Take-Action Guide to World Class Learners : How to Make Product-oriented Learning Happen

Yong Zhao is a Foundation Distinguished Professor in the School of Education at the University of Kansas and a professor in Educational Leadership at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education in Australia. He previously served as the Presidential Chair, Associate Dean, and Director of the Institute for Global and Online Education in the College of Education, University of Oregon, where he was also a Professor in the Department of Educational Measurement, Policy, and Leadership. Prior to Oregon, Yong Zhao was University Distinguished Professor at the College of Education, Michigan State University, where he also served as the founding director of the Center for Teaching and Technology, executive director of the Confucius Institute, as well as the US-China Center for Research on Educational Excellence. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Education and a fellow of the International Academy of Education.

Homa Sabet Tavangar is the author of Growing Up Global: Raising Children to Be At Home in the World (Random House, 2009), lead author of The Global Education Toolkit for Elementary Learners (Corwin, 2014), and contributor to Mastering Global Literacy, by Heidi Hayes-Jacobs, ed. (Solution Tree, Nov. 2013).  Growing Up Global has been hailed by national education and business leaders and media ranging from Dr. Jane Goodall to the BBC, NPR, NBC, ABC, Washington Post.com, Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times, Boston Globe, PBS, Scholastic, Parents Magazine, Rodale, and many more.

Homa’s work is sparking initiatives to help audiences from CEOs to Kindergartners learn and thrive in a global context – and have fun along the way.  She is the Series Consultant to NBC TV’s original production of the animated children’s series Nina’s World, has served as Education Advisor to the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania; she is a contributing writer for the Huffington Post, PBS, Momsrising, GOOD, Ashoka’s Start Empathy, National Geographic and Edutopia, among other media, and is a sought-after speaker and trainer around globalization and global citizenship, parenting, globalizing curriculum, empathy, diversity and inclusion. 

Homa spent 20 years working in global competitiveness, organizational, business and international development with hundreds of businesses, non-profits, and public organizations, before turning her attention to global education.  She has lived on three continents, is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of UCLA and Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.  She speaks four languages and her religious heritage includes four of the world’s major faiths.  Passionate around issues of opportunity and equality for women and girls, she has worked on these issues for private companies and the World Bank, and served on various non-profit Boards, including, currently on the Board and Executive Committee of the Tahirih Justice Center, a national leader protecting immigrant women and girls fleeing violence.  She is married and the mother of three daughters. 

Emily McCarren is the High School Principal at the Punahou School in Honolulu Hawaii, the largest single campus K-12 independent school in the United States.  Originally from Vermont, McCarren graduated from Colby College in Maine where she majored in Spanish and Biology, and was a two-sport athlete, captaining the alpine ski team and lacrosse team. She holds two master’s degrees: in Spanish Literature from the Saint Louis University′s Madrid campus and in Educational Leadership from the Klingenstein Center at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is completing her Ph.D. in Educational Technology at the University of Hawai‘i, where her dissertation examines the role of teacher care on a student’s online learning experience. McCarren began her career teaching Spanish and Geometry at Swiss Semester, a program for American students in the Swiss Alps.   Next, she worked at The Thacher School in Ojai, California, where she taught, coached and served as a residential advisor for six years before joining the faculty at the Punahou School in Honolulu, Hawaii in 2006. At Punahou, she has taught all levels of Academy Spanish and a year of biology, served as a department head of both Asian-Pacific and European Languages, and as Academy Summer School director. McCarren was appointed to lead Punahou’s Wo International Center in 2012, where she worked to broaden the global perspective of students and faculty while strengthening Punahou’s role as a global educational leader.   

Gabriel Rshaid is the Headmaster of St. Andrew’s Scots School in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the oldest bilingual school in the world, and a Professional Development Associate with the Leadership and Learning Center in Denver, Colorado. A former Board member of ASCD, he is the author of the books: Learning for the Future: Rethinking Schools for the 21st Century, The 21st Century Classroom, and From Out of This World: Leadership and Life Lessons From the Space Program.  He has presented all over the world on the future of learning and 21st Century Education, as well as conducted numerous workshops, retreats, and seminars for educators and administrators.

Kay Tucker’s vision and passion is to actively engage in defining and creating a culture for World Class Learning. She collaborates with educators to create ecosystems for sustainable learning including space, context, and technologies; designs and implements professional development opportunities; and originates systems and tools to impact change. As the World Class Education Specialist at Lone Tree Elementary in Douglas County Colorado, she is in charge of creating a model of teaching and learning driven by current global educational reform and a World Class Education based on the thinking of Dr. Yong Zhao. In this model students learn in an integrated manner as they align their strengths and passions in solving problems within a real world context. In flexible environments, students navigate curriculum through inquiry and create their own learning pathways while teachers facilitate opportunities, provide resources, and target teach on an as needed basis. Kay Tucker’s career in education spans twenty years. She has an undergraduate degree in Fine Arts from the University of Colorado Boulder and a master’s degree in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Colorado at Denver.