It’s a scene that’s instantly recognizable across independent schools: colorful flags draped across tables; families proudly serving national dishes that reflect their cultural heritage; students performing music, dancing, and reciting poetry; and the school community gathering for a signature International Day celebration. Schools often extend their mission-aligned commitment to global citizenship through events like these as well as international exchanges, language study, community service and service-learning trips, and global education curricula. But awareness of and exposure to culture alone do not cultivate intercultural competency.
For nearly three decades, I have partnered with independent schools as a strategist to cultivate safe and inclusive communities grounded in dignity and respect. I also work with international schools, a practice that has spanned more than 200 schools in 30 countries over the past 15 years. Across these contexts, I have consistently observed that practices treated as neutral in U.S. schools often reflect cultural assumptions specific to a particular national context. Schools therefore need to understand intercultural competency not as a discrete program but as an institutional capacity embedded in the systems and relationships that influence how students, families, faculty, and staff experience school.
Individuals and schools must also examine the assumptions that inform how they understand and interact with others—not only the behaviors they seek to understand. For schools serving international communities, this requires broadening analysis beyond U.S.-based identity and civil discourse frameworks to include the national, cultural, and linguistic perspectives that inform international experience.
The Challenge: Unexamined Cultural Norms
The familiar story of a fish unable to describe water captures one of the central challenges of intercultural competency: cultural assumptions often go unnoticed by the people who live within them because they have been normalized. Those assumptions may appear neutral even as they inform expectations, practices, and decisions rooted in a particular U.S. national context. For example, the expectation that young adults will leave home to attend college reflects one cultural understanding of adulthood and independence; other national contexts may understand family responsibility and higher education differently.
These assumptions become especially consequential when U.S.-based frameworks inform how schools understand and support international students. A newly arrived Chinese student, for instance, may be placed within the broader category of “Asian American,” a framework derived from a specific history of race, ethnicity, immigration, and political organizing in the U.S.—one the student may neither know nor have experienced. Students from China, Korea, Japan, India, and other countries bring distinct languages, histories, political contexts, and cultural traditions. When schools apply U.S.-based identity categories without naming their cultural specificity, they risk obscuring how international students understand their own identities and experiences.
The same pattern appears in family engagement. At an independent school gala, for example, families from the U.S. may understand bidding at an auction, raising a paddle during a fundraising appeal, or contributing to a capital campaign as familiar ways to support the school community. International families, however, may not conceive financial participation beyond tuition as part of school culture and may experience U.S. public fundraising practices as culturally unfamiliar. If schools interpret lower levels of philanthropic participation as limited engagement, they may mistake unfamiliarity with cultural norms for lack of commitment.
The stakes are even higher when culturally situated assumptions influence how schools understand students’ needs and well-being. U.S. independent schools often value direct communication and student independence, while students from cultures that place greater emphasis on hierarchy or saving face may communicate concern less directly. A boarding student, for example, may repeatedly assure a dorm parent that “everything is fine” even while struggling socially or academically. If staff interpret that response literally, the implications extend beyond communication to the school’s duty of care.
When U.S. Identity Frameworks Become the Default
Intercultural competency also narrows when schools treat U.S.-specific identity and civil discourse frameworks as the primary lens for this work. Those frameworks address important dimensions of school life, and they derive from a particular social and historical context. For many international community members, nationality, culture, and language may provide more immediate reference points for understanding identity, relationships, and school experience.
Over the past decade, schools have invested more deeply in dialogue-based professional learning in response to geopolitical conflict and social tension. These events often resonate personally in international communities, where students, families, faculty, and staff may have direct ties to those affected. Yet when schools define intercultural dialogue primarily through U.S. identity-related issues and devote less attention to how national and cultural backgrounds inform communication, trust, and disagreement, they risk treating one important framework as the full measure of intercultural competency.
Intercultural competency is the capacity to communicate and collaborate across cultural, national, and identity differences with respect, empathy, and adaptability. Developing intercultural competency begins with sustained examination of how one’s background and assumptions inform perception and communication, including how those frames influence engagement with others. Within international communities, national, cultural, and linguistic frameworks assume particular salience without prescribing individual behavior.
The Solution: Strategies for Cultivating Intercultural Competency
Examine institutional and individual frames. Schools should identify the U.S. cultural assumptions embedded in expectations, practices, and decisions. Individuals should also examine the frameworks that inform how they understand themselves and engage with others. This reciprocal work establishes adaptation as a shared responsibility rather than an expectation placed primarily on international students, families, faculty, or staff.
For example, limited direct parent communication with teachers and school leaders may reflect different cultural assumptions about authority and school-family roles. Schools might then revise how advisers initiate contact, explain expectations, and invite engagement rather than assume a family is uninvolved.
Integrate multiple frameworks. National, cultural, and linguistic perspectives should inform intercultural analysis alongside identity and belonging frameworks, broadening how schools understand the people within their communities.
Build shared capacity across the community. Schools should create sustained opportunities for senior leaders, trustees, faculty, staff, students, and families to strengthen intercultural competency through learning grounded in their own school contexts. Community-wide development establishes intercultural competency as a shared capacity rather than the responsibility of one office, role, or group.
Embed intercultural competency in daily systems. Intercultural competency should inform teaching and learning, residential life, student support, family engagement, faculty supervision, global education, policy, and institutional decision-making. For international schools in the U.S. and independent schools with substantial international communities, these domains represent daily sites of intercultural engagement rather than peripheral programming.
From Awareness to Institutional Practice
Independent schools aim to educate thoughtful, responsible young people prepared to participate in an interconnected world. Intercultural competency advances that goal while strengthening schools’ capacity to support the international students, families, faculty, and staff already in their communities. For international schools, boarding schools, and independent schools with substantial international populations, this work constitutes both an immediate institutional responsibility and preparation for global citizenship.
Schools must help students engage across difference while sustaining the internal work required of adults and institutions: examining the assumptions, norms, and frameworks that inform how they understand themselves and others. In international communities, this both/and approach accords appropriate attention to national, cultural, and linguistic perspectives alongside other dimensions of identity, strengthening the conditions for dignity, support, and flourishing.
THIS WEEK: Get more context and strategies during Dr. Derrick Gay’s NAIS webinar this Thursday, September 24. Register today for Beyond Enrollment: Supporting International Students and Families at Independent Schools, part of NAIS’s Global Webinar Series.