On 19 July, our Year 10 IB students, the Year 9 APEX student leaders from all year levels participated in the High Resolves Global Citizenship Program and completed the Collective Action and Effective Collaboration modules.

High Resolves is a not-for-profit educational program that motivates high-school students to become engaged and proactive global citizens, ready to tackle contentious world issues, both current and anticipated.

Within these modules, students developed their understanding of purposeful collaboration, gained the requisite skills to deal with divergent opinions, and learned how to negotiate towards mutual agreement.

The Collective Action module demonstrated first-hand how poor communication can complicate diplomatic agreement and action on real-world problems. Our students role-played as ambassadors representing different countries at the General Agreement on Climate Change.  Our ambassadors embraced their roles and negotiated passionately for several rounds. At the end of each round, each student ambassador publically delivered their decision, accompanied by much cheering and booing.

In the Effective Collaboration module, students learned how to accommodate different perspectives and elicit active engagement from others. The “Guess What?” activity required effective team-based collaboration to build a whole from its parts. Students had to express their individual observations and compile their knowledge in order to identify an everyday object based on fragmented information. The module concluded with a discussion about the applicability of these skills across a wide range of circumstances including at school, in the wider community, and on a global level.

At the end of the module, each student filled out their own ‘I resolve to’ card, and made a commitment to undertake specific action as a global citizen in the following days or weeks.

These skills for the IB students are being further developed through an inquiry project into the re-design of their IB Hub in CI block – watch this space!