Getting Smart Podcast | Global Competency in Kentucky

This podcast series on language learning features voices of EdLeaders, educators and students. The intent of the series is to highlight the ideas of language experts and great examples of language teaching and learning across the country. Getting Smart believes online language learning can be used to enhance or complement face-to-face instruction. This podcast series is sponsored by Rosetta Stone Education. See the bottom of this blog for more.

If the first thing that comes to mind when you think of elementary education in Kentucky isn’t “global competency,” you may not be alone.

But this just means that you haven’t heard of one of Boone County Schools’ most interesting and innovative initiatives.

The district, which serves 23,000 students across urban, suburban and rural environments, believes that preparing students for the 21st century means helping them develop cultural awareness and global competency. To do this, they are focusing on providing all of their elementary–and most of their middle–school students with a chance to learn a second language.

What’s more, they’re doing it with a supplementary online language learning tool in a way that is improving the district’s community engagement–all without breaking the budget.

In a globalizing world that demands paradigm shifts and expecting the unexpected, if our goal is to thrive in an inclusive environment, we think Boone County Schools is doing great work.

To learn more, Tom sat down with Jim Detwiler, the district’s Assistant Superintendent, who explained how they designed their program, their graduate profile priorities and exactly why global competency is such a priority for this diverse region of Kentucky.

For more, see:

• Shifting Paradigms to Respond to the Demands of a Global World
• Designing Student Projects for Global Readiness
• Taking Global Education Beyond the Classroom

This podcast series is sponsored by Rosetta Stone Education. Interviewees were not compensated for their participation. The Rosetta Stone® Language Learning Suite for K12 provides flexible e-learning solutions that are easily integrated with the teacher’s in-class instruction. Their solutions are designed for all proficiency levels to fit your students‘ learning needs. For more, visit Rosetta Stone.com or see the Get Language Ready site.