The Transformative Potential of Global Outreach
A review of the Global Outreach program at Crescent School and how to expand the impact and reach of similar programs.
Crescent School is an Institute for Global Learning member school and an independent school for boys in Ontario, Canada. Our Global Outreach program gives students the opportunity to engage with culturally diverse communities through experiential travel. Through the Institute for Global Learning Action Research Fellowship, I examined how Crescent students experienced this learning. Specifically, I explored how these experiences contributed to the development of positive leadership and engaged citizenship, two core components of Crescent’s Essential Characteristics.
I collected data through a mixed-methods design and involved 85 students engaged in Grades 10-12 who travelled to Japan, Costa Rica, Cape Town, or British Columbia/Yukon in March 2025. All students completed pre-trip surveys to establish baseline attitudes about leadership and citizenship using Likert-scale and short-answer questions. Post-trip surveys gathered both quantitative and qualitative responses about personal growth, leadership, and cultural engagement. A voluntary focus group composed of seven students added deeper narrative insights. Ethical considerations included voluntary participation, anonymized data, and informed consent. The design aimed to link student voices directly to real-world, intercultural experiences.
What did I discover?
The Global Outreach program at Crescent School demonstrated a strong influence on students’ development of positive leadership and engaged citizenship. My findings from surveys and focus groups revealed several compelling trends, particularly in the areas of collaboration, cultural awareness, adaptability, and real-world civic engagement.
Leadership through Collaboration and Mentorship
Over 88% of respondents agreed that the program helped them grow as leaders. Students recounted activities that placed them in roles requiring cooperation, taking initiative, and peer support, such as planning group meals, guiding canoe trips or planning for hikes. Many students also stepped into informal mentorship roles, such as helping peers adjust to cultural differences, leading group games, or teaching one another useful phrases in a new language. Over 75% of students reported that this was their first experience in a leadership role, and these experiences led many to redefine their understanding of leadership and the importance of developing and identifying their own leadership style when opportunities arise.
Citizenship through Cultural Engagement and Ethical Growth
Another key trend was students’ heightened sense of engaged citizenship. Almost all participants (98%) identified the variety of cultural workshops and activities as powerful learning moments that helped them better understand intercultural learning from locals. Students reported growth in their empathy, adaptability, and open-mindedness, particularly as they engaged with new traditions, environments, and ways of life. For instance, several reflected on how learning about Indigenous stewardship practices in British Columbia led to deeper respect for land and cultural responsibility.
Students also described discomfort as an important learning catalyst, whether due to language barriers, commuting, unfamiliar food, or physical challenges like hiking in intense heat or camping in cold conditions. These moments encouraged students to adapt, practice resilience, and develop effective communication and flexibility. Students gained a deeper appreciation for how a collective mindset, one that emphasizes respect for one’s actions, can create meaningful impact. They observed this firsthand in Japan, where societal responsibility in shared spaces, along with respect for religious traditions, cultural practices, and natural landscapes, shapes daily life.
Students were able to articulate how these experiences changed their perspective on community and civic responsibility. Many returned with a renewed interest in local engagement, wanting to volunteer, advocate, or lead within their school and neighbourhoods. Students identified common challenges shared in our communities, both locally and internationally, such as food insecurity, price inflation, and access to healthy food in South Africa and Canada. They also gained a clearer understanding of their privileges and the importance of using their voice and actions to contribute positively to a greater context and community. Students connected their experiences to broader global issues, including climate action, inequality, and social justice.
Putting Findings into Practice
My findings from this action research suggest several clear pathways for enhancing and expanding the impact of the Global Outreach program in developing leadership skills and citizenship. The following recommendations can serve as food for thought for educators in schools implementing similar experiential programs.
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Create or Adopt a New Global Competence Framework
Adopting a framework like the Asia Society’s Global Competence into the program would help strengthen the assessment practices of leadership and citizenship development. With clear indicators across four domains: investigating the world, recognizing perspectives, communicating ideas, and taking action, it enables us to efficiently and effectively assess growth. While students currently reflect through journaling, using the rubric before, during, and after travel would enable more formal self-assessment and educator evaluation, enhancing the program design, faculty Leader training, and classroom integration.
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Expand Reflective Practices and Deliberately Embed Them into Programming
Reflection proved to be one of the most powerful components of the student experience. Many students cited journaling, group conversations, and post-activity discussions as crucial for helping them make meaning of their experiences. These reflective spaces helped students connect abstract values like leadership or empathy to specific actions and decisions made during the trip. Consider embedding reflective checkpoints throughout the experience (pre-trip orientation, mid-trip discussion, post-trip presentation) would help students process learning progressively and more deeply.
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Extend Programming to Lower and Middle School Students
Currently, the Global Outreach program is limited to students in Grades 10–12. However, there is untapped potential to build a broader global education continuum by introducing foundational experiences in the Lower and Middle Schools. Earlier exposure to service-learning, cultural appreciation, and civic interactions would lay the groundwork for more impactful engagement later on. Local community projects, partnerships with diverse organizations, and age-appropriate cultural exchanges could begin building the same skills of empathy, collaboration, and reflection. A spiral curriculum approach would allow students to revisit key competencies at increasing levels of complexity as they mature.
Member schools can view the full report by accessing the Resource Library.
