EDUCATION September 2018

September 2018

City College offers unique Business Programmes in Doha leading directly to International University degrees

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ity College is proud to welcome students from across Qatar, having officially opened its doors on September 2nd 2018.

The College offers distinctive, practical higher education Business programmes with specialisations in related fields such as Human Resources, Marketing, Entrepreneurship, Accounting and Finances & Operations Management. All programmes are fully licensed by the Ministry of Education and Higher Education in Qatar, and are accredited by the Business and Technology Education Council (BTEC) in the United Kingdom. Students receive an internationally-recognised qualification accepted by hundreds of universities worldwide.

According to Mr. Nicholas Evans, Director of Education for City College’s holding company, the institution’s mission is to deliver a fasttrack route into a Bachelor’s degree as well as to prepare students for employability.

“The difference we offer is a break from the usual traditional approach of teaching and learning. We innovate with a British curriculum that is rooted firmly in vocational learning, and provides students with a practical and meaningful experience. As well as offering programmes with significant academic credibility, our BTEC awards higher education credits, which can be transferred to the final year of a university Bachelor’s degree across 339 universities world-wide”, Nicholas explains.

City College works in partnership with the University of Portsmouth, in the United Kingdom, and after completing a 2-year Business Diploma, students can be recruited from Doha to directly enter the final year at Portsmouth, or other universities of their choice. City College will offer three and four year degree as well.

Students are supported with individually tailored bridging courses in English Language, Computer Studies as well as Study and Research Skills, should they need further support before starting their specialised higher education programmes.

“We are delighted to welcome our students at the beginning this new academic year. It has been a long-term project for us, aiming to support the development of higher education in Qatar and contributing to the national development of the country and the achievement of the National Vision 2030. We have worked hard to recruit highlyskilled lecturers and to build facilities that accommodate the practical experience offered at City College and that give students an urban, work-related learning experience”, says Nicholas.

City College is now open offering Bridging Courses and BTEC qualifications in Business.

The college also offers full-time programmes for young school leavers and part-time routes for mature working students.

By Robyn Harris

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ummer may be ending, but as passionate educators we’ve been thinking about our classrooms and our schools for some time now.

The question I’ve been pondering as a principal is: How can we create a school environment where, to paraphrase Lead Like a Pirate, students, staff, and parents are beating down the doors to get in, not out?

As students head back into the classroom, their minds may still be on the sunshine and beaches, or the mountains and all the great hikes they went on, but we’ve got to grab their attention and bring them into school. Here are a few ideas on how school leaders can guide their teams to create the #BestYearEver.

Starting the year on the right note Spruce up the place: Before students arrive, work on your own or with colleagues and paint some bulletin boards with chalkboard paint so that you can reuse and refresh them regularly. Get inspiring words up—buy some posters or make your own—on the walls of your halls or even in the bathrooms to remind students of the positive goals they have set.

Meet students at the bus with fun: Open up your first day in a fun and memorable way. Music can be a great opening when students get off the bus—have a staff dance-off, or lip sync to upbeat, positive songs.

Dressing up in a silly or fun way will most likely bring a smile to the students’ faces. Or you can roll out a red carpet and treat staff and students like royalty or movie stars. Get out of your comfort zone—after all, as a leader you want to model what you want your students to do.

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Greet all students: Use students’ names if you know them, and if they’re new and you don’t know them, introduce yourself right away. It’s sometimes loud outside when the buses are arriving, so I invested in a speaker with a microphone so that students hear me calling out their names and introducing the new students when I meet them.

This is one of the simplest things to do, but it helps students and staff to get to know one another.

Make time to create long-lasting relationships with your students: As an administrator, I ask teachers to engage students in icebreakers, team building, all-about-you activities, and much, much more for the first week or two. This helps teachers get to know the students in their class, and it helps students to get to know one another, as well. These activities can also be used throughout the year to keep the bonds with one another strong.

Invite parents in for a Parent University: Give parents information about what their child will be learning this year. Bring in an outside speaker to talk about a hot topic such as social and emotional learning, or a district staff member to talk about school and district initiatives, so that parents can better understand what’s happening around them.

When we involve parents in what we do, we build relationships, open lines of communication, and create connections.

Continue the relationships all year long Create intentional time in your school and in your classrooms when students and staff can build healthy relationships. Focus on student interests, and invite parents to come in. Allowing students to choose activities empowers them to move forward

with positivity, and it shows them that you care about what interests them—you can connect with them on another level.

We want to build strong connections with our whole school community. Adding a few simple touches those first days and weeks, and sprinkling them in throughout the rest of the year, takes little time to put in place. While money may be scarce in some of our schools, together our staff, parent, and student volunteers can always help in creating a great place.

By allowing our students to see our vulnerable side and building strong bonds with one another, we can definitely look forward to a year that flourishes with passion and positivity. Courtesy: www.edutopia. org.

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Doha British School

21 years of excellence in education

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Mr. Terry McGuire Principal

ur core purpose is that every young person should gain as much as possible from our school, based our belief that all learners can, need and want to achieve.

Doha British School (DBS), celebrating its 21st anniversary this year is located in Ain Khaled and Al Wakra and recognised as amongst the most prestigious British Curriculum International Schools in the Gulf region. We are proud of our very high standards of teaching and learning. We have a fundamental belief that all young people can, need and want to learn.

DBS is fully accredited by British Schools of the Middle East (BSME), Council of International Schools (CIS), Qatar National Schools Accreditation (QNSA) and British Schools Overseas (BSO). BSO is a hugely significant accreditation. The standards by which we are judged are based on UK Independent Schools Inspectorate criteria which are extensive and rigorous. We were first inspected by BSO in 2014. The results of their follow up inspection in June 2017 showed significant improvement in 3 years. The school was deemed to be ‘Outstanding’ in 7 areas out of 8 and ‘Good’ in the 8th. This places us in the top echelon of all British curriculum international schools anywhere in the world.

We could never have achieved this status without the dedication, commitment and energy of fantastic teachers, supportive parents and the most wonderful children one could ever wish to work with.

This year we celebrate 21 years of a first class environment of teaching and learning. We often talk about our determination to continuously improve.Our IGCSE and IB Diploma results are improving year on year. This year 93% of our IGCSE students achieved 5 x A* to C. In one subject in particular, IGCSE Design and Technology, 7 of our students achieved grade 9 (the new highest grade) out of 40 such grades worldwide. Amazing. DBS can rightly be considered as one of the best English National Curriculum schools anywhere in the Gulf and probably much further afield. Our determination is to ensure that the next 21 years are as fruitful as the first 21.

We are ambitious and determined in our pursuit of excellence. The school has just embarked on a programme of investment including full renovation of the swimming pool and the construction of a new football pitch and basketball courts. If you would like your child to be part of the DBS family, contact the admissions team at our Ain Khaled campus (Pre-school to Year 13) or Al Wakra campus (Pre-school to Year 8). Tours are conducted weekly by our senior leaders, details as follows:

Kate Cliffe, Head of Primary at DBS Ain Khaled, conducts tours every Thursday at 9am

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Stuart Shelton, Head of Secondary at DBS Ain Khaled, conducts tours every Thursday at 10am

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Beverley Stevens, Vice Principal of DBS Al Wakra, conducts tours every Thursday at 9am

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You are very welcome to join us.

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obots can play an important role in the education of young people but will not fully replace teachers, at least not in the foreseeable future, a new study suggests.

Writing in Science Robotics, scientists say social robots are proving effective in the teaching of certain narrow subjects, such as vocabulary or prime numbers.

infrastructure just like paper, white boards, and computer tablets. But a social robot has the potential to support and challenge students in ways unavailable in current resource-limited educational environments. Robots can free up precious time for teachers, allowing the teacher to focus on what people still do best -- provide a comprehensive, empathic, and rewarding educational experience.”

The current study, compiled in conjunction with academics at Yale University and the University of Tsukuba, involved a review of more than 100

published articles, which have shown robots to be effective at increasing outcomes, largely because of their physical presence.

However it also explored in detail some of the technical constraints highlighting that speech recognition, for example, is still insufficiently robust to allow the robot to understand spoken utterances from young children.

It also says that introducing social robots into the school curriculum would pose significant logistical challenges and might in fact carry risks, with some children being seen to rely too heavily on the help offered by robots rather than simply using them when they are in difficulty.

In their conclusion, the authors add: “Next to the practical considerations of introducing robots in education, there are also ethical issues. How far do we want the education of our children to be delegated to machines? Overall, learners are positive about their experiences, but parents and teaching staff adopt a more cautious attitude.

One of the robots used in the University of Plymouth’s Robo21c program, which aims to complement to the school curriculum by developing teachers’ skills and understanding of robotics and programming.

