Roosevelt Middle School

Roosevelt is an urban public middle school that serves approximately 550 students in Oakland, CA.

Why Global Education?

“It’s the reaction against the common narrative of going to school to get a good job, and feed into capitalism. We are trying to help facilitate students being world changers and improving the world, however they feel like that makes sense to them.”

– Mr. Cliff Hong, Principal

Key Practices

Shared Mission and Vision

  • Established a team to define the school’s new mission and make that mission come to life, and then published and disseminated plan to district and community stakeholders. 
  • Created a formal plan to meet the mission focused on three areas: academic foundation, 21st-century skills, and community ethic, the last two of which embed global competence.
  • Attached measurable metrics to the mission statement, which took years of testing indicators with different stakeholder groups.

Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment

  • Experiments with different curricula as the school integrates global competence into their teaching, including, for example, Engage NY in humanities subjects.
  • Partnered with World Savvy to operationalize global competence for staff and students as a part of the school’s learner-centered strategies, and then weave it into instruction in a way that prioritizes the students’ interests.

Collaborative Professional Community

  • Provides faculty the autonomy to control lesson topics and class projects.

Global Connections and Collaboration

  • Hosts a high school exchange program from Thailand on their campus, where Thai students spend a semester studying in the United States.

Advocacy and Community Engagement

  • Hosts parent engagement groups and coconstructs the curriculum based on topics that matter to the school community.

Operations and Management

  • Seeks and maintains responsibility for grants to develop programs that meet the school’s innovative mission. 
  • Joined the Next Generation Learning Challenges Network, which provides funding and technical support to help schools become more innovative. Uses the grant money to generate and develop new programs, then runs the program using public funds.