Superintendent’s Goals for School Year: Global Competency

Editor’s note: This is part two of a four-part series that takes a look at the goals of Medfield Superintendent of Schools, Bob Maguire, who broke each down into four categories.

When Medfield Superintendent of Schools, Bob Maguire, travelled to China this past summer, he took on the challenge of navigating himself through a foreign land to find his destination.

Along the way, he encountered a “simple experience” that inspired him to evaluate the level of global competency throughout the and stress its importance.

“When I arrived over there [China] … I took on this challenge of basically finding this address, which doesn’t seem like it’s a big deal but when you don’t really speak the language, it’s quite the challenge,” Maguire said. “Long story short, I end up with five, six to seven people trying to help me, using sign language and this and that. The outcome of it really was that there was one person who spoke a little bit of English and started to say to me something about this older woman and her grandson. It was enough of a conversation that I understood there was something about this woman’s grandson.”

It turned out the woman’s grandson, who was 13, spoke English and helped Maguire get to where he needed to go.

“This random 13-year-old boy ended up being the savior of the day,” Maguire said. “He could speak very good English and it ended up that the grandmother, after we got acquainted and I figured out my problem in terms of being able to make my way to this address, ended up having the boy take me to breakfast.

“I literally sat down for an hour with this 13-year-old boy and carried on a perfectly acceptable conversation in English. When you think about, what could our average American 13-year-old do with someone in a foreign language? It really is an eye opener.”

That experience prompted Maguire to look at global competency in Medfield schools beyond the China exchange program, which will take another leap forward this fall when students from and visit Bengbu for three weeks in October.

“I know over the last couple of years we have been talking about the initiative we have with our private school in China and Chinese language imitative and all that,” Maguire said. “For me, it is a broader topic … [China exchange] is really a good program that we’ve developed but it doesn’t really have to be China that it’s about. It really is about the whole area of getting students today to be globally competent. Both educationally as well as how we view the world as Americans.”

The evaluation of global competence in Medfield centers on language instruction in the classroom and students’ knowledge of the world.

“We offer language programs but what level of competency are we really getting kids to?” Maguire asked. “Is that acceptable in the environment that we’re in or do we really want to try and achieve something better than that? Which I think we should.

“Beyond that, it really is a whole other conversation around kids’ knowledge of the world. Clearly some of the indications are from the research that is out there that American students aren’t as competent, whether it is culturally or really understanding other parts of the world.”

While Maguire hopes to explore this concept of global competence “over the next year or so,” he stressed this evaluation is not about the China exchange program developed between Medfield and Bengbu, though it can be related.

“The China experience is something that relates but it’s the other languages that we teach and relates to social studies and some other subject areas,” Maguire said. “I think it’s a conversation that we really ought to have over the next year or so.”

Check Medfield Patch Monday for part three of this four-part series as Maguire outlines his third goal: Facilities.

To read part one of this series, "Superintendent's Goals for School Year: Technology,"