Becoming a Globally Competent School Leader. Ariel Tichnor-Wagner

of charter and private); are in urban, suburban, and rural communities; and work with student populations with varied economic, racial, linguistic, and cultural diversity. This 30,000-foot view that spans from elementary schools in rural North Carolina to middle schools in suburban Massachusetts to charter K–12 schools in Los Angeles has allowed me to draw upon the expertise and experience of an array of leaders who have infused global competence in varied ways. In doing so, I hope to illustrate how leading a global school can happen anywhere. (To protect the confidentiality of participants interviewed as part of research projects, I omit names of individuals and schools throughout the book.)

      I also recognize that I am writing from a U.S.-centric perspective. I admit to the irony of writing a book about global competence from the lens of only one country. However, I do this intentionally. I ascribe to the notion that the global is grounded in the local (Peacock, 2007). What the world looks like depends on our perspective. What is foreign to one person is quotidian to another. It would be a near impossible task to write about how to align global competence to current priorities and build will in ways that attend to the intricacies of the political, social, and cultural landscapes that influence schools and school stakeholders' experiences in every country in the world, not to mention the scores of territories and indigenous and cultural groups within each country. As such, I encourage you to conduct this exercise from the location in which you are grounded while transferring that which is applicable to your context.

      The concept of becoming a globally competent school leader may apply most directly to school administrators (e.g., principals, assistant principals, headmasters), yet it is also a clarion call to any and all educators ready and willing to begin the hard work of transforming schools into spaces for globally relevant and responsive learning. I have witnessed teachers, school coaches, curriculum specialists, district administrators, and superintendents lead global initiatives in schools. As I previously stated, actions—not titles—truly denote leadership.

      This book focuses on globally competent school leadership, but the framework for its implementation can be transferred to other learning initiatives that—like globally competent teaching and learning—focus on real-world learning and cover social, emotional, and cognitive domains of development. A holistic approach to school leadership, one that grounds education in the complexities of the real world, is a need-to-have for all students, regardless of where in the world they call home. This book is an invitation to create possibilities for every student under your tutelage and lead to systemically level the playing field so all students can thrive in the world today and the future.