But current technical limitations -- particularly around speech recognition and the ability for social interaction -- mean their role will largely be confined to that of teaching assistants or tutors, at least for the foreseeable future.

The study was led by Professor in Robotics Tony Belpaeme, from the University of Plymouth and Ghent University, who has worked in the field of social robotics for around two decades.

He said: “In recent years scientists have started to build robots for the classroom -- not the robot kits used to learn about technology and mathematics, but social robots that can actually teach. This is because pressures on teaching budgets, and calls for more personalised teaching, have led to a search for technological solutions.

“In the broadest sense, social robots have the potential to become part of the educational

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“Notwithstanding that, robots show great promise when teaching restricted topics with the effects almost matching those of human tutoring. So although the use of robots in educational settings is limited by technical and logistical challenges for now, it is highly likely that classrooms of the future will feature robots that assist a human teacher.” Credit: University of Plymouth

Qatar International Beauty Academy (QIBA) – Tajmeel

Professional International Beauty Training in Qatar

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atar International Beauty Academy (QIBA) Tajmeel was founded by Nama Qatar’s Social Development Center in 2009 to provide professional beauty training courses for women in Qatar.

Based in Doha, it is the country’s first and only licensed beauty academy. The Academy offers a range of courses in beauty therapy, body treatments, hair styling, makeup artistry and nail-care. Course offerings are designed to meet the needs of all: the beauty enthusiast, the aspiring beauty professional, and the seasoned beauty professional.

Tajmeel students enjoy exposure to an array of different hair and makeup styles. The unique cultural mix amongst students and instructors enriches the learning experience and covers Eastern and Western aesthetics.

Tajmeel in-house and internationally accredited programs equip students with the skills and knowledge to become fully licensed professionals in their beauty fields of interest. Advanced continued education courses are also available for professionals who want to stay ahead in their career. Tajmeel offers courses accredited by international professional beauty associations such as: CIBTAC, CIDESCO, City & Guilds and ITEC. The length of professional courses offered ranges from several months to two full academic years.

A variety of personal grooming and non-vocational short courses are offered along day and evening schedules. In these courses, students learn basic hairstyling, skincare, or makeup application skills. They learn about tools and products that suit them best, too.

The duration of personal grooming short courses and workshops ranges from one day to twelve weeks.

Hands-on learning is ensured in fully equipped treatment rooms. Class sessions include elaborate demonstrations and allow ample time for student practice and instructor feedback. During the weekly Salon Days, Tajmeel students perform a wide range of beauty and hair services for paying clients at the Academy premises. Work experience is also provided through the Academy’s strong alliances within the local community theatre, film industry, and fashion scene.

By the time our students graduate, they would have an impressive portfolio!

Within its nine years of service, Tajmeel established itself as an authority in promoting industry best practices in Qatar. A Memorandum of Understanding was signed between Nama the Social Development Centre (SDC) and the Ministry of Labor (MOL) in Qatar on January 24, 2013 regarding the qualification and training of those who wish to work in the beauty and hair industry.

Consequently, the MOL entrusts Tajmeel with approving beauty industry professional qualification programs for licensing within the State. Moreover, salon and spa staff are required to pass an International Health and Safety Course provided by the Academy. To further support the local beauty industry, Tajmeel launched the Qatar Hair and Beauty Network in 2014 as a professional group for providers of hair and beauty services, the network aims at promoting professionalism and safe practices. The network currently includes 44 members.

By Amy L. Eva ome people are just jerks, and not much can be done to change them.

Do you agree with this statement?

If your answer is yes, here’s something you might consider: Research suggests that believing in the human capacity to change is linked to less depression, better health, and greater achievement.

This is the “growth mindset,” an idea pioneered by Stanford researcher Carol Dweck. It’s the opposite of a “fixed mindset,” the idea that people are born either smart or not, kind or not, strong or not—and people just don’t change all that much.

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According to this research, when we practice a growth mindset, the obstacles we’re facing seem more surmountable.

It’s crucial for us to realize that we are not helpless; we can grow and adapt. Just as important as seeing ourselves as capable of growth is the belief that someone who is challenging us can change, too. This perspective releases some of the pressure we might feel, and helps us to think more in terms of challenges than threats.

We shouldn’t only believe in the ability of other people to change for their benefit.

We are the ones who stand the most to gain when we see possibilities in others. For example, one recent study found that teens who learned about the growth mindset in relation to bullying—hearing that bullies could change, and no one was stuck as an aggressor or victim—were more resilient to social stress. Even when they got ignored or felt shy, for example, they didn’t become overwhelmed or physically stressed out.

Seven months later, they were even getting better grades.

We shouldn’t only believe in the ability of other people to change for their benefit.

We are the ones who stand the most to gain when we see possibilities in others. For example, one recent study found that teens who learned about the growth mindset in relation to bullying—hearing that bullies could change, and no one was stuck as an aggressor or victim—were more resilient to social stress. Even when they got ignored or felt shy, for example, they didn’t become overwhelmed or physically stressed out.

Seven months later, they were even getting better grades.

That’s a fairly easy idea to suggest, and perhaps you already believe in it. But if you’re a parent or educator, the challenge lies in helping kids to see the advantages and the ways that it can be applied to their lives and relationships. Here are some tips for helping kids turn a fixed mindset into a growth one.

How to explain the social benefits Although there is some controversy over the misapplication of mindset research in schools, a growing number of studies suggest that fostering a growth mindset (also known as an “incremental theory of personality”) helps students to better navigate social challenges.

Improved peer relationships: A simple belief in the possibility of change may have a powerful effect on our thinking—potentially freeing us to actually see our way through anxiety and a sense of failure in the midst of peer conflict and peer exclusion. Research also indicates that believing personalities can change can lower aggression and retaliatory behavior.

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recreate a similar learning experience at home or in your classroom, here are some elements you might include. n Talk about bullying and social exclusion: Why do bullies bully? Are victims always victims? What traits do bullies and victims share? Can bullies or victims change? The goal here is to challenge black-and-white views of “bullies” and “victims.”

Exploring these questions can help us realize

We all experience fixed mindsets, too: Everyone is a mix of both fixed and growth mindsets, and no one person has a pure growth mindset all the time.

If we want to benefit from a growth mindset, we need to understand how both a fixed and growth mindset can play out in different situations. For example, a growth mindset can come in handy in situations where we experience anxiety or a sense of failure.

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Empathy: A growth mindset can prompt us to put in the effort to empathize more—particularly when it’s challenging. If we are struggling to understand that so-called “jerk” in our lives, we might be able to say to ourselves, “This person may be having a rough time right now, but she may change her behavior over time.”

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Cooperation: Finally, if we believe that personalities are malleable and situations can change, we can also apply this thinking to groups.

Israeli and Palestinian teens who were taught the simple idea that groups of people can also change demonstrated increased cooperation in a joint tower-building task. They showed more positive emotions and built a much higher tower than the control group participants in the study.

Although the basic message above seems to yield numerous social benefits, researchers caution us not to default to oversimplified “people-can-change” platitudes as we share information about the growth mindset. It’s not okay to put all the burden on someone who is being bullied or otherwise facing unfair circumstances. When we address bullying and victimization, both bullies and bystanders must be part of the conversation—and the solution. n

that neither bullies nor victims are fundamentally flawed or fated to always remain in their role.

Explore growth vs. fixed mindsets: Learning about the concept of neuroplasticity and what it means to hold a growth vs. a fixed mindset will enable us to understand how believing that people’s abilities and traits can change makes us more motivated and optimistic about solving problems. We can apply these concepts to the idea of bullying: Can bullies and victims grow and change? How can we shift some of our fixed ideas about them—He’s a bad person; No one likes me— to more flexible ones?

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Beware of your triggers: However, sometimes it’s really challenging to access a growth mindset.

Fixed-mindset triggers such as feeling threatened, compared or criticized can make us feel defensive and insecure so that it can be difficult to believe in the capacity for change. Fixed mindsets can also spark negative self-conscious emotions like shame, which can spark signs of stress in the body as we react to potential threats.

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Reinforce learning through teaching: Research demonstrates that learning and comprehension can be significantly enhanced when you get to teach what you are learning.

Invite older children or teens to develop several tips and discussion questions about the growth mindset. Then find a time when they can share these key ideas with younger children.

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Obstacles to growth Consider the following cautions and clarifications from mindset researcher Carol Dweck:

Three ways to teach a growth mindset Many growth mindset studies feature brief reading and writing activities where participants learn about our human potential for growth, apply their learning, and share it with others. If you would like to

You can’t have a growth mindset all the time: It’s important to note that a growth mindset isn’t a personal attribute or state of being; it’s a way of thinking or a coping strategy that we can apply in a given situation. It is not something you simply have or you don’t.

