FREE ONLINE COURSE MATERIAL
How To Use The IES In Your Classroom
Are you shifting your course to an online format this summer or next fall? Looking for practical and insightful ways to help your students learn about intercultural competencies in an online class? The Intercultural Effectiveness Scale (IES) provides your students with feedback on their current levels of intercultural skills and shows them how they can develop these skills during your course.
“I’ve found [the IES] to be a great, non-threatening tool to start talking about intercultural effectiveness.”
Philippa Erlank
What Do Cross-cultural, Diversity and Inclusion Have in Common?
How Developing Global Competencies Can Improve Personal Growth
Diversity or Intercultural Competence – Are They Really Different?
Developing a Global Mindset
When you incorporate the IES into your virtual classroom, your students will look at 6 dimensions of their intercultural skills. Not only will the IES reveal their strengths and weaknesses, it will help them focus their efforts to continue to develop their intercultural skills. The IES Personal Development Process introduces students to a highly effective self-improvement method they can use not only during the course, but throughout their entire career.
“It gives [students] a neutral language for talking about what they’re experiencing that’s not judgemental but’s more exploratory and helps them to contextualize the experiences they’re having and where they’re succeeding in demostrating global competencies and where they might be struggling to do so.”
Amy Wallis
Once your students take the IES, you can incorporate activities into your syllabus to reinforce its lessons, expand their global and diversity-related understanding, and build their intercultural skills.
Here are some examples of things the Kozai partners and others have done:
Group Integration
Assignment
Difficult Person
Assignment
Divergent View
Assignment
Use the Personal Development Plan to Strengthen Intercultural Skills
A Personal Development Plan (PDP) allows students to target skills they want to strengthen based on their IES results. In a virtual classroom, you can pair students with someone outside their own culture and have them coach one another every week or two on their progress. This is very helpful for their own progress and also approximates the cross-cultural mentoring that global leadership experts, Caligiuri & Ibraiz, identified as important in their global leadership research.
