Global Education Advisory Council (GEAC)
Notes from the Meeting of December 04, 2014
Welcome and Introductions
The Thursday, December 04 meeting of the Global Education Advisory Council, held at Mass
Department of Elementary and Secondary Education meeting room at 3:00 pm. Those present at the
meeting were: Ariel Libhaber, Patricia Shanahan, Ruth Kaplan, Jalene Tamerat, Jorge Allen and Pei
Zhang. (Jorge Allen is the director of World Language Department for Andover School District. He has
been invited to participate as a guest.)
Notes:
Ariel introduced the school-to-school connections they built, the best practice in setting up the program,
integration with other part of school life and suggestion to handle the hurdles.
Patricia introduced Swampscott model and Chelmsford model for global competence program. Ruth and
Jalene also pointed out teacher’s curricula decision and role on promoting this kind of program. In
addition, the organizations like Brookline educator’s foundation, Brookline high school foundation are
also great resources for teacher’s global education training programs.
Pei mentioned US Scitech program which enable students to experience the global collaboration through
science and technology projects. The program brings US students to China to participate in local events,
and establish joint research project with Chinese school.
The Council would also like to invite more schools and teachers to provide their current global
education programs and resources. Karen White would help make the repository of resources available
to share with other school districts in the state.
Jorge suggested we should set up some program to facilitate the information sharing among the schools,
for example, each school’s exchange program and best practice experienced.
We also discussed a few possible questions for the survey to Mass schools:
1. How many interested in a global education conference?
2. Do you interested in sharing your best practice with other schools?
3. What kind of activities can raise people’s interesting, and consciousness?
4. How can we cooperate within the state?
5. Existing Program and Resource support the global education?
6. What ‘s our goal for global education?
7. Why do you think it matters to outsiders and local community?
8. How do you see students could collaborate with foreign partners?
9. What do you see as the motivation for students to get global experience?
10. Contact information
Pei also suggested maybe to have a global education conference held in China. Mass. School
Representatives can sit down with Chinese educators and discuss the goals, actions and evaluations.
Then starting from those schools, we could move forward and take some solid actions.
The meeting adjourned at 4:30 pm.
Action Items:
Ariel, Patricia and Pei will write a short paragraph regarding what kind of global education resource
they currently could provide to Mass. Students. Karen White to list the resource pool on the DESE
GEAC website. We will also try to collect more ideas/resources through the survey.
Ruth will write a paragraph calls for global education joint efforts for the survey. Jalene will write the
definition of global education in a few bulletin lines. We will together brainstorm the one page survey to
be posted in Commissioner’s update.
Special Notice:
We will go to Foxboro International Economic Summit at Jan. 8th, 2015 at 11am or so, then meet up
there around 12pm. Call Patricia Shanahan for meeting venue once arriving there.