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Studies suggest that growth mindsets counter the fight-or-flight response, helping us to view social problems as challenges. This helps us to adapt, change, and grow—the chief characteristics of resilience. When we promote the belief that people truly have the potential to change, we free up ourselves and others to actually do that. Courtesy: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu

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Assessments for academic subjects such as reading, math, and science rightfully form the core of any college-readiness high school program.

But the career-ready pathway hasn’t garnered the same level of attention, leaving a substantial portion of the student population less prepared to successfully enter meaningful and challenging careers.

Career and Technical Education (CTE) subjects deserve the same robust, high-quality assessments to guide instruction and support student growth that are administered for other academic subjects.

The following tips can help you get more out of your CTE assessments.

Start with the end, not the beginning

Involve all of the right subject- matter expertise

Match the rigor of industry assessments

Typical development processes with core subjects start with standards that drive curriculum, extend to the design of the core course, then subsequently drive the development of formative and summative exams.

For exams in which career-readiness is the goal, it is critical to start at the end (the job or certification for which the student wants to be qualified). Strong CTE programs work backward from the job to drive their formative and summative assessments, design courses and curriculum, and then link appropriate standards.

Designing and developing a successful CTE program requires multiple types of subject-matter expertise. This includes CTE education experts, core subject education experts, and industry experts. Failing to include all appropriate expertise can result in programs and assessments that fall short of the desired goals.

Evaluate the knowledge and skills of your CTE students in light of industry assessment expectations. Understanding the breadth and depth of content covered on industry certification exams, as well as the difficulty of the item and assessments your students will be required to take, is crucial. Familiarize yourself with the industry certifications and ensure your courses and assessments have similar content and rigor so that students are well-prepared for these critical exams.

Follow the leader when setting performance standards

Track career ready statistics the same way you track college ready statistics

Setting passing scores for industry exams is a structured process driven by assessment standards. When preparing assessments that are designed to evaluate a student’s readiness for an industry exam, implement a standardsetting process similar to one used for industry certifications. This process will help ensure your exam requirements accurately prepare your students for career requirements.

Most schools, districts, and states track student performance statistics in some manner. To ensure equitable preparation for your CTE students, your analytics program should include career-ready indicators and provide equitable information regarding early warning indicators that highlight potential issues with career readiness.

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AFG College with the University of Aberdeen First British university offering undergraduate degrees in Qatar

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FG College with the University of Aberdeen is a unique partnership between the Al Faleh Group for Educational and Academic Services (AFG) and the University of Aberdeen which opened its doors to undergraduate students in September

2017.

The establishment of the institution is a significant achievement as AFG College with the University of Aberdeen is the first British university offering undergraduate degrees within the State of Qatar.

This exciting University project has been developed under the leadership of Dr Sheikha Aisha Bint Faleh Al Thani, who identified the need for increased capacity within higher education to support the Qatar 2030 Vision and to contribute to the development of a stronger knowledge-based economy for the country.

The Partnership Vision The vision is to deliver an excellent UK higher education experience in Qatar with a strong emphasis on employability. The institution will embrace social inclusion and allow access to university education beyond the academic elite.

The university partnership presents the opportunity for those students living and working in Qatar to access a British degree from one of the leading international universities, currently ranked within the top 1% of global universities. The vision includes the development of a regional research hub, drawing on the strengths of Aberdeen’s excellence in global academic research and working collaboratively with other Qatar based educational and institutional partners to contribute to the wider knowledge based economy within the region.

Future Plans Now in the second year of operation, AFG College with the University of Aberdeen will be developed in two phases. Phase one offers business degrees at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, with the introduction of the University of Aberdeen MBA and MSc in International Business Management in October 2018.

Phase two is the establishment of a large purpose built university campus offering engineering, medical and social science degrees. This new campus will be opening its doors in September 2021 with a student capacity of over 4,000.

From September 2018 AFG College with the University of Aberdeen has over 300 undergraduate students studying for their Aberdeen degrees. With over 60% of students of Qatari nationality, both AFG and the University of Aberdeen are extremely proud to be part of the growing higher education community of Qatar.

By Youki Terada

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eachers have long known that rote memorization can lead to a superficial grasp of material that is quickly forgotten. But new research in the field of neuroscience is starting to shed light on the ways that brains are wired to forget—highlighting the importance of strategies to retain knowledge and make learning stick.

In a recent article published in the journal Neuron, neurobiologists Blake Richards and Paul Frankland challenge the predominant view of memory, which holds that forgetting is a process of loss— the gradual washing away of critical information despite our best efforts to retain it. According to Richards and Frankland, the goal of memory is not just to store information accurately but to “optimize decision-making” in chaotic, quickly changing environments. In this model of cognition, forgetting is an evolutionary strategy, a purposeful process that runs in the background of memory, evaluating and discarding information that doesn’t promote the survival of the species.

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“From this perspective, forgetting is not necessarily a failure of memory,” explain Richards and Frankland in the study. “Rather, it may represent an investment in a more optimal mnemonic strategy.”

The Forgetting Curve We often think of memories as books in a library, filed away and accessed when needed. But they’re actually more like spiderwebs, strands of recollection distributed across millions of connected neurons.

When we learn something new—when a teacher delivers a fresh lesson to a student, for example—the material is encoded across these neural networks, converting the experience into a memory.

Forgetting is almost immediately the nemesis of memory, as psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus discovered in the 1880s. Ebbinghaus pioneered landmark research in the field of retention and learning, observing what he called the forgetting curve, a measure of how much we forget over time.

In his experiments, he discovered that without any reinforcement or connections to prior knowledge,

information is quickly forgotten—roughly 56 percent in one hour, 66 percent after a day, and 75 percent after six days.

So what can be done to preserve the hard work of teaching? After all, evolutionary imperatives—which prune our memories of extraneous information— don’t always neatly align with the requirements of curriculum or the demands of the Information Age. Learning the times tables doesn’t avail when running from lions, in other words, but in the modern world that knowledge has more than proved its mettle.

The Persistence of Memory The same neural circuitry appears to be involved in forgetting and remembering. If that is properly understood, students and teachers can adopt strategies to reduce memory leaks and reinforce learning.

MIT neuroscientists, led by Richard Cho, explain the mechanisms for synaptic strengthening in a 2015 article, also published in Neuron. When neurons are frequently fired, synaptic connections

are strengthened; the opposite is true for neurons that are rarely fired. Known as synaptic plasticity, this explains why some memories persist while others fade away. Repeatedly accessing a stored but fading memory—like a rule of geometry or a crucial historical fact—rekindles the neural network that contains the memory and encodes it more deeply.

Researchers have also learned that not all new memories are created equal. For example, here are two sets of letters to remember: 1. NPFXOSK 2. ORANGES For readers of English, the second set of letters is more memorable—the more connections neurons have to other neurons, the stronger the memory.

The seven letters in NPFXOSK appear random and disjointed, while ORANGES benefits from its existing, deeply encoded linguistic context. The word oranges also invokes sensory memory, from the image of an orange to its smell, and perhaps even conjures other memories of oranges in your kitchen or growing on a tree. You remember by layering new memories on the crumbling foundations of older ones.

5 Teacher Strategies When students learn a new piece of information, they make new synaptic connections. Two scientifically based ways to help them retain learning is by making as many connections as possible—typically to other concepts, thus widening the “spiderweb” of neural connections—but also by accessing the memory repeatedly over time.

Which explains why the following learning strategies, all tied to research conducted within the past five years, are so effective: 1. Peer-to-peer explanations: When students explain what they’ve learned to peers, fading memories are reactivated, strengthened, and consolidated.

This strategy not only increases retention but also encourages active learning (Sekeres et al., 2016).

2. The spacing effect: Instead of covering a topic and then moving on, revisit key ideas throughout the school year. Research shows that students perform better academically when given multiple opportunities to review learned material. For example, teachers can quickly incorporate a brief review of what was covered several weeks earlier into ongoing lessons, or use homework to reexpose students to previous concepts (Carpenter et al., 2012; Kang, 2016).

3. Frequent practice tests: Akin to regularly reviewing material, giving frequent practice tests can boost long-term retention and, as a bonus, help protect against stress, which often impairs memory performa nce. Practice tests can be low stakes and ungraded, such as a quick pop quiz at the start of a lesson or a trivia quiz on Kahoot, a popular online game-based learning platform. Breaking down one large high-stakes test into smaller tests over several months is an effective approach (Adesope, Trevisan, & Sundararajan, 2017; Butler, 2010; Karpicke, 2016).

