What is Global Classrooms?

Global Classrooms (GC) is an academic project developed through a partnership between the Community of Madrid, the United States Embassy in Spain, the British Council, and Fulbright Spain. Participating schools elect classes in their 3°ESO to participate in the semester-long project, which culminates in a simulation of a formal conference within the United Nations. Students are assigned countries they must represent within a certain UN committee, and the goal of that committee is to discuss a predetermined topic of interest and collaborate on resolutions, or plans of action, related to the topic.

GC strives for a lot of goals, including development of research and writing skills, speaking, debating, critical thinking, teamwork, and leadership abilities. On top of all of this, students must do it all in English. While standard curriculums for teaching GC have been developed and modified time and time again, all of the ones I have seen seem to require a minimum level of English that I found some of my classes well below. I believe that the opportunity GC presents to learn about the world, collaborate with others, and improve English ability should be given to all students, but in order to do so, careful restructuring of the curriculum should be made in order to cater to different levels of English. Therefore, I have put together a detailed and nuanced proposal for a curriculum that I believe would allow students to get the most they can out of GC, while learning at an intermediate (programa) level.

This proposal, found on the "Curriculum" tab, was inspired by my own experience and observations teaching GC as well as feedback I gathered from students I worked with in both our school-wide mock conferences and the Comunidad de Madrid-wide formal conferences, two of whom came from programa classes.