IIE. Global Opportunities for Teachers

October 23–25, 2016 | Washington, DC | Register

The 2016 IIE Summit will bring education, government, and business leaders together for action-oriented panel discussions, sessions, and plenaries on how to ensure an international experience is a key part of a 21st century education and how to make study abroad opportunities available to all. The 2016 IIE Summit will continue to push the envelope to change how we think and 'do' study abroad as we work together to achieve our collective goal. It is more important than ever that K-12 U.S. students are given the opportunity to acquire international, intercultural, and language skills that they will need to address and help solve today’s global challenges.

The contributions that the K-12 community are making to achieve the goals of Generation Study Abroad will help inform the discussions and identify solutions to expand and diversity study abroad. We encourage you to bring your colleagues, principals and superintendents from your district to the Summit to further inspire and bring about change and ensure that the next generations have the global competencies to succeed in the 21st century.

IIE is pleased to offer K-12 teachers and administrators a special registration rate of $250. Please register as early as possible to secure your seat!

How Teacher-Created Free Online Resources Are Changing the Classroom

By Katrina Schwartz

When Eric Langhorst teaches the Civil War to his eighth-graders at Discovery Middle School in Liberty, Missouri, he likes to give his students a taste of what Missouri was like in that era. In addition to teaching about the big events found in any Civil War curriculum, like the battles of Gettysburg and Antietam, Langhorst incorporates materials he has created about the guerrilla-style warfare more common in his region at that time. He wouldn’t be able to localize his curriculum that way if he taught only out of a textbook.

"Some of the limitations of textbooks are they tend to be very non-interactive, kind of impersonal, and they’re not very flexible in terms of regional differences," Langhorst said. For all these reasons, he doesn’t use them anymore. Instead, he creates his own curriculum, in collaboration with the other eighth-grade social studies teacher at his school, out of materials he has found on the internet and adapted to the needs of his classroom.

Creating Supportive Learning Environments for Girls and Boys: A Guide for Educators

A new resource to help administrators, teachers, and communities make classrooms and schools more gender inclusive - Creating Supportive Learning Environments for Girls and Boys: A Guide for Educators - is now available!

The real-life strategies throughout the guide include practical steps to examine and address negative gender stereotypes, methods for tracking both behavior and learning responses from girls and boys, and overall approaches for schools and communities to become more gender-friendly and inclusive. While designed principally for teachers, this resource is free for anyone to use to help ensure that youth of all genders can succeed at equal levels in education and beyond.

Contact ilepalumni@irex.org to request the resource.

New Interactive STEM Curriculum

In May 2016, in order to encourage students to invest in STEM education, Itron, Inc launched a new interactive science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) curriculum. The course is accessible through a mobile application called Resourcefulness: An Introduction to the Energy-Water Nexus. Sharelynn Moore, Itron’s vice president of global marketing and public affairs, says that as part of the company’s corporate social responsibility initiatives, it funded the development of the app so that it could be made available free of charge.