Even as those education administrators like Crittenden County Superintendent Dr. Yarbrough contemplate how to cope with the education cuts announced by Gov. Steve Beshear Thursday, speakers at the Louisville summit have shared modest solutions from around the world that are preparing student for international competition. From Swaziland to Newport News, cutting-edge tactics in educating are utilizing already-available technology to shrink the world and teaching methods that rate success outside of test scores.
"Today's learning is not dependent on location," Mike Butler, an executive at Nottingham, England's Djanogly City Academy, told nearly 400 Kentucky educators Thursday afternoon through a virtual Webcast from his institution.
Yarbrough and other education professionals from Crittenden County in attendance at the international summit, entitled Learning the Core Business in a Global Society, are taking such revelations to heart. In a roundtable discussion between addresses, the 10 local participants began contemplating ways to prepare Crittenden County students for the globalization that is knocking down economic and cultural borders.
"Our students have got to be prepared for a future that doesn't exist right now," the first-year superintendent said.
In a theme that has been echoed by several international speakers at the summit, the world once thought to be flat is closer to that shape than ever before. No longer is the other side of the world on the other side; it's in America's backyard. And the ends of the earth a now at our fingertips.
The international educators chosen to spoke to Kentucky's educational leaders in Louisville have implemented instructional methods that embrace that concept. Through links to virtual classrooms in nations across the globe, many of these teachers in foreign nations have opened new cultures to their students. Their methods of teaching are no longer based in their own culture.
"We got to get kids out of the county without sending them out of the county," said Pam Collins, an incoming Crittenden County school board member in attendance at the summit this week.
Collins was speaking of virtual classroom links from elementary to secondary levels. Already, links to classrooms from Indonesia to Great Britain are being considered as way to shrink the world for the students enrolled in Crittenden County's three schools.
