High school teachers from Asia and Europe kick off learning program
Last 16th of September 2022 high school teachers from Moldova, Tunisia, Romania, Bangladesh, Taiwan, Greece, and Peru met in an online gather-round to discuss the kick-off learning program of Class2Class.org – an educational Edtech that offers the possibility to connect high school classes around the world, so that together, they can work on sustainable development projects.
What’s the worldwide learning program about?
The program’s name is Class2Class.org. Basically, the program offers a platform with the index of teachers worldwide ready to connect with, academic lesson plans with activities on sustainability for students, added to this, guidelines on how to carry out online meetings between international classes.
Contrarily to an LMS (Learning Management System), the Class2Class.org platform focuses attention on a specific pain teachers face nowadays: keeping the students’ motivated while learning something valuable.
Why did it start? – education and how to teach sustainability
I want you to take a moment and close your eyes to imagine a more just, equitable, and sustainable world. A world without poverty and hunger, where inclusive, quality education is available to all, where everyone enjoys safe and affordable drinking water, and where people have access to decent work. Can you imagine? This is the exact idea behind the Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs.
Now learning the definition or concepts behind the SDGs is easy. However, a problem still came to the surface: How can students be involved and collaborate toward these 17 Sustainable Development Goals if the education system does not always include this topic in a vivid, cool, realistic, fun, and productive way?
Sustainability at school… but make it international
The goal of the 17 SDGs is to achieve them. Now, how? What do we do? Participating on our own is amazing, nevertheless wouldn’t be greater to encourage whole communities to work towards it? How do we do this? The answer: work sustainability with the largest group of people in town – schools.
Now, what about making these high schools connect with other classes from another part of the world and compare their realities?
How to work sustainability at school?
Seems a challenge when our school principal tells us to introduce a new topic or develop certain skills in our class. Particularly, when we are asked to insert sustainability to high school students. How do teachers deal with sustainability in their lessons?
We have the answer in some simple steps👇 :
- First, have students identify the challenges they face in their communities
- Then make students analyze and be critical of them
- Have them come up with solutions
- Next, students present their solutions to other peers and once again are critical of what they’ve created or designed as a solution
- Students introduce their designed solutions to the problem in their community
Fin all these steps in the Class2Class.org with already-made lesson plans and activities on sustainability.
Extra factor: Take your students on a trip around the world
Designing solutions for problems in our community that contribute to a sustainable world can be done everywhere by anyone. However, the process that makes students design solutions becomes more fruitful when they broaden their minds and solutions by having online meetups with students their age from other parts of the world.
They meet, present their solutions, and get feedback from their peers to improve their solutions and learn other realities.
Try Class2Class.org
Likewise mentioned in our very first paragraph you are welcome to join the worldwide learning program Class2Class.org if you consider yourself a global-minded high school teacher ready to explore the world from your classroom and help the world at the same time!