My Teaching Experience: Global Classrooms

Me (right) with my 10 students and teacher partner at the 2019 Global Classrooms Conference

The Global Classrooms program

The Global Classrooms (GC) program is available to bilingual students in the Community of Madrid who are in their third year at a public secondary school. It is based on the Model United Nations program from the United States, and pioneered by the Fulbright Commission, which sends specifically trained GC language assistants each year to various cities in Spain. Students spend the semester learning valuable researching, note-taking, writing, and public speaking skills in English with the goal of competing with other schools at the annual Global Classrooms conference in January. The conference is meant to be a simulation of a real United Nations conference, so a real-world topic is set and debated by students representing various countries around the world. Each school sends their 10 best GC students to compete, with the goal of moving to a secondary conference in February and eventually making a select group who are flown to New York to compete at the United Nations building.

I had never heard of Global Classrooms before arriving in Madrid and meeting the bilingual coordinator at my school for the first time. She made it clear that she was seeking a motivated, skilled language assistant to be in charge of the program, and had selected me based on the public speaking and writing skills I had listed on my resume. The specific students I would be working with were 14-15 year old students in the 3B, 3C, and 3D classes. I would meet with these students three times a week, twice in their English and once in their Geography/History classes. I was to attend four GC workshops throughout the semester and lead class-wide activities while keeping an eye out for the final 10 students who would represent our school at the conference in January.

At the conference, pairs of students represent a variety of assigned countries and debate from their respective point of view on a given topic. Our assigned topic was "Juvenile crime and violence as an effect of socio-economic conditions," and our assigned countries were Chile, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Israel, and Somalia. I thus spent most of my first semester developing lesson plans to teach MLA format, note-taking strategies, the research process, academic vocabulary, transition words/connectors, improvisation, public speaking and debating techniques.

My Goals as a Global Classrooms Language Assistant (GCLA)

I had several goals for both myself and my students in the GC program. As a new GCLA, my main goal was to be as approachable and accessible to my students as possible because many of the lesson topics were completely new to them. I found that the best way to connect with my students over heavy material like this was to treat them like adults. At 14-15 years of age, most of them were mature enough to start taking responsibility for their learning, and I was lucky enough to be at a great school with motivated students to begin with. I avoided speaking down to them or treating them like children, and many of them rose to the challenge and were quite responsive to my requests for involvement and teamwork. If they were confused or uncomfortable with a debate topic or classroom activity, they were more likely to actively communicate with me because my choice to treat them like adults in turn made me more accessible as a teacher. Working with teenagers can be complicated and unpredictable, but I have found that this strategy caters more to their work ethic than treating them like children.

For my students, I wanted them to come out of the GC program having gained confidence speaking, debating, and writing in English. Prior to my involvement in their English classes, many of them stuck with simpler vocabulary and patterns that they had grown comfortable with. I worked to introduce more academic words into their writing and speech (beneficial instead of good, etc), usually through presentations followed by games used to practice their new vocabulary. Both the teachers and I noticed that the class improved considerably over the semester and many students were likely to experiment with new words outside of their comfort zone. By the time they had to write a position paper (a paper summarizing their assigned country's point of view on the topic), they felt prepared to do so and proud of their ability to write so academically.