Besides their role as agents of change, globally competent teachers, or global teachers (Pike & Selby, 1988) are supposed to have specific characteristics. To be credible in their role of promoting global citizenship, teachers, first and foremost, must become global citizens themselves (Andreotti, 2012). Several authors have attempted to draw up the profile of a competent global teacher and describe all the knowledge, skills, and attitudes they need to be able to nurture global citizens, including Pike and Selby (1988) in their signature book Global Teacher, Global Learner. According to them, a global teacher…

 

The Longview Foundation (n.d.), in their Teacher Preparation for a Global Age also claim that global teachers need to be global citizens, who have the following competences:

 

Apart from these competences, they also have:

 

UNESCO (2018, p. 5) promotes a similar set of competences for global teachers: educators need to “[have] strong subject and pedagogic content knowledge, possess effective classroom management skills, readily adopt new technologies, and be inclusive and sensitive to the diverse needs of their students”. According to Cates (2004), EFL teachers “have a special role to play” in nurturing global citizens and they need to follow the next 10 steps to become global teachers:

 

Based on the above-described frameworks, Figure 2.4 synthetises the most important characteristics necessary for globally competent teachers, categorised into knowledge, skills, attitudes, values, and pedagogical content knowledge.

 

 

As can be seen from Figure 2.4, becoming a globally competent teacher is not an easy undertaking, as it warrants a great deal of preparation and a new type of pedagogical thinking from teachers. Nevertheless, it seems easier for language teachers, who can incorporate the global perspective by using a dual syllabus containing both language learning and global education goals (Oxford University Press, 2019), who can use different work modes and activities in the framework of communicative language teaching, and who have various continuous professional development opportunities. It is important to emphasise though that teachers are instrumental in incorporating the global perspective into their lessons, as they are role models for their students and they are the decision-makers in pedagogical processes, so failing to educate globally competent teachers may hinder the large-scale implementation of GCED (UNESCO, 2018).