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  Demand for educational services is at its highest in the UAE. Nowhere is this as visible as in the emirate of Dubai, which attracts a growing number of expatriates each year and boasts a large number of young nationals eager to face the challenges of a booming economy.  

  The Al Habtoor Group, through the Dubai-based Emirates International School (EIS), has been at the forefront of efforts to bring world-class educational standards into the UAE. Al Shindagah Magazine caught up with EIS Director Robert Bennett, who shares the secret of the school’s success, sheds light on other Al Habtoor Group community projects currently in the pipeline, and explains why innovation should be a key word for educators. 

  “Many problems in the world would be more easily resolved if those people involved had broader and more formal educational background,” says Robert Bennett towards the end of our conversation. We have spent almost two hours discussing the field, which has been Bennett’s passion for some 35 years. Having previously worked as an educator in Germany, Turkey, Italy and his native USA, Bennett brings in valuable experience to Emirates International School, where teachers from over 30 different countries are working with a student body representing over 80 different nations of the world.  “If we are going to help solve global problems, certainly a great place to start should be with this student population”. 

  The efforts of the classroom teachers seem to be recognised among Dubai’s community members, as Emirates International School’s student long waiting list for the current academic year indicates. This fact augurs well for Al Habtoor Group’s other community service projects, including a new school currently being built in Dubai’s Meadows complex as well as additional facilities now in the planning stages.  The Al Habtoor Group realizes there are not enough quality schools and will continue to develop quality programs. 

  According to Bennett, it is the school’s high standards that set it apart in the community. High accountability for both, staff and students is the key principle. EIS seems also to provide expatriate children with a rare opportunity to get to know the Middle East and its culture. About 15 per cent of pupils come from countries in the region, including the UAE, while planned activities such as trips to local cultural sights and even neighbouring countries also enable students to interact with the local environment. “We operate as an International School, but still include the local cultures and traditions, helping our visiting students better understand the local way of life.” 

  While there is much to commend EIS and its team, Bennett wants to raise the bar even higher. According to him, there is a great need for innovation in the field, not only in the Middle East, but also in the rest of the world. 

  “The model of education generally used in many parts of the world is over 100 years old, we need to have a greater focus on student learning,” says Bennett. While the current mode of education traces its roots and follows the logic of the early industrial age, society has changed drastically in the last two centuries. Means of mass communication, international travel and technologies such as the Internet have changed the way people interact and do business. According to Bennett, educators have some catching up to do. “Educational Practices should model the societies we are living in.” Teaching methods that matched an older, traditional way of life have to be reviewed to make sure that the students that graduate are prepared for the challenges and requirements of an every changing society. 

  “Young people now are being bombarded with so many stimuli,” says Bennett. “ In an information age, where young people have ample access to news, entertainment and international travel and when various viewpoints on a variety of issues are available through different media, we can no longer say that one way is the right way”, he claims. “ We as educators have to have the skills to help child sort through all this stimuli and separate the bad from the good.  

  “Education should be more of a process than a product,” he says. While many teachers focus on whether their students have memorised a particular sets of information, the real emphasis needs to be on encouraging critical thinking and problem-solving.   

  “In many schools, the math teacher will give a test and ask his students to just put the answers on a piece of paper,” continues Bennett. “A child could have worked for a lengthy period of time to develop the correct answer, making a very simple mistake, yet for the teacher a wrong answer would mean a complete failure.” 

  Viewing learning as a process rather than a product means it is no longer the sole responsibility of the teacher. “The teacher is responsible for the environment in which learning takes place but the learning should be the responsibility of the individual child,” says Bennett. “ A major fault could be that we as educators do too much for children and do not teach them the antimony to make decisions and be responsible for their own learning. 

  “Self and peer evaluation should play an important role in the learning process”, Bennett claims. “ When it comes to writing, for example, a great way to teach children how to write is to let them see good and bad samples of writing so that they could compare and contrast. 

  “I had the opportunity to observe an English language teacher that brought the papers of her 11th grade students into her 7th grade English class and she gave them the simple directions to read all the papers and put them in four groups,” says Bennett. “The number one group had papers that didn’t make sense and weren’t clear versus the number four group, in which the papers were very easy to follow, interesting to read, had a good introduction, a good body and a great concluding statement,” he says adding, “When the children have these examples posted in the room, they don’t have to turn their paper in to find out what grade they’ll get, they can grade it themselves. 

  “Education should not be a secret, there should be no surprises,” Bennett says. According to him, rather than having students guessing what will be on the test or guess what’s on the teacher’s mind, there should be clearly understood communication and clearly understood outcomes. Exams and assessment should then be given when students are ready to be successful, not when the teacher says “it’s Wednesday and time for a test!” 

  While the approach to teaching needs a revision, so does the academic calendar. “We have an educational system now that has locked holidays in that are not directly related to the learning process,” he says. “ The summer holiday, for example, was designed 200 years ago so that children could go home and help harvesting the crops. Children do need a break but I am not advocating this long period of time that we currently give them,” says Bennett. “We spend a tonne of energy teaching children in the first grades how to read and we achieve a very high readability rate by the end of the school year only to find out they have dropped almost half a year by the end of the summer.” 

  The above is especially true for students for whom English is a second language. “They work so hard to get to a particular point but if that learning is not re-enforced, it goes away,” says Bennett. “We are going to do some research this year into the reading levels of children that have English as a second language versus those for who English is a first language. There could be some implications that we could share with other international schools.”  

  According to Bennett, education should put a greater emphasis on the individual. “One of the things that concerns me most about education is that we chronologically group children, mostly for the convenience of the educators and the school, rather than the developmental levels of the children,” he says. 

  A standards-based instructional programme can address this issue by providing a benchmark with minimum requirements in each curricular area that children will be expected to cover. According to Bennett, teachers need to assess where each pupil is in the beginning of the school year and then set up individual goals for each student to achieve.  

  In the day-to-day functioning of a school, this translates into making sure teachers pay attention to all the students in a class. “When I evaluate teachers in the classroom, I will note how many times a teacher has made personal interaction with each child. I’m going to expect the teacher to acknowledge every one of them at least once.” says Bennett.  

  An individualised approach to education also means that teachers acknowledge the fact that children learn differently. Various activities need to be incorporated into a lecture to cater to the different senses of students – hearing and vision are the norm, but why not include senses of touch, smell and taste.  And don’t forget that sixth sense and we all choose to use at the appropriate time.  

  A personalised approach to teaching allows teachers to work with and understand students emotional and social maturity levels. “We work very hard in the academic arena to prepare children for the higher maths and the sciences but seldom do we get reports of somebody being fired from their position because they couldn’t do the work, what they are fired for is they didn’t get along with people, they didn’t show up on time, they couldn’t meet deadlines,” says Bennett, explaining why teachers need to also promote the social and emotional development of children. 

  “Parents should expect us, and I think we are doing a pretty good job here at EIS, to provide children with the tools to help them make the right decisions about whatever vocation they go into,” he says. 

  “Ultimately, for children to grow up into successful people, they need to have a sound level of emotional stability and be socially adaptable to different types of environments”, says Bennett. “ In an ever smaller and more globalised world, tolerance and the ability to understand different people, cultures and situations are an asset. A good education is one that encourages children to be problem solvers, to ask questions and to be an advocate for themselves from an early age”.

   

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