A Week of Wonder: Reflections from the National Geographic Explorers Festival

Black tigers, penguins, and Antarctic krill, oh my!🐅🐧🦐

I just returned from Washington, D.C., where I spent an extraordinary week at the National Geographic Explorers Festival, and I'm still buzzing with inspiration. As I sat on my flight home, I kept replaying moments from the week, powerful presentations, chance conversations in hallways, and those pinch-me instances when I realized I was in the same room as people whose work has shaped how I see the world.

Two years ago, I joined the National Geographic community as a Grosvenor Teacher Fellow, an experience that fundamentally changed my approach to teaching and learning. Since then, I've been continuously inspired by perspectives that challenge my assumptions, questions that ignite my curiosity, and ideas that point toward a better world. But this week at the Explorers Festival? It took that inspiration to an entirely new level.

The festival brought together an incredible mix of National Geographic educators, explorers, scientists, and storytellers from around the globe. These weren't just people doing remarkable work, they were people generous enough to share their journeys, their failures alongside their successes, and their unwavering commitment to understanding and protecting our planet.

One of the most meaningful parts of the festival was having the opportunity to share my own work with immersive learning experiences in the classroom. It's one thing to be inspired by the incredible explorers around you, but it's another to realize that the work we're doing as educators bringing the world into our classrooms in new and engaging ways, matters to this community too. The conversations that followed reminded me that we're all part of the same mission: sparking curiosity and helping others see the world with fresh eyes while making their impact on the world

This week reminded me of something essential: there is always more to learn. New discoveries are unfolding every single day. The world is more surprising, more complex, and more beautiful than we can possibly imagine from our individual vantage points. 

I left D.C. with powerful lessons that I'm already thinking about how to weave into my teaching:

Perseverance matters. I heard stories of research expeditions that took years to yield results, of hypotheses that required complete rethinking, of fieldwork in the harshest conditions imaginable. The explorers I met don't give up, they pivot, adapt, and persist.

Curiosity is a superpower. The questions these scientists and explorers ask aren't always the obvious ones. They wonder about the small things, the overlooked things, the "what if" scenarios that others dismiss. That childlike sense of wonder? It's not something to outgrow, it's something to nurture and protect.

Courage to push boundaries changes everything. Whether it's diving beneath Antarctic ice, tracking elusive wildlife, or challenging long-held scientific assumptions, the work of exploration requires bravery. Not the absence of fear, but the willingness to move forward despite it.

Now I'm back home, but I'm bringing something invaluable with me: a heart full of wonder and a head full of ideas. I'm already planning how to share these stories with my students, how to help them see that exploration isn't something that happens "out there" by "other people". It's a mindset we can all cultivate, right here, right now.

The world needs curious minds. It needs people who ask questions, who push boundaries, who care deeply about understanding and protecting our planet. My students can be those people. They already are, in so many ways.

Thank you, National Geographic, for creating spaces where educators, scientists, and storytellers can come together. Thank you for investing in teachers through programs like the Grosvenor Teacher Fellowship. And thank you for reminding me why I fell in love with teaching in the first place because learning never stops, wonder never fades, and there's always another discovery waiting just around the corner. 🌎✨

 

Bridging Classrooms

Bridging Classrooms, Growing Global Citizens: How to Build Cross-Cultural Partnerships That Matter

Over the past two years, my fourth graders in Middleton, Massachusetts, worked hand-in-hand (virtually) with a class in Newbury, England, not on a one-time pen pal exchange, but on a sustained, creative, and curriculum-connected collaboration. Together, our students co-authored storybooks, mapped out local landmarks, and reimagined classic literature through a global lens.

Students in England and the USA meeting over Google Meet to collaborate on projects

The most powerful part? The partnership felt real. Tangible. And deeply meaningful for students on both sides of the Atlantic. My students love to say, "My British friends."

This partnership didn’t happen overnight, it was built through curiosity, trust, and the belief that young learners are capable of global thinking when we give them the tools and the space to grow it.

As part of a National Educator Association (NEA) Learning and Leadership Grant I received, I was fortunate to visit this partner school in England this spring. Seeing Burghclere Primary School in action allowed me to reflect on what made this collaboration work and what others might borrow to launch cross-cultural experiences of their own.

Visiting Burghclere Primary School in Newbury, England

Here are a few guiding ideas for educators hoping to bring global competencies into their classrooms through authentic international connections:

1. Start With the Relationship, Not the Project

Find a teacher, not a program, who’s interested in building something with you. My partner in England, Mrs. Field, and I began collaborating through the JDO Foundation. We start each year with a Google Meet for students to exchange student questions and say hello. Over time, that evolves into shared Google Earth projects, book publishing, and real-time feedback loops. Global work is human work. Building relationships makes it possible.

Hand-delivered letters, books, postcards, pens and stickers

2. Make the Curriculum the Bridge

Our students didn’t collaborate “on the side.” Instead, we weave the work directly into our standards-based curriculum. In the project, we collaborated on based on my site visit, students wrote storybooks inspired by Make Way for Ducklings and Paddington. Both take place in our local locations but this time, students made their teachers the main characters. This allowed for lessons in geography, narrative writing, civic pride, and empathy, all through the lens of two cultures meeting.

3. Use Tools That Empower Student Voice

We relied on tools that made student work visible and interactive: Google Slides for co-writing, Flip for video sharing, Padlet for photo stories, and Google Earth to explore each other's communities. These tools helped bridge the physical distance and gave students a sense of agency and ownership in the process.

4. Visit If You Can But Connect Either Way

My in-person visit to Burghclere deepened everything. I was able to walk the streets students had described, take photos for our collaborative projects, and observe new instructional strategies firsthand. But even without international travel, these partnerships can flourish. What matters most is consistency, creativity, and care.

5. Redefine “Global Competency”

Global education isn’t about one-off festivals or food days. It’s about perspective-taking, collaboration, communication, and curiosity. When students work with peers from another culture, they begin to ask better questions about the world and themselves. That’s the heart of this work.

This year, I watched my students become not just writers or researchers, but bridge-builders. They celebrated each other's voices. They noticed similarities and differences. They stepped into a shared story. Global competencies aren’t extras. They’re essentials and they grow best when rooted in relationships, relevance, and real-world creativity.

If you're an educator wondering where to begin, start small. Start simple. Start by connecting. And if you’d like to connect with me, I’d love to hear from you. Let’s build something global together.