Through development in three key areas, the Changemaker Curriculum builds informed, intelligent global citizens who are empowered to enact real and lasting change.

We believe that education should connect you to the world around you, providing context and insight into today’s most pressing issues. Drawing from the 21st Century’s most innovative and effective educational models, the Changemaker Curriculum combines high academic standards with interdisciplinary, project-based learning—so your environment informs your studies and your studies give meaning to your environment.

Mastery

The Changemaker Curriculum focuses on mastering skills and concepts instead of regurgitating facts. We divide level of mastery into three stages: Apprentice (can remember and understand), Specialist (can analyze, evaluate, and apply), and Master (can create new ideas and teach others). At THINK Global School, you’ll gain a level of Specialist or higher in academic disciplines including mathematics, science, English, social science, world language, art, physical education and health, and careers, while attaining mastership of the subjects that intrigue you most.

Autonomy

Through a robust advisory program and continuous, constructive academic feedback, you’ll gain the skills and knowledge to become a self-guided learner and remain engaged in learning throughout your life.

Purpose

Developing as an individual is important, but it’s just as important to develop a sense of belonging to something greater than yourself. No matter how you choose to create change, we’re devoted to helping you find the causes you’re passionate about and figure out how to make a real and lasting difference

An Academic Calendar for
Non-Stop Learning

Eight weeks on. Five weeks off. All year long. Our unique academic calendar fully immerses you in four countries a year, taking advantage of the best times to explore climates ranging from tropical jungles to icy fjords. It also offers more time off to process your experiences, pursue internships or student-designed projects, or simply relax with friends and family back home.

Each session begins with one week of online preparation that can be done from home (or anywhere!). During this week you’ll select your project-based learning module, finalize your areas for a student-designed project, begin research assignments, and ramp up cultural and language skills.

The online preparation week ensures that you waste no time diving into life in your new host country, where you’ll spend seven weeks pursuing group and independent projects directly related to your environment. Expect to fill your days with exploration, experiments, lectures, field trips, scientific and mathematical modeling, reading and writing, physical activity, documenting your experiences—and, of course, plenty of time to rest, relax, and socialize!

Our Current Travel Cycle (Locations Subject to Change):

Authentic Experiences ThroughProject-Based Learning

By engaging in an array of projects that enhance your teamwork, problem-solving, and curiosity skills, you’ll transform into a passionate and multifaceted citizen, able to adapt and thrive in an increasingly globalized world. 

Teacher-Led Modules

In each location, you’ll select from one of four teacher-led modules to participate in for the eight-week term. Teacher-led modules combine multiple academic subjects at once and are designed to help you answer key questions about the world around you.

Modules at THINK Global School are designed and overseen by our educators, yet structured in a way that provides agency and flexibility to learn in ways that work best for you.

Answer Challenging Driving Questions

Each module revolves around a driving question relevant to your surroundings. In addition to focusing the module’s scope, the driving question helps communicate its purpose and set key standards for project work. During our Bosnia & Herzegovina term, for example, while students were exploring the process of reconciliation, they were asked to answer the following driving question:

How can we convey the complexities of ethnic and religious reconciliation through our experience of Bosnia and Herzegovina?

Driving questions are unique and open-ended, ensuring you’ll develop a wide range of fundamental and 21st-century skills as you explore the world and build upon your knowledge base. 

A Team-Based Approach

For each teacher-led module, you’ll work in teams to gather facts, look for correlations, and evaluate possible solutions to the driving question. Along the way, you and your teammates will Q&A with local experts, take meaningful field trips, and regularly engage with the local community. It won’t take long before you realize just how much your global experiences deepen your projects’ meaning and amplify their impact.

Terms culminate with a project-based showcase, where you and your teammates will demonstrate your learning by presenting your module’s final product before a live audience.

Botswana Spotlight

Conservation and Storytelling in the Okavango Delta

How does Botswana’s government track the density and movement of wildlife in the Greater Okavango Delta? In this module, students work with local conservation experts to recognize animal tracks, sight predominant species, and identify vegetation in Northern Botswana, with the collected data being submitted to a long-term conservation study sponsored by the government of Botswana.

Learning Targets

• Teaming and Collaboration
• Critical Thinking
• Effective Communication
• Processing and Comprehending
• Creation of an Original Piece
• Research Methods
• Stewardship
• Environmental Law
• Environmental Impact Statements
• Applied Experimental Science and Problem Solving

India Spotlight

TGS Gives Through E-commerce

How can e-commerce solutions aid local Indian economies and communities? To answer this driving question, students work in conjunction with indigenous Warli artisans to establish an e-commerce site for their wares. Through these firsthand experiences, students gain valuable insights into the transformation of global economics.

Learning Targets

• Leadership
• Teaming and Collaboration
• Active Literacy
• Rhetoric
• Creation of an Original Piece
• Human Geography
• Visual Literacy
• History, Institutions and Traditions in Society

Student-Designed Projects

With the guidance of your academic mentor, you’ll pursue 3-5 student-designed academic projects per semester.

In personal projects, you’ll formulate your own driving questions and select the learning targets and 21st-century skills you’d like to focus on. It’s an opportunity to pursue your passions or tackle a subject you’d like to become more familiar with.

