Recent

This past week I had the pleasure of attending the launch party at HundrED.org as a representative of THINK Global School (TGS). If you aren’t familiar with HundrED, their mission is to help schools change by spreading the word of innovative educational practices from across the globe. This year our school, TGS, had the honor of being named as one of these top 100 innovative programs. As I sat through...

From the Andes Mountains to the Pacific Northwest, TGS ended its year on a high note, graduating the Class of 2017 on a perfect night with the Canadian Rocky Mountains serving as a gorgeous backdrop. Today, I would like to thank all of the people that made the culmination of our students’ experience possible: Foremost, to our founder Joann McPike and the THINK Global School Board, whose vision and generosity...

Recent events have caused me to pause and reflect. Reading the news cycle, one gets a warped sense of the world becoming a more dangerous place, and that the root cause of this danger is Islam. We see the rise of nationalism and hear the declarations that all countries should take care of their own. TGS stands against such notions of discrimination and strives to develop a community based on...

Educators rarely talk about the concept of cognitive dissonance, which occurs when a student is confronted with new ideas that run counter to their preconceived notions. In the student's attempt to relieve this discomfort, they try to make sense of the world by reconciling what they thought they knew with what new information has taught them. We each came to the city of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, with our own...

During the Winter Term of THINK Global School’s 2014-15 school year, the 9th and 10th grade students spent 34 days exploring Costa Rica. As they made their way across this Central American paradise, they spent time living with local families; studied primates and dolphins; immersed themselves within rainforests; whitewater rafted down rivers; and studied marine biology on pristine beaches. Head of School Jamie Steckart joined Team Omega for a ten-day...

During our recent weXplore expedition to New Zealand’s South Island, Mother Nature tried to break our spirits from the get-go. We launched into the waters surrounding Abel Tasman National Park during a building rainstorm, our group taking a water taxi south of Separation Point and landing on the beach at Totaranui. We unloaded our gear from the boat and began to haul it to our first campsite, where students began...

I left Qatar -where the temperatures can reach 122 °F- on July 5th. Rain in this small country is an afterthought, and all drinking water is processed from the desalinization of sea water. There were times when I felt like I was on the set of a Star Wars movie filming a scene on Tatooine, half-expecting to see landspeeders zooming past as I traveled to work. Other times my drive...