12 questions for the 21st century

1. How do we grow global mindedness in every child and youth in this country? Why does it matter?

2. How do we leverage the immense power and potential of the Internet, digital tools and social media to enable learners and teachers to connect in purposeful ways across borders and boundaries to contribute to making the world a safer, saner and more just place?

3. How can we support and encourage all teachers to internationalize their classrooms, their curricula and every aspect of their practices?

4. Why is education the linchpin for democratic living?

5. When is the last time you paused to reconsider a bias, prejudice or an assumption you have held without wondering about its efficacy or origin or accuracy?

6. How do we assure that schools, after-school programs and community-based settings are dynamic places that surround children and youth with opportunities to be connected and exposed to the world and not isolated and segregated from it?

7. Why does cultivating broad mindedness, resiliency, curiosity, imagination and the ability to work with others matter?

8. How do we tap into all learners’ sense of agency, idealism and their social imaginations, i.e. their capacity to imagine the world, as it should be, and the tools and capacities to act?

9. Why is it more urgent than ever to make education relevant and meaningful as a way to transform lives and not stultify them?

10. How do we say "yes" each day we step into our classrooms to the proposition that we are all midwives in the messy, challenging and exhilarating vocation of teaching?

11. How do we move away from the pursuit of the right answer to the capacity to generate profound questions? From the single-minded adherence to the lesson plan to spurring the insatiable desire to learn more?

12. How do we become polyglots of instruction? Ambidextrous teachers with an ensemble of practices that stir the multiple intelligences of our students?

There are no right answers here. But there are invitations to reexamine the very basis of why we entered this most honorable of callings in the first place. One question at a time.