each student a knowledge and empathy of cultures of the
nation of the world.
Likewise students are encouraged to see the world as a whole, learn various cultures to make
them better relate and function effectively within various cultural groups.
ST. ANTHONY COLLEGE THE TEACHING PROFESSION
CALAPAN CITY, INC.
Thus to meet the various global challenges of the future, the 21 st Century Learning Goals have
been established as bases of various curricula worldwide. These learning goals include:
●21st century content emerging content areas such as global awareness financial,
economic, business and entrepreneurship literacy, civic literacy, health and awareness
●learning and thinking skills, critical thinking and problem solving skills, communication,
creativity and innovation, collaboration, contextual learning, information and media
literacy
●ICT literacy, using technology in the context of learning so students know how to learn
●life skills, leadership, ethics , accountability , personal responsibility , self direction and
others
●21st century assessment, authentic assessment that measure the areas of learning
Global education is all about diversity, understanding the differences and teaching the different
cultural groups in order to achieve the goals of global education as presented by the United Nations.
It is educating all peoples in the world from the remote and rugged rural villages in developing
countries to the slum areas of urbanized countries to the highly influential and economically stable
societies of the world. Global education addresses the need of the smallest schools to the largest
classrooms in the world. It responds to borderless education that defies distance and geographical
location.
Thus global education provides equal opportunity and access to knowledge and learning tools
which are the basic rights of every child in the global community
Are our pre service teachers prepared to provide global education in their respective future
school assignments? Are you preparing yourselves to become a global teacher?
Global teacher
Looking back at the concept of global education how do we define now a global teacher? Is
this teacher somebody who teaches abroad? Is this person teaching anywhere in the world and is
able to teach the 21st century learning goals? These are some of the fundamental questions which
should be answered in order to understand who a global teacher is.
A global teacher is a competent teacher who is armed with enough skills, appropriate attitude
and universal values to teach students with both time tested as well as modern technologies in
education in any place in the world. He or she is someone who thinks and acts both locally and
globally with worldwide perspectives right in the communities where he or she is situated.
More specifically, a global Filipino teacher should have the following qualities and
characteristics in addition to knowledge, skills and values
●understands how this world is interconnected
●recognizes that the world has rich variety of ways of life
●has a vision of the future sees what the future would be for him and the students
●must be creative and innovative
●must understand, respect and be tolerant of the diversity of cultures
●must believe and take action for education that will sustain the future
●must be able to facilitate digitally –mediated learning
●must have depth of knowledge
●must possess good communication (for Filipino teachers to be multi lingual)
And lastly but most importantly
●must possess the competencies of a professional teacher as embodied in the National
Competency -Based Standards for Teachers (NCBTS)
ST. ANTHONY COLLEGE THE TEACHING PROFESSION
CALAPAN CITY, INC.
The need for global teachers is on the rise in several countries worldwide. Even
developed countries are in dire need of competent teachers who will man the countries rural and
urban classrooms. This is true with our neighboring countries like Singapore, Cambodia and
Thailand. The regional data of the United Nations show the numbers of teaching posts needed by
2015.
