Wellstone International High School
Wellstone is an urban public high school that serves approximately 350 students in Minneapolis, MN.
Why Global Education?
“The mess our world is in right now is because we have people in power who never developed global competence. Our students are our next generation. If we don’t like what we’re seeing now we need to change some things. We are witnessing a group of people who have had the privilege to opt out of global competence and we’re seeing the effects of that. I want to create a space where people can’t opt out. You need to be able to embrace it. It’s just a part of our future living in a global society. This idea of America First, we aren’t as great as we think we are. We need to understand for being as diverse of a nation as we are, we have done our best to keep people segregated. I think it’s our responsibility of those of us working in education to change that around.”
– Dr. Aimee Fearing, Principal
Key Practices
Shared Mission and Vision
- Incorporated global and cultural learning into the mission statement, and ensures that staff can see, tangibly, how the mission can be implemented.
Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment
- Supports teachers in using project-based learning, place-based learning, and problem- based learning to help students make meaning of the world.
- In addition to encouraging the use of rubrics to assess global projects, supports teachers in using informal modes of inquiry, such conversations with students, to measure students’ global competence.
Collaborative Professional Community
- Builds in time for teachers to collaborate on global learning.
- Reorganized the school’s leadership structure so that the teachers who lead collaborative grade-level meetings also serve on the school leadership team.
- Instills a culture of collaboration to help school leaders, faculty, and staff take on the challenge of infusing global learning into the school environment.
- Encourages global learning by loosening the reins on motivated staff, trusting them to do the work rather than micromanaging it.
Advocacy and Community Engagement
- Invites the community to school meetings and school functions to showcase students’ work. Partners with an organization that mentors her students.
Equity and Inclusivity
- Understands that her students from other countries do not necessarily have a high level of global awareness, which allows her to scaffold global learning to accommodate her students’ needs.
- Leads her staff to set students on the pathway of social-emotional learning and cultural understanding so that they can recognize their own biases and identity biases in others.
- Leads conversations about equity that extends beyond race and language to broader power dynamics that contribute to inequities that play out locally and globally.
