Morning Homeroom
Global Leadership Program

While working at Young Hoon International Middle School,

I began a new program to help our ELL students engage with English every morning before going to their first period class - half of which are taught fully in English. Even though nearly 100% of our student body would consider English to be their second language, I recognized that YHIMS did not have a system in place to support students who were struggling. Student English levels varied greatly, with some students being completely fluent, while others struggled to form simple sentences. I proposed a the new Morning Homeroom Global Leadership Program to help fill this need.

The program is a year-long curriculum containing low stakes 15-minute activities that encourage all students, regardless of English level, to engage in an English activity each morning. Each activity focused on one of the primary English skills - Reading, Writing, Speaking, or Listening. The program is broken down into 10 units, each with a different leadership themes so that all students would have an opportunity to learn something new and interesting. The leadership themes included:

• Mindset

• Diversity

• Cultural Awareness

• Conflict Resolution

• Global Leaders

• Leadership Traits

• Teen Voices

• Public Speaking

• Community & Civic Engagement

• Giving Back

This program was taught to every student in the school (500+ students, in grades 7-9) simultaneously during morning homeroom. In addition to creating, and overseeing the creation of, all of the content, I managed the team of 15 teachers who taught the lessons each morning.

Throughout the year, I also oversaw a revisions team. Together we worked on modifying the materials that were taught this year to make the program even more effective next year. I also established the framework for the creation of new, vertically aligned, content to expand the program into a second and third year. Students who took Year 1 of the program in 2021, will take Year 2 of the program in 2022, and Year 3 in 2023.

Freerice at Young Hoon

An integrated element of the Morning Homeroom Global Leadership Program is the schoolwide Freerice Tournament which occurs throughout the second semester of the school year. 2021 was the second year in which we ran Freerice Tournaments. As a school, we collectively raised over 20 million and counting grains of rice for the UN WFP. As of writing this, YHIMS is ranked #20 on the Global Leaderboard for all time group donations.