4. Interleave concepts: Instead of grouping similar problems together, mix them up. Solving problems

involves identifying the correct strategy to use and then executing the strategy. When similar problems are grouped together, students don’t have to think about what strategies to use—they automatically apply the same solution over and over. Interleaving forces students to think on their feet, and encodes learning more deeply (Rohrer, 2012; Rohrer, Dedrick, & Stershic, 2015).

5. Combine text with images: It’s often easier to remember information that’s been presented in different ways, especially if visual aids can help organize information. For example, pairing a list of countries occupied by German forces during World War II with a map of German military expansion can reinforce that lesson. It’s easier to remember what’s been read and seen, instead of either one alone (Carney & Levin, 2002; Bui & McDaniel, 2015).

So even though forgetting starts as soon as learning happens—as Ebbinghaus’s experiments demonstrate—research shows that there are simple and effective strategies to help make learning stick.

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By Dominique Russell

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n a recent Teacher article, two schools discussed their differing policies on mobile phone use during school hours. Here, we look at a range of studies that have explored the positives and negatives of allowing mobile phones to be used in class.

As Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) programs become more widespread, questions are being raised about the benefits of allowing students to actively use mobile phones as learning devices in school. Over the past decade, several studies have taken a closer look at student and educator perspectives on the issue.

One comparative study was undertaken across two schools in England in 2012, and details how students from each school use their devices during class time. One school allows the use of mobile devices and one doesn’t.

The study titled “I don’t think I would be where I am right now.” Pupil perspectives on using mobile devices for learning conducted student surveys. The results show that 43 per cent of students attending the school where devices are banned are still using them to help with learning despite the ban. Meanwhile, 74 per cent of students at the school which allow them, use the devices to aid learning.

Most respondents in this study say they use their device for Google and calendars during the school day. As for learning at home, most students also rely on their device.

‘A few days ago, my friend didn’t understand one of the questions on the Science homework, so he Facetimed me, and I showed him my answer and I explained how I got that answer to him ...’ one student says.

The research shows that students rely mostly on their devices to keep them organised. The calendar, alarms and camera (usually to take photos of a teacher’s notes) are features constantly used by students, the report notes. ‘One pupil said his device was essential for “remembering things” and without he would “forget to take homework in a lot”.’

Overall, this study proposes that mobile devices are a suitable learning tool for the classroom.

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‘There is clear evidence that many pupils feel that they are deriving educational benefit from the use of their devices,’ the report says.

‘They are using many of the features of their devices and often finding creative ways to employ these features in their schoolwork, both at home and at school.’

Students with concerns A study conducted in the US reveals concerns held by some students about the risks involved with allowing mobile phones to be used freely at school. The research, Hold the phone! High School Students’ Perceptions of Mobile Phone Integration in the Classroom, which was published in 2016, found that although seven out of 10 of students interviewed think mobile phones support learning, serious concerns still exist among 30 per cent of respondents, who feel the negative effects of smartphones justifies a school-wide ban.

Across the 628 students surveyed, worries range from general distraction (for example, phones ringing during class) to fears about other students using smartphones to cheat, sext and cyberbully.

Despite this, the study also found that 90.7 per cent of the students surveyed were using their mobile phones for school-related work.

The authors of this study say that school policy makers should consider these findings and ‘develop clear policies on appropriate classroom mobile phone use as well as consequences for their misuse … expecting schools to completely eliminate the problems associated with mobile phone integration, however, is unrealistic; therefore, school stakeholders must carefully consider the

benefits and barriers identified by students in determining policy.’

Mobile phone use – a teacher’s perspective As for what teachers think about including the use of mobile phones in their lessons, one US study looked at nine teachers’ attempts to incorporate various technology devices in their lessons.

The 2015 study, Teaching and Learning with Mobile Computing Devices, details the experiences of one Mathematics teacher, Steven, who uses an iPhone in class.

‘Steve used his own iPhone to document students’ work and attendance,’ the study says. ‘He uploaded scanned tests, quizzes, assignments, and photographs into a webbased software application called Evernote.

Each of his students [primarily 9th and 10th graders] had a file in this program … this was helpful to Steven when conducting formal and informal parent-teacher conferences and also when discussing with other teachers and administration.

‘Steven enjoyed the flexibility of mobile devices by holding class in locations other than his classroom, such as the auditorium and outside … [and] he could use his iPhone to “pull up every document [he’s] ever scanned in and get a much bigger, much more accurate picture” of a student’s progress.’

Although participants in this study say using a mobile device in the classroom involved the need for exploration and a lot of personal research, the authors suggest that with the growing trend of BYOD, schools should consider integrating mobile devices into lesson plans. Courtesy: Teacher Magazine

Offering Master’s degrees in hospitality and tourism management

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tenden University of Applied Sciences-Qatar (SUAS-Q) – a premium higher education provider in the areas of business, hospitality and tourism management in Qatar – has begun offering two Master’s programmes from September 2018.

The new programmes – Master’s in Leisure, Tourism, and Event Management, and Master’s in International Hospitality and Service Management, have been approved and licensed by the

Ministry of Education and Higher Education after a rigorous review the curriculum, teaching and learning resources, staffing and facilities of SUAS-Q. The achievement is a key milestone in the development of SUAS-Q, which operates under the umbrella of Al Rayyan International Educational Company – a subsidiary of Al Faisal Holding.

The two Master’s programmes will enrich the current educational portfolio

of the university, and will contribute to the expansion of high-quality graduate education in the country. The programmes will also add value to the development and growth of the tourism and hospitality sectors in the State of Qatar.

The Master’s degrees will be offered in full-time and part time modes to facilitate working professionals who are interested in receiving a graduate degree.

The approval of these graduate programmes is a validation of the high quality of education offered at Stenden University of Applied Sciences in Qatar.

On this occasion, H.E. Sheikh Faisal Bin Qassim Al Thani, Chairman of Al Faisal Holding, commented: “The education sector has always been of great importance to us, as we actively sought – for more than two decades – to be one of the leading supporters of the Government’s wise initiatives in enhancing the local education sector and placing Qatar among the top ranks in that field globally. We have partnered with

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several international educational institutions and attracted them to Qatar in order to support the development and diversification of the education sector, and better equip a more distinctive and highly-efficient generation to lead the country forward. The Masters Programmes offered

by Stenden University are considered a major milestone and an added value to the education landscape in Qatar.

I would like to congratulate Stenden University on this important achievement, as I wish them more success. I would also like to thank the Ministry of Education and Higher Education for their continuous support”.

Dr. Ivan Ninov, Executive Dean of SUAS-Q, stated: “We are very proud of this achievement as we have been provided with an excellent opportunity to start delivering academic courses

at a more advanced graduate level in key areas which are of great importance to the future development of the State of Qatar. We are confident that with the introduction of the two new Masters programmes, we will be able to further develop the skills of working professionals and help them enrich their professional careers. At the same time we are extremely excited as the licensure of both programmes comes at a very important time as both Master’s degrees are fully aligned with the pillars of Qatar’s National Vision 2030, and with the strategic objectives of the government. This is a very important moment in the evolution of Stenden University of Applied Sciences – Qatar, and a significant step towards achieving our vision as an educational institution.”

Mistakes help us to learn In her 2017 paper “Learning from Errors,” psychologist Janet Metcalfe claims that avoiding and ignoring mistakes at school appears to be the rule in American classrooms—and it may be holding back our education system. Drawing on research, she argues that students may actually benefit from making mistakes (and correcting them) rather than avoiding them at all costs.

Focus on errors; don’t ignore them: Only a few studies can shed light on how teachers respond to mistakes in the classroom. One famous study of mathematics classrooms in a variety of countries revealed a marked difference between the instructional strategies in Japan versus the United States.

Videotapes showed that American teachers focused on the correct procedures for solving problems— primarily ignoring errors and praising students for correct answers only. Japanese teachers, on the other hand, rarely praised their students and asked them to solve problems on their own. Then, they led discussions of common errors as students explored a variety of pathways to both correct and incorrect solutions.

Because Japanese students outperform U.S. students in math, it’s worth taking note of this contrast.

Japanese teachers seem to be embracing the learning struggle by acknowledging mistakes rather than ignoring them.

Real learning isn’t usually easy. Teaching methods that center on errors may make learning more challenging but can also be more motivating—potentially enhancing metacognition (the ability to think about your thinking) and self-efficacy (a belief in your capability to accomplish a task).

By Amy L. Eva

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hen my daughter was a toddler, I regularly spilled milk in front of her during meal time. “Oops, oh well, no big deal, let’s clean it up!!” I would say in my high-pitched, goofy mom voice.

Before she could speak, I sensed that she was wired for perfectionism (something very familiar to me), so I attempted to normalize day-to-day mistakes and to show her how easy it was to bounce back from them.

