Our Services
Our services include consulting in the classroom, designing courses, and planning themed, curriculum-linked country visits. Platforms for facilitating these activities include traditional workshops, weekend retreats, professional learning trips, film & media festivals, webinars, and ‘games for change’.
Professional Learning for Educators
Our flagship professional learning product is a broad, far-reaching assessment of the challenges facing educators worldwide – from conflict resolution to technology in the classroom, from girl education to arts in curriculum. Our professional events aim to develop sustainable, collegial relationships with a host of foreign colleagues.
Globally Focused Professional Learning
Our 4-day overseas professional learning features workshops and presentations at host-country universities and K-12 schools. Workshops focus on how host-country teachers design and deliver their lessons. Workshops are complemented by school visits where the US delegation can observe classes at the appropriate grade level. We make school visits tailored to the needs of all three levels – early years, middle years and high school. We discuss and observe vocational education, special-needs education, and we consider the importance of play and teacher training. Our focus countries include Finland, Estonia, South Africa, Denmark, Egypt, the Netherlands, South Korea, and India. In each country, we shine a light on best instructional practices; coding, gaming & robotics; literacy promotion & ESL; and linguistic diversity
On-Campus Professional Learning
We design and deliver themed, school-wide professional learning. Sessions may run two hours, or they may run two days, with all faculty gaining access to the learning experience. These PDs are designed to fit each school’s particular needs and requirements.
One-on-One Sessions with Classroom Teachers
We consult with teaching faculty at all grade levels and across the academic disciplines, one-on-one, to seed existing course content with case studies from the global experience. We incorporate ideas based on dialogues held during an initial visit. We conduct these sessions to help teachers learn to transfer the insights gained from examining global issues into practical applications for their classrooms and communities.
Experiential Learning for Students
We offer 6 products to stimulate student interest in global trends and perspectives.
Contemporary Issues Courses
Schools design custom courses, into which Alterra embeds a rigorous, short-term overseas experience as a “capstone” of experiential academic learning. This model very intentionally reveals to students the entire range of policy challenges facing the host country, both on campus during the academic year and during the capstone visit overseas. Capstone in-country visits typically take place at Spring Break, and may be tied to STEAM or Humanities courses. This model ensures that students arrive in the host nation prepared to think and act critically about the local issues they will observe, the field work they will conduct, and the service they will perform.
STEAM-Themed Summer Camps
Schools design custom courses, into which Alterra embeds a rigorous, short-term overseas experience as a “capstone” of experiential academic learning. This model very intentionally reveals to students the entire range of policy challenges facing the host country, both on campus during the academic year and during the capstone visit overseas. Capstone in-country visits typically take place at Spring Break, and may be tied to STEAM or Humanities courses. This model ensures that students arrive in the host nation prepared to think and act critically about the local issues they will observe, the field work they will conduct, and the service they will perform.
Summer Experiential Learning Abroad
Alterra designs student travel-abroad during the summer. Students learn how global organizations and local communities alike address pressing problems. Summer travel expeditions are an excellent chance for service-based experiential learning. This is a key component of Alterra’s philosophy and educational approach. The premise underlying experiential learning through travel reflects a simple truth: there is a great deal to learn that cannot be found in textbooks or taught from the distance of a Western classroom. You need to go.
Global Perspectives Symposia
Schools hold student symposia on campus, around any number of global themes. Symposia highlight a single theme, assess its significance from multiple approaches, and identify links to students’ own experience. Local students and their peers from partner schools overseas share findings and views with one another, based in part on knowledge gained in globally relevant community action.
Themed Experiential Service Education
Alterra supports schools in ensuring that all service programming incorporates one or more globally relevant themes. Ideally, these themes should link back directly to curriculum, reinforcing classroom learning across the academic disciplines. Alterra designs local and overseas service opportunities to elicit understanding of these concrete, globally relevant policy issues.
Curriculum Integration
Alterra supports schools in their efforts to weave global perspectives more deeply into curriculum, infusing course syllabi with contemporary case studies from the global experience. Instructors in World History, Government, and other core disciplines are encouraged to enrich their courses with globally relevant ‘plug-ins’ packaged creatively and designed to encourage student engagement. Content is woven into lesson plans as instructors see fit.
International Student Recruitment
Alterra supports school admissions officers to recruit and enrol international students. Our team collaborates with a range of public, private, and education-sector stakeholders in China, India, South Africa, South Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere to pair students seeking a rigorous stateside academic experience with welcoming boarding school environments.
Increase International Admissions
We arrange in-country visits to recruit international students. We also arrange virtual recruiting meetings. In-country, senior Admissions personnel visit with prospective students and their parents to pitch what makes their school an enticing and unique learning environment for foreign students.
Diversify International Recruitment and Retention
For schools to continue to recruit, diversify, and retain international students, they must place global perspectives front and center - as a cornerstone of campus culture. International parents look for rigor, and a core curriculum that incorporates ideas from all world regions. We advise schools on how to get there.
Virtual Services
Our virtual learning opportunities for teachers, parents and administrators are designed using best practices for online instruction and professional development. Our approach is multi-layered and meant to engage our participants beyond the online classroom via dialogues and hands-on activities with our national and international partners. Our current courses are bite-sized, 1-hour modules on a single pressing education-sector topic that teachers can apply in their classrooms.
We use an integrated curriculum of 30-minute activities, assignments, group exercises, dialogues, and short videos administered via a multimedia online platform developed by colleagues in Finland. If your school has been using Zoom or other platforms for virtual learning, we can tailor our program to meet your existing curricula and virtual learning goals. Our virtual professional learning services enable school communities to learn powerfully from the global experience while at home in the United States. We partner with educators in the Nordic nations to offer content around robotics, nature & play, ‘future learning’, and civics & ethical leadership. We partner with Brazilian, South African, and Ghanaian experts to explore the racial justice reckoning presently taking place internationally.
Our Danish, Finnish, and Estonian colleagues present:
- The Scandinavian tradition: Using nature & the outdoors as a foundational learning environment.
- Robotics in the early grades: Encouraging entrepreneurial application.
- The future of learning: The Nordics’ unique interdisciplinary approach.
Brazilian, Ghanaian, and South African experts present:
- Art as a form of Protest and Reconciliation: The Role of Performance Theater in the Anti-Apartheid Movement.
- Decolonizing the Curriculum: Moving beyond Accepted Wisdom and toward Fresh New Perspectives.
- A Look In The Mirror: Examining African Diasporic Culture and Resistance.
These 6 classes, and more, are offered to teachers, administrators, students, parents, and others.