Second session, now; Lakeside’s global education program director, Vicki Weeks.  She offers a six step cycle: Start with the Vision, Gather the Wisdom, Enlist the Departments, Poll the Constitutents, Adjust Accordingly, Repeat. 

But How do you Measure?, she asks, in what is a repeated and regular theme of this blog.   Vicki has great passion for her program, as she explains its history and evolution out of travel programs, such as to Peru, during which students would ask her: can we stay longer in one place, and can we get to know the people here? 

To “gather wisdom,” she says, they formed a global think tank to define global citizenship. Nice.    Knowledge and Skills and Attitudes, she explains, are identified.   Students should be change agents in the world, she said, for which she would not apologize. Good discussion of the tension of making it mandatory or voluntary, and about the difficulty of implementing a global studies course, which Vicki couldn’t get through the faculty. 

Measuring: participants conduct reflections all the way– before, during, after.   But measurement requires more, and is important, but is “problematic”– the most important impacts are hard to measure and may not be revealed until years later.   Nonetheless, they are going to poll in a comprehensive survey 8 separate groups, including parents, board members, faculty, partner organizations, and students.  No results yet.   Vicki is passionate about her program and speaks well, and it seems they are doing good stuff;  her planning cycle is a nice piece, but this session didn’t really have big reveals for me on what Lakeside means by an outcomes-driven approach, and I don’t have big take-aways for my work at my school.  Nice question and answer session; good questions about the role of the head, the issues of how kids might split off from each other by the trip they did, or didn’t do.