We’re in the thick of the spilled-milk journey right now—learning to accept and embrace mistakes on a larger scale. Now that she is 13 years old, I am all the more sensitized to how she responds to mistakes at school, in particular—and how they enhance or detract from her learning.

For many teens, perceived faults loom large as their self-consciousness grows. Theorist David Elkind’s classic description of an adolescent’s sense of an “imaginary audience” may not be so imaginary these days.

Kids are watching each other closely both in school and online—judging, comparing, and evaluating—while mental health conditions like anxiety and depression are on the rise. Our performance-based school culture may not be helping, but there is an alternative—and it involves guiding our students to embrace the very failures they’re trying to avoid.

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Fail first, then learn: In another study, researchers in Singapore identified the value of “productive failure” in learning. They separated seventh grade mathematics students into a “direct instruction” group and a “productive failure” group.

In the direct instruction group, students learned to solve complex math problems with the teacher helping them along the way. In the productive failure group, however, students struggled and failed at solving problems until the teacher stepped in to help them analyze their failed attempts and find the correct solution.

As a result, the productive failure group outscored the direct instruction group on both simpler and more complex problems during a final test. Further, groups of students who demonstrated multiple approaches to solving problems were also more successful than those who did not.

In addition to understanding the different ways you might err, it seems helpful to actually make errors in the first place.

Be confident and be wrong: If productive failure appears to enhance learning, so does overconfidence. Multiple studies suggest that the more confident you are in the wrong answer, the more likely you will remember the right answer after you are corrected.

In one study, students answered questions on a quiz and rated their confidence level in each of their answers. Then they were given feedback on their incorrect answers. Researchers discovered that students were more likely to correct their initial errors during a final test if they had been highly confident in them.

Why did this happen? Researchers speculate that students focus more attention on corrective feedback when they are both confident and wrong (and perhaps surprised by their error). They also claim that when a learner expresses confidence in wrong answers, the learner’s second guess may often be the correct answer. When corrected, some students claimed that “they knew it all along.”

Bottom line: If we embrace and even study errors in our classrooms, students may actually learn more. However, there is a glaring caveat here: This only works if students have the emotional resilience to respond to mistakes adaptively and flexibly.

Helping students respond to perceived failure When children worry that they are making too many mistakes or possibly failing at something, the emotional fallout can be difficult to manage. According to UC Berkeley professor Martin Covington, the fear of failure is directly linked to self-worth, or the belief that you are valuable as a person. Covington found that students will put themselves through unbelievable psychological machinations in order to avoid failure and maintain the sense that they are worthy.

In a study of fourth to sixth graders, researchers analyzed students’ emotional responses when they made mistakes and identified three distinct styles.

The “distance and displace” style (withdrawing and blaming someone else) and the “minimize and move” style (moving on and looking beyond the mistake) reflected patterns of avoidance. However, students who had the “regret and repair” style (featuring some guilt, normalizing of the situation, and self-care) engaged in less self-blame, participated more actively in problem solving with their peers, and earned greater respect from teachers.

Here lies the larger challenge: How can we help kids to accept their errors and failures, particularly in school, so that they might translate this skill to the real world?

Adjust the learning context: “Let’s try this another way.” In the same study of fourth to sixth graders’ mistakes, emotions, and coping

strategies, researchers suggested that the context for learning may be important. Students may find it more emotionally challenging to work in a small group when they’re having difficulty, and may be better served by working privately. So consider providing options to kids who may need a little space to flounder.

Encourage persistence: “Keep trying. Don’t give up!” A 2017 study demonstrates that when adults model persistence in working toward a goal, infants as young as 15 months tend to mimic that behavior. Persistence can be learned. As teachers, we have a lot of power to influence our students’ efforts by sharing our own vulnerability and identifying our own self-conscious emotions, our stops and starts during problem solving, and our commitment to keep going. Students who engaged in the “regret and repair” style of coping still felt guilt when they made mistakes, but they continued to engage and keep trying—while also being gentle with themselves.

Model self-compassion: “Be kind to yourself when you’re confused; it’s okay.” If we model and normalize the ups and downs of learning with our students, we can also share the power of selfcompassion. They can learn to think: “This is tough, and I don’t get it. I’m not alone here; other people get confused just like me, and I’m going to cut myself some slack; it’s okay to not know the answer right now. I can be kind to myself and know that I will find my way through this challenge.”

EDUCATION 17

By Gina Picha

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n 2012, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology released a report calling for a national effort to produce 1 million more STEM graduates. Science, technology, engineering, and math educators have responded with a sense of urgency, and STEM programs and schools have been developed throughout the United States to better prepare our youths for careers in those fields. STEM curricula experts have begun to integrate studentdriven inquiry and a real-world context that add authenticity to class projects and prepare students for future STEM careers. They also encourage educators to connect learning across disciplines.

So how is STEM education still missing the mark, especially at the elementary level? Project-based learning and other practices that support educators in integrating across content areas have benefits, but those benefits will mean nothing if our young people do not enter in STEM fields or majors. These skills and experiences are rich and useful when done well, but secondary to the real roadblock that many American students face. We must look deeper than any new program or initiative aimed at simply increasing interest in STEM careers. We must look at a known problem that we often avoid talking about: the math problem.

Our students cannot enter into STEM majors if they have a fear of mathematics. Even students with an interest in a STEM major often drop out because of a lack of ability or confidence with mathematics, according to University of Chicago researchers Sian L. Beilock and Erin A. Maloney.

Elementary schools cannot integrate unproductive math practices and hope to turn out STEM graduates. In fact, we don’t need to start with integration at all. The problem lies in an avoidance and anxiety toward mathematics that begins as early as 5 years old.

Educators can successfully integrate math with other core subjects, but I wonder why we are focused almost entirely on integration. Integrating

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mathematics isn’t an easy thing to do well. Often times it is math that is put in the passenger seat to lightly serve another subject, project, or task.

So what is quality math instruction? Quality math instruction is real-world, collaborative, and involves productive struggle, debate, and conversation.

Integrating unproductive math practices into other content areas is counterproductive for any STEM program or school. Instead, healthy math classrooms have time when the math is integrated and also times when it is not. We know that developing deeper mathematical conceptual understanding takes time, perseverance, and a learning community free of anxiety. Research tells us that these are the things that our youngest students need most as they begin to develop their math identities. Integrated content

cannot be the sole focus of STEM programs if it comes at the expense of addressing math anxiety.

Students need to learn critical thinking skills. They need time to apply their learning in an integrated and authentic way. They need time to develop their success skills. But those things alone do not make a successful STEM program.

If our programs and schools do not produce more students capable of graduating with a STEM major, then are they successful? My concern isn’t just that many students continue to avoid math—I already know that. My concern comes from the realization that STEM education, the very thing that should be combatting this problem, seems to be focused on everything but the actual barrier. Courtesy: Education Week

VCUarts Qatar: A Center of Educational Excellence for Art and Design

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CUarts Qatar is the international branch campus of Virginia Commonwealth University’s prestigious School of the Arts (VCUarts), which has been a top-ranked art and design program in the U.S. for more than 10 years, according to U.S. News & World Report.

VCUarts Qatar contributes to the vitality of human, social, economic and environmental development in Qatar and

the region through creative innovation, expression and collaboration, while encouraging a dynamic intercultural environment of diverse research, learning and community engagement that is helping to develop exemplary artists, designers and scholars to build vibrant communities and diversified economies.

Established in 1998 through a partnership with Qatar Foundation, VCUarts Qatar celebrated its 20th anniversary in Education City in 2018 with a series of activities to celebrate the diversity of its alumni and their successes in the art and design fields.

VCUarts Qatar offers students the opportunity to earn a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in fashion design, graphic design, interior design and painting and printmaking, a Bachelor of Arts degree in art history and a Master of Fine Arts degree in design.

The current student body of 339 represents 38 nationalities. The campus attracts major contributors to contemporary visual culture for speaking and teaching engagements, and hosts events such as Tasmeem Doha and the Hamad bin Khalifa Symposium on Islamic Art. Tasmeem Doha is VCUarts Qatar’s international conference. It focuses on unique and contemporary themes within art and design. Held every two years, it

attracts prominent speakers and artists from all over the world. Tasmeem Doha 2019, which will take place on March 13-15, 2019, will be a creative event that will focus on “Hekayat” (stories) as its central theme.

The Hamad bin Khalifa Symposium on Islamic Art will take place at VCUarts Qatar on November 7-9, 2019 with the theme, “The Seas and the Mobility of Islamic Art”.

The general public is also welcome at VCUarts Qatar. Short courses in art and design are offered to all through the university’s Community Education Program. No prior experience or education is required and the courses take place throughout the year. Subjects range from fashion design and ceramics to photography. In addition, VCUarts Qatar’s library has, arguably, the broadest range of art and design books in Doha.

