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Foundations of Global Competence and Global Education
What is Global Competence?
What is Global Competence?
Global Competence is the ability to understand and act on issues of global significance. It's not about knowing facts about every country or culture. It's about developing the skills to investigate the world beyond your environment, recognize and appreciate multiple perspectives, communicate ideas effectively across differences, and take informed action to improve the world both locally and globally. Global competence means students can navigate complex issues, engage respectfully with people who think differently, and see themselves as capable of shaping the world they're inheriting.ย
References: Asia Society's Four Domains of Global Competence & World Savvy's Global Competence Matrix
What is Global Education?
What is Global Education?
Global Education is the pedagogical approach that develops global competencies. In my practice, global education means starting with the local, investigating our own community, understanding our own place and identity, as the foundation for understanding the wider world. It's not an add-on subject or a special unit about other countries. It's a lens that transforms how we teach existing content. I often refer to this in my classroom as "global perspective leads to local action". Global education asks: Whose perspectives are we including? What real-world issues are students investigating? How are students communicating across differences? What opportunities exist for meaningful action? It's rigorous, essential work that prepares students to be both rooted in their communities and connected to the world.ย
Resources: Anderson's "Think Globally, Teach Locally" & Selasi's framework of local identity
Organizations in the Field
Organizations in the Field
Offers transformative professional development through semester-long international exchanges and the Teachers for Global Classrooms program, which combines rigorous online coursework with field placements that equip educators to bring authentic global perspectives back to their schools.
Provides world-class geography resources, educator grants, and frameworks for developing students' geographic literacy through visuals, interactive maps, and the Geo-Inquiry approach that connects local ecosystems to global systems.
Partners U.S. and international classrooms (ages 8-14) for yearlong collaboration, providing professional development, coaching, technology (1:3 device ratio), and ready-made co-curricular projects where students connect weekly through writing and via video calls.
Harvard's research initiative offers simple, practical thinking routines like See-Think-Wonder and Circle of Viewpoints that make thinking visible and are essential tools for facilitating dialogue and exploring multiple perspectives on global issues.
Sends K-12 teachers on immersive expeditions as full expedition team members working alongside scientists, with fellows returning to host local explorers at their schools and create lesson plans based on their fieldwork experience.
Global Education Assessment Tools
Global Education Assessment Tools
The OECD's international assessment defines global competence and provides sample test items that reveal what it looks like when students analyze multiple perspectives, evaluate information sources, and understand global systems and interconnections. The cognitive assessment tasks paired with self-report questionnaires about students' attitudes, dispositions, and intercultural experiences offer a comprehensive picture of global competence. This is particularly valuable for assessing and showing how math, science, and literacy connect to global citizenship.
This Google Forms gathers baseline data about current global learning practices, teacher confidence levels, and barriers at your school. Questions explore what's already happening, where teachers feel confident, what obstacles are most common, and what support would actually help, recognizing that global education fails when positioned as an add-on that ignores teachers' real constraints. Use survey results to identify patterns, inform next steps in shaping what global learning looks like in your school context.
These rubrics translate the Four Domains of Global Competence into observable, measurable student outcomes, providing concrete evidence of what global competence looks like in practice. Use these for student self-assessment, designing learning experiences that explicitly build competencies, and demonstrating to administrators that global competence is rigorous and measurable across all content areas and grade levels.
Additional Background
Additional Background
Use these resources to familiarize yourself further with the foundational underpinnings of global education
๐ฆAsia Society: Teaching for Global Competence๐: The framework for global competence education, defining the Four Domains (Investigate the World, Recognize Perspectives, Communicate Ideas, Take Action) that structure what globally competent students should know and be able to do. Essential reading for understanding how to move from abstract "global awareness" to concrete, observable competencies that can be taught, practiced, and assessed across all grade levels and content areas.
๐บ๏ธWorld Savvy: Global Competence Matrix๐: Breaks down global competence into specific skills, investigate, collaborate, engage, and digital fluency, with clear descriptors and progressions from emerging to advanced. Use this framework to understand the dispositions (curiosity, empathy, self-awareness) and skills (perspective-taking, communication, action) that underpin globally competent learners, and to design learning experiences that explicitly build these competencies.
๐บ๐ณUnited Nations Sustainable Development Goals๐: The 17 global goals adopted by all UN member states provide a shared framework for understanding and addressing the world's most pressing challenges, from climate action to quality education to reducing inequalities. Use the SDGs to help students investigate real-world issues that connect local actions to global impact, and to structure student-driven projects where they take meaningful action on goals that matter to them.
๐OECD PISA Global Competence Framework๐: This international research framework defines global competence as the capacity to examine local, global, and intercultural issues, understand and appreciate different perspectives and worldviews, engage in open and effective interactions across cultures, and take action for collective well-being and sustainable development. PISA's framework emphasizes that global competence requires students to apply knowledge from multiple disciplines (reading, mathematics, science) to analyze complex real-world challenges, moving beyond memorization to transfer and application. Use this resource to ground your understanding in research-based definitions that have international consensus, to see how global competence connects to academic rigor across content areas.
๐ปISTE Standards๐: The International Society for Technology in Education provides research-backed standards that define how students and teachers should leverage technology for learning in meaningful, transformative ways. Use ISTE Standards to understand how technology integration and global competence intersect, not using tech for tech's sake, but strategically selecting digital tools that enable authentic global collaboration, communication across differences, and student-driven investigation of real-world issues.
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