Personal projects can take many forms, including completing an additional AP course, conducting scientific research and presenting your findings, crafting an original piece of art, or creating a paper or presentation to document your new understanding of an element of local culture or history.

Your mentor will help plan and evaluate your projects, tracking them against the school’s learning targets to ensure that you’re getting a well-rounded education covering all academic disciplines.

Personal Project Spotlight: Ecology of the Mind

For her mastery project, Class of 2020 student Soeun K. set out to create a work of art that explores our world by focusing on its most essential component: the mind. In doing so, Soeun endeavored to answer the following driving question: How can I acquire a deep understanding of Buddhist philosophies and their perspectives on the self and the world by creating an original short film?

To do so, Soeun spent time learning about the basis of cognition, behavior, and data collection alongside filmmaking techniques. For the latter, she chose Ashoka Fellow and documentary filmmaker Chanpil Jung as her project mentor, who taught her a variety of invaluable skills related to photography, filmmaking, and visual literacy.

For the second stage of her project, Soeun embarked on an 11-day filming excursion at a remote Mihwangsa temple in Haenam, South Korea. Here she interviewed a Buddhist monk, Kum Kang Sunim, and heard him share centuries-old Buddhist insights, which Soeun believes have the potential to revolutionize cognitive science. Alongside filming Kum Kang Sunim, Soeun turned her camera to capture the temple inhabitants’ everyday routines and Haenam’s surrounding natural beauty.

Learning Targets

Integral to teacher-led modules and student-designed projects are learning targets, which form the backbone of the Changemaker Curriculum. At their core, learning targets provide a measuring stick against which our students can assess their acquisition of knowledge. At the start of each project or module, students select the learning targets they would like to focus on and then provide a clear statement of what they aim to accomplish through their module or project work. 

Including 21st century skills (skills to be applied to our host countries and the world), there are ten different categories containing many subcategories of learning targets, which collectively represent a broad spectrum of learning. Considering projects at THINK Global School are multidisciplinary, they typically consist of learning targets from numerous categories.

The Learning Targets categories and subcategories are:

Each of these subcategories is made up of numerous learning targets, and there are 122 learning targets in all. All students must achieve the rank of novice in all of our learning targets, the rank of specialist in 70% of our learning targets, and complete at least one mastery project to meet the graduation requirements for THINK Global School. These standards ensure that every TGS student receives a comprehensive education while also allowing them to focus on the learning targets and relevant skills they genuinely care about. 

You can find a more in-depth look at learning targets here.

A Focus onWell-being

Social and Emotional Development

Studies have shown a direct correlation between emotional health and learning effectiveness, which is why we make personal growth an integral part of your education.

Our comprehensive student wellness program focuses on social and emotional learning, the mind-body connection, character, and mindfulness. You’ll work with your advisor to craft an evolving personal wellness plan that may involve yoga and meditation one semester, self-discovery and social mediation the next, and organizing a soccer league the following.

The result? Students graduate as grounded individuals with exceptional empathy and strong interpersonal skills.

Service Learning

Nothing embodies our core value of empathy more than the Changemaker Curriculum’s service-learning component. Our service-learning program is driven by a student-community partnership in which students identify real needs and work with one another and community leaders to address them actively.

Service-learning projects in the past have involved advocating for indigenous land rights, teaching English, building and repairing schools, and demonstrating the basics of dental and female hygiene to schoolchildren. Students can expect to lead and take part in community efforts that resonate with their passions and evolve depending on where we are in the world.

CollegeReadiness

Learn how The Changemaker Curriculum makes you a rock-solid college candidate and prepare you for post-secondary education and beyond. More detailed information on college preparation can be found here.

Advanced Placement

All students enrolled at THINK Global School participate in two Advanced Placement courses: AP Seminar and AP Research. These multidisciplinary courses, which encourage students to demonstrate critical thinking, collaboration, and academic research skills, are seamlessly incorporated into the Changemaker Curriculum through the module and personal project work that students engage in each term.

In addition to AP Seminar and AP Research, all students who attend THINK Global School have the option of self-preparing and taking any Advanced Placement exams offered. Students who elect to take the exams have the opportunity to do so during the month of May each school year. Each student may take up to six exams total during the course of their THINK Global School career.

To determine if the Advanced Placement exams are necessary for their plans post-graduation, each enrolled student sits down with their advisor and counselor to determine a personalized plan. If a student would like to sit one or multiple AP exams, assistance is available in developing a self-study program through their advisor and counselor.

The Capstone Project

The Capstone Project is a multi-term individual project on the topic of your choice that culminates in a presentation to the THINK Global School community before graduation. Capstone Projects may take the form of studying a global issue and designing a product or program to help address it, conducting a scientific study and presenting your findings, creating a documentary film, or other creative ways to demonstrate mastery of a subject.

Academic Portfolio

As you make your way through the Changemaker Curriculum, you’ll create multiple forms of academic output such as research papers, multimedia presentations, films, works of art, and creative writing. These projects go into your academic portfolio, a digital collection that showcases your progress for evaluation and assessment. As you near matriculation, you’ll edit your academic portfolio to show a body of your most substantial work to universities and colleges.