By Amy Schwartzbach-Kang

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oo often when we consider how to connect science and literacy, we think about using literature to support science. Maybe it’s reading a fictional book with a science theme, or exploring a biography of a famous scientist.

But we could instead turn that around and use science experiments as a way of bringing literature to life. Or we could use literature as a way to explore some of the questions about design and ethics that arise in the work of science.

As educators in Chicago, we saw that regardless of the setting, many students were not interested in science. They saw it as facts and rote memorization.

In both our classwork and our outside workshops, we needed to create more meaningful connections to the sciences, and incorporating literature allowed students to engage in a different way.

The stories suddenly became something students could see, feel, and experience. They could see science as being creative. Showing students how scientific concepts connect to things that they’re passionate about allows them to gain confidence in science. It also challenges them to move beyond the traditional expectations of science classwork to become more open-minded and think creatively.

to “fight” a Beowulf character. We discuss the probability of the outcomes, and discuss behavioral and physical characteristics of predators that occur in nature: What adaptations aid predators to overcome their prey? Which of these adaptations would need to occur in a monster in order for it to defeat Beowulf?

Students gain a deeper sense of the literature by thinking about alternate scenarios such as: What if Beowulf had lost to Grendel? What would it mean to our sense of the poem if Beowulf did not kill the dragon?

The lessons also incorporate chemistry, anatomy, and physiology to deepen inquiry and connections.

We “myth-bust” to see if these events and monsters could really exist. What is a venomous dragon, and what toxins would the dragon secrete that would make it venomous? What would a fire-breathing dragon’s diet consist of to enable it to breathe fire?

What would really happen if an arm was torn off in battle?

Using literature to help students understand the idea of responsibility in science: We hit upon the idea of using the story of Frankenstein to help

own unique creatures. We learn about motors and circuitry to bring our mini-robots to life.

After going through the process as creators, students reflect on how much of their process was spent on bringing their creature to life vs. considering the design and function of their creature. This idea reconnects us to a deeper theme in the story— because the creature Dr. Frankenstein created is so ugly, people assume it’s evil. The creature looks at Frankenstein and says, “Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust?”

Since people expect it to act like a monster, the creature eventually becomes one. Students are then challenged to consider these questions: n If Frankenstein created a beautiful creature, would people have responded to it differently? n What was your process when you were deciding how your creature would look? n What responsibility do scientists and inventors have to focus on the design as much as the purpose of their creation?

make a potentially dry science unit on circuits more engaging. With students from the mid-elementary grades and up, we don’t read the novel but instead work with quotes from it to expand on what they know about the character, create deeper discussions, and incorporate reading comprehension skills.

We use Frankenstein’s monster to connect students to ideas of design and ethics in science.

We role-play as our own Dr. Frankenstein, collecting a series of items to cobble together to build our

What We’ve Seen after These Lessons

How We’ve Done It Using science as a support to engage students with complicated texts: Beowulf is a classic story filled with monsters, a venomous firebreathing dragon, undersea scrimmages, and battle descriptions including torn limbs and bloody, severed heads—like your basic video game.

Yet many of the high school students we’ve worked with were completely turned off because they found the language too difficult. Even when trying a variety of drawing and role-playing activities, it was still hard to get all of our students to completely engage.

So we created a series of science lessons to make the story more tangible. In one lesson, students are challenged to create their own 3D model of Grendel, Grendel’s mother, or the dragon.

They must support their ideas by citing evidence from the text, and make and explain inferences where specific descriptions are not available. Students create paper robots, and learn the science behind circuitry by using LEDs to make their monsters light up. Battery-powered motors make the robots move.

Taking the lesson further, students can develop an arena where they set up their moving monsters

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These lessons draw in the students who don’t see themselves as scientists—they come to see that creativity can be a part of science. And they build confidence as they realize that science is broad—not just a singular subject. The lessons challenge the science-minded students to expand and think more creatively. And they’ve drawn many students toward independent reading and inquiry. Credit: Edutopia.org.

By Jill Suttie

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s any teacher knows, students need to be engaged with learning to absorb lessons in any meaningful way. Otherwise they can become distracted, disrupting everyone in the classroom and taking time away from instruction.

There are many ways to foster engagement, of course. But one may surprise you: holding classes outside. Findings from a new study show that learning outdoors is not just a fun, novel experience for kids, but also helps them focus once they return to the classroom.

In this study, third-grade students from two classrooms were assigned to conduct about half of their biology lessons outside (on a nearby patch of grass) and half inside the classroom during an academic year. The lessons involved things like identifying leaves and understanding the process of decomposition, and were closely matched: The indoor lessons had natural elements (like leaves and soil), while the outdoor lessons were conducted like a regular classroom (without student interaction or free play).

After each lesson, students received a short break and then continued indoors with their regular studies, like math or reading. Their level of engagement during this time was assessed by teacher ratings, independent tallies of “redirects” (how many times teachers needed to redirect students to the task at hand), and ratings of engagement based on classroom photos analyzed by someone blind to the study’s purpose.

Results showed that when the students received outdoor biology lessons, they were significantly more engaged in their next instructional period on all measures than if they’d received biology lessons indoors. This held true for different teachers, different times of day, and different times of year.

According to lead researcher Ming Kuo of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, this is an important finding with practical implications.

22 EDUCATION

“Kids can actually pay better attention in class after an outdoor lesson,” she says. “This is nice for teachers, because you don’t have to stop teaching and you still get that bump in attention.”

Not only that, the bump in attention was large— much larger than Kuo had expected. In some cases, teachers only had to redirect half as often and kids paid attention one or two “standard deviations” better—research-speak for much, much better—if they’d had an outdoor lesson rather than an indoor one. This surprised Kuo, who is used to working on highly controlled studies in a laboratory rather than field studies in a classroom.

“I thought that we would have smaller effects when we had a whole class of squirmy third graders,” says Kuo. “But maybe when every kid gets a little bit better at paying attention and at controlling their impulses, and then you put them all in one classroom, there’s some kind of synergy happening.”

What’s powerful in this study is that the children didn’t spend time wandering down a forested path.

The teachers simply changed the location of their lesson to a greener space—something that virtually any teacher at any school could do without taking away from instruction time.

“We could have taken these kids into capital-n Nature; but the kind of nature that we studied turns out to be pretty common—just a patch of grass with an access road,” she says. “The kind of outdoor setting we used is probably available for many, many schools.”

The restorative power of nature Why would being in nature benefit kids at all?

Perhaps it reduces stress, restores depleted attention, and improves immune function in children, much like it does in adults. And kids who are healthier, calmer, and less depleted may simply learn better.

Kuo’s study adds to a growing body of research on learning in nature. Prior studies have found that teaching outdoors increases students’ interest in

a subject and intrinsic motivation to learn, and may help them to retain information longer than regular indoor classes. In addition, kids like learning outside, says Kuo, and they report liking their school more when lessons are held outdoors.

“Being able to pay more attention, being less stressed, and being happier and more interested in doing the work—this can have real effects on how engaged kids are,” she says.

Still, Kuo’s study is unique in looking at what happens after an outdoor lesson—the carryover effects. And that’s important to teachers who may be reluctant to give up class time for going outside, worried their kids will lose all focus.

Kuo understands that teachers may be skeptical— even one of the teachers in her study was doubtful before the experiment started. But, if a teacher can be open-minded, she says, they should at least try it out and see what happens. Kuo argues that the current educational movement to reduce student outdoor time—or enrichment programs like music, art, and theater—is wrong-headed.

“You can add as much instructional time as you want and keep pouring, but once that cup is full, it’s full,” she says. “You have to find ways to give kids more capacity to take things in, before it makes sense to spend any more time with instructional teaching.”

Being in nature seems to increase that capacity, suggesting yet another way kids benefit from being outside. Kuo’s work implies that kids need nature, maybe more than we think. She hopes that future researchers will study whether spending more time in nature produces even greater benefits.

In the meantime, it’s pretty clear that it doesn’t take much nature to make a difference.

“Kids are so starved for nature that you can take them out into a not-very-natural area, give them a lesson without really engaging much with nature, and even this pretty small, pathetic dose helps them function remarkably better,” says Kuo. “That feels like a big ‘Wow!’ to me.”

Georgetown University in Qatar Creating Global Leaders

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eorgetown University in Qatar’s unique learning environment capitalizes on expert faculty, world class facilities, and a history of service. During their four year Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service degree program, students follow the same curriculum as Georgetown’s campus in Washington, D.C., while interacting with a diverse student body representing more than 40 nationalities.

International History: Students investigate the breadth and depth of human activity by studying intellectual, economic, social, and cultural dimensions of societies and states.

International Politics: Students examine how governments and non-state actors compete and cooperate with one another on issues including policy, strategy, and security.

Student Life and Experiential Learning In addition to their in-class learning, students can travel to new countries for service learning opportunities and community engagement programs. They can also spend a semester abroad at Georgetown’s campus in Washington, D.C., or a host of other respected institutions, allowing them to engage with different cultures and countries while gaining academic credit.

GU-Q’s Education City campus offers an internationally recognized undergraduate degree that enables students to critically analyze, communicate, and make decisions in a rapidly changing global landscape.

GU-Q graduates have ventured into every industry—from diplomacy to energy, education, finance, and media.

At GU-Q, students can major in one of four areas: Culture and Politics: Students explore the connection between culture, knowledge, and power by studying the construction of political and cultural identities.

International Economics: Students learn about markets and economic relationships among countries and how to evaluate the effects and success of policies targeting the economic welfare of individuals, firms, and countries.

Admissions Students interested in finding out more about GU-Q’s degree program, facilities, and the application process, should visit the university website. Potential applicants

can contact the office of admissions for personal consultations, or join one of the many events or free workshops on offer to help build interview and essay writing skills.

Financial Assistance GU-Q is committed to providing an affordable world-class education for every student and to meet demonstrated financial needs through a combination of financial aid.

By Mark Bertin

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s the school year looms, it’s easy for parents like me to feel a sense of intense pressure. We may worry, sometimes for valid reasons, about our children’s academic progress, independence, and social life. We get caught up in micromanaging and ruminating instead of staying grounded and clear-sighted in our planning.

How do we reduce the pressure and still give our children what they need? A long-term focus on the resilience of our children—their ability to overcome challenges independently—is what can really help them thrive in school.

As a developmental pediatrician, I believe it’s the proven basics that matter most for a child’s resilience: their belief in their own self-efficacy, strong selfmanagement skills, and reliable relationships. If we can let go of other pressures created by our busy family life, fads and trends within our communities, and information overload on the Internet, we can confidently focuws on the tried-and-true instead.

Here’s what child development research shows builds resilience in our kids.

1. Consistent relationships Dr. Robert Brooks, one of the foremost experts on resiliency, emphasizes the benefit of having at least one “charismatic adult” in your life throughout childhood. Dr. Brooks defines this vital role as someone from whom a child gains strength and who meets their emotional needs. Healthy relationships of this kind start with consistency, positive feedback, and low-key, fun time together.

So, before filling up your calendar with extra activities, protect family time, play time, and social time in your child’s weekly schedule. For example, research shows that in families who eat meals together more frequently, adolescents have higher well-being and better relationships.

Unstructured play time helps kids build relationships and contributes to the development of their socialemotional and self-management skills—which is why the American Academy of Pediatrics recently issued a recommendation that physicians “prescribe” play for children.

2. A sense of self-efficacy In everyday life, encourage your children to believe in their own strengths—whether around their behavior, a sport, creativity, or whatever you else you see—by praising and valuing them yourself, particularly when they find school challenging. Perhaps even more

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importantly, notice and comment on their hard work when you see it. When children hear that solid effort leads to success, rather than getting the message that they should be smart and get good grades, they persist more. This helps them become more resilient when they suffer any setbacks in doing their schoolwork.

Most children are also driven by short-term achievements and have a hard time persisting when they don’t taste success. They will be more motivated when they focus on incremental goals that sustain their interest and sense of accomplishment, rather than protracted long-term plans. For example, if your child has been struggling in French, “successfully stick to your new study plan this month” may be more motivating then “get a B+ in French this year.”

3. Self-management skills “Executive function” skills include all mental abilities that allow us to envision the future, organize our lives, persist at long-term tasks, and make plans. Since these skills only mature as we become adults, it isn’t typical for younger children and even many teens to manage their academic lives independently until they learn how from adults.

Without these more concrete managerial abilities, our children may find that success is elusive. Because of that, many require direct guidance around academic routines right up until they show themselves capable.

In fact, what appears to be poor effort on their part often reflects a lack of knowing what to do next, or how to adjust and stick to a plan.

By understanding how executive function develops, we can accept the reality that many students need involved parents and teachers to figure out how to study, manage time, and handle whatever hurdles they encounter around school. Teach selfmanagement skills by creating detailed routines around homework, managing projects, writing

assignments, and studying, and then assist children in maintaining those plans. We can change the course of an entire school year by establishing useful academic habits right from the start.

4. Addressing skill deficits Whenever children fall behind, it’s vital for their future that we intervene early. Around executive function, language, reading, and anywhere else, the sooner children catch up, the better. That catch-up requires that we honestly, compassionately evaluate where work is needed, then implement appropriate supports. Many students require parents and teachers to lead and initiate these interventions, since problem-solving and self-advocacy are also part of their (still-maturing) executive function.

One specific way to improve executive function is through mindfulness—a focused, nonjudgmental attention towards everyday experience that can be developed with practice. Children can learn mindfulness through formal meditation, such as a few minutes built into bedtime. More informally, it can grow from paying detailed attention to activities like eating or walking in the woods. Whatever works for your family, these types of practices are also something to consider when prioritizing family time.

While nothing is guaranteed, focusing on these proven basics—healthy relationships, emphasizing effort, self-management skills, and early intervention—is bound to make a difference to your children. While countless other details, plans, and challenges will no doubt be part of their school year, it’s their resilience that will provide the strength to persist through it all. As a parent, coming back to this simple framework when you feel off balance or overwhelmed will help you let go of any pressure to do even more. And you can rest assured that you already are setting up your child for a successful school year.

By Lory Hough

P

rofessor David Perkins likes to tell this story: Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi was getting on a train. One of his sandals slipped off and fell to the ground. The train was moving, and there was no time to go back. Without hesitation, Gandhi took off his second sandal and threw it toward the first. Asked by his colleague why he did that, he said one sandal wouldn’t do him any good, but two would certainly help someone else.

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enough to be pretty sure that hand is going to go up as soon as you got started on this topic, and so it does, with an annoying indolence. All right. You gesture toward the hand, Let’s hear it.

“The student: ‘Why do we need to know this?’”

As a teacher, Perkins says he hates that question.

Teachers work hard at what they do, and the question is disrespectful. Yet, he admits, the question is actually a good one — an “uppity version” of what’s worth learning in school. (It’s also one he admits having asked once or twice himself.)

“When that ballistic missile comes from the back of the room, it’s a good reminder that the question doesn’t just belong to state school boards, authors of textbooks, writers of curriculum standards, and other elite,” he says. “It’s on the minds of our students.”

That’s why Perkins decided to devote an entire book, and many lectures and discussions, to how that question gets answered.

These days, he says we teach a lot that isn’t going to matter, in a significant way, in students’ lives.

There’s also much we aren’t teaching that would be a better return on investment. As a result, as educators, “we have a somewhat quiet crisis of content,” Perkins writes, “quiet not for utter lack of voices but because other concerns in education tend to muffle them.”

These other concerns are what he calls rival learning agendas: information, achievement, and expertise.

Information

As Perkins writes in his new book, Future Wise, “People cherish the story as a marvelous example of a charitable act. And so it is, on a small scale, seizing a singular moment.”

But as he also points out, and as he told an audience at the Future of Learning institute held this past summer at the Ed School, it was more than that: It was also a knowledgeable act. By throwing that sandal, Gandhi had two important insights: He knew what people in the world needed, and he knew what to let go of.

Educators, Perkins says, need to embrace these same insights. They need to start asking themselves what he considers to be one of the most important questions in education: What’s worth learning in school?

What’s worth learning in school? It’s a question that students have been lobbing at teachers for years, in a slightly different form.

“In the back of the class, there’s that idly waving hand,” Perkins writes. “You’ve been teaching long

For starters, most education has become a mastery of a very large body of information, even if it’s not what Perkins calls lifeworthy — likely to matter, in any meaningful way, in the lives learners are expected to live.

“It’s nice to know things. I like to know things.

You like to know things,” Perkins says. “But there are issues of balance, particularly in the digital age. The information in textbooks is not necessarily what you need or would like to have at your fingertips.” Instead, even though most people would say that education should prepare you for life, much of what is offered in schools doesn’t work in that direction, Perkins says. Educators are “fixated” on building up students’ reservoirs of knowledge, often because we default to what has always been done.

“Conventional curriculum is chained to the bicycle rack,” he says. “It sits solidly in the minds of parents: ‘I learned that. Why aren’t my children learning it?’

The enormous investment in textbooks and the cost of revising them gives familiar elements of the curriculum a longer life span than they might perhaps deserve. Curriculum suffers from something of a crowded garage effect: It generally seems safer and easier to keep the old bicycle around than to throw it out.”

As a result, “the lifeworthiness of the multitudinous facts and ideas in the typical curriculum is spotty,” he says. “It seems not to have been thought through very carefully.”

And simply having a vast reservoir of knowledge isn’t helpful if it’s not being used. “Knowledge is for going somewhere,” Perkins says, not just for accumulating. But too often, we tend to focus on short-term successes — scoring well on a quiz, acing a spelling test. Unfortunately all of that test knowledge, all of that accumulated knowledge we thought was worth knowing, becomes useless if not used.

“The hard fact is that our minds hold on only to knowledge we have occasion to use in some corner of our lives,” Perkins writes. “Overwhelmingly, knowledge unused is forgotten. It’s gone.”

Here’s where, during the Future of Learning session, Perkins asked the audience to think about something they learned during the first dozen years of schooling that really matters in their lives today, beyond basics like learning to read and not including specialty professional skills.

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“The frightening thing when I have these conversations is how hard it is for people to answer,” he says. “I find that frightening. It also says a lot about the current state of education.”

Take mitosis, the process of cell division. During the Future session, he asked everyone in the audience — hundreds of people — to raise their hands if they had studied mitosis in high school. Pretty much every hand went up. He asked how many people remember, basically, what it is. About half went up. He then asked how many have used their knowledge of mitosis in the last 10 years. One hand went up.

Perkins acknowledged that he personally finds mitosis fascinating and stressed that with learning, there should always be room for passion, “but in terms of generalized education and what everyone should learn, something like mitosis doesn’t score well.”

Achievement Just as educators are pushing students to build a huge reservoir of knowledge, they are also focused on having students master material, sometimes at the expense of relevance. This happens, for example, with the achievement gap.

While Perkins is quick to say that the achievement gap is a highly important problem that should be taken seriously, in general, he says, “achievement” is about mastering a topic and less about providing life-worthy content. The achievement gap asks if students are achieving X. Instead, it might be more useful to look at the relevance gap, which asks if X is going to matter to the lives students are likely to lead.

“If X is a good mastery of reading and writing, both questions earn a big yes!” Perkins says. “Skilled, fluent, and engaged reading and writing mark both a challenging gap and a high-payoff attainment. That knowledge goes somewhere.

However, if X is quadratic equations, the answers don’t match. Mastering quadratic equations is challenging, but those equations are not so life-worthy.” Perkins says we can fill in X with thousands of topics that make up the typical curriculum, such as geography. Students are drilled to remember state capitals and major rivers and rewarded as “achieving” when they score well. And while it’s nice and sometimes useful to know those things, Perkins argues that instead, knowing how the location of rivers and harbors and other features of the land have been shaped and continue to shape the course of history offers more in terms of lifelong usefulness — more so than “a bag full of facts. All that talk about achievement leaves little room for discussing what’s being achieved.”

Expertise And then there’s what Perkins calls “the Holy Grail” of learning in school: becoming an expert. The typical math curriculum is a good example of how we want learners to move toward expertise in a subject, with little regard for usefulness. Arithmetic leads to algebra, including many “hardly used twists and turns” of advanced algebra, then to geometry and calculus, “an entire subject that hardly anyone ever uses,” Perkins writes.

Unfortunately, if someone questions whether this expertise serves students well and instead suggests more life-relevant topics, Perkins says the common reaction is: “We’re sacrificing rigor!” But that doesn’t have to be the case. Instead of building during the first 12 years of schooling toward expertise in an advanced topic like calculus that hardly ever comes up in our lives, Perkins says students can instead become “expert amateurs” in something like statistics — a rigorous topic that is also used in daily life. In fact, expert amateurism works great, he says, in most of what we do in our lives — raising children, filing taxes, appreciating art, understanding insurance rates, or dealing with our own health care.

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Perkins is very clear that expertise in a specific field is not bad; in fact, he encourages it and assumes it will happen at the college or university level. But he advocates that in today’s world, younger students need to first master the fundamentals of key learning and then decide where they want to specialize.

So we come back to the question: What is worth learning? In his book, Perkins promises that he is not going to answer that question, at least not in a tidy way.

There’s no list of 1,000 things we must know or teach. Perkins says there would be no way to create a definitive list because there are lots of things worth learning at any given time or for a specialized career or even simply because we enjoy learning.

Instead, he does know that the encyclopedic approach to learning that happens in most schools that focuses primarily on achievement and expertise doesn’t make sense.

“The fixation on the heap of information in the textbooks is itself part of the problem because the world we are educating learners for is something of a moving target,” he says.

Historically, the first 12 or so years of schooling have focused on educating for the known, “the tried and true, the established canon,” he writes. “This made very good sense in the many periods and places where most children’s lives were likely to be more or less like their parents’ lives. However, wagering that tomorrow will be pretty much like yesterday does not seem to be a very good bet today. Perhaps we need a different vision of education, a vision that foregrounds educating for the unknown as much as for the known.”

And to do that, Perkins says we need to rethink what’s worth learning and what’s worth letting go of — in a radical way.

“We do kind of need to blow up the system and start fresh,” he says. “Well, maybe not blow up the whole thing, but at least some corners.”

One of those corners is the drive to educate through high-stakes testing, he says.

“It’s clear that NCLB has not worked well,” with pressures on teachers and students, sometimes leading to instances of cheating and maneuvering. With high-stakes testing, he says, there’s a fixation on “summative” versus “formative” assessment — evaluating students’ mastery of material with exams and final projects (achievements) versus providing ongoing feedback that can improve learning. “You end up shooting for the Big contest, the Big test, at the end of the year,” he says. “It’s a distortion.” As a result, “students are asked to learn a great deal for the class and for the test that likely has no role in the lives they will live — that is, a great deal that simply is not likely to come up again for them in a meaningful way.”

Perkins stresses that he isn’t taking a stance against assessment, which he says is critical for learning. Instead, “it’s more about how assessment is made. This is a vote for a richer form of achievement.”

To be fair, he says, the assessment “game” as it’s usually played in education seems perfectly reasonable — at first. Tests “are socially pretty efficient. You can distribute them widely and score them efficiently,” he says. “We give those tests.

We evaluate those tests. But that makes for shallow learning and understanding. …

You cram to do well on the test but may not have the understanding. It unravels.”

Instead, we should be moving away from an understanding of something — the information on the test, the list of state capitals — to an understanding with something. With the latter, he says, students are able to then make connections to other things. For example, rather than just learning facts about the French Revolution, students should learn about the French Revolution as a way to understand issues like world conflict or poverty or the struggle between church and state. Without those connections, Perkins says he’s not surprised that so many people have trouble naming things they learned early on that still have meaning today or that disengaged students are raising their hands, asking why they need to know something.

“And students are completely right,” he says. “First-graders are very interested [in school], but over time, engagement slides and slides. There are often multiple reasons why, but one is that they don’t see the relevance of what they are learning.

They don’t see how it serves their lives.”

Growing up in Farmington, Maine, a small town with just under 5,000 residents, Perkins remembers it feeling safe and peaceful, a great place to come of age. He also remembers being bored with school through eighth grade.

“I got excited in high school when I encountered a range of topics treated at a higher level,” he says. But, he acknowledges, he was probably unique. “I was lucky, I think, in that I’m not so much the kind of person that Future Wise was written for.

I like a lot of knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Algebra, history — I can really get into those things. I don’t have to ask myself how is this going to be enlightening my life.”

Still, despite his own experience, he says that in the bigger picture of learning, we need to remember Gandhi.

“As the train started up and Gandhi tossed down his second sandal, he showed wisdom about what to keep and what to let go of,” Perkins says. “Those are both central questions for education as we choose for today’s learners the sandals they need for tomorrow’s journey.” Courtesy: www.gse.harvard.edu

Ideas that shape your world start here

C

arnegie Mellon University attracts a certain type of student: motivated, inventive, and driven to make a difference. Students come to Carnegie Mellon to learn, create and innovate with the very best.

They leave with the passion, connections, credentials and lifelong friends who will help them change the world.

Programs of study CMU-Q offers undergraduate programs that are ahead of the curve, in fields at the forefront of technology, innovation, scientific discovery and economic growth. All undergraduate majors require four years of full-time study, after which students earn a bachelor of science degree.

Biological Sciences: The undergraduate degree uses interdisciplinary approaches to provide students with both intellectual breadth and depth of exposure to modern research biology. Students enhance their undergraduate laboratory learning through discoverybased research at an on-campus lab or collaborating institution. The research experience helps students apply the critical thinking and problem-solving skills they learn in the classroom.

Work that matters For more than a century, Carnegie Mellon University has challenged the curious and passionate to imagine and deliver work that matters. A private, global university, Carnegie Mellon stands among the world’s most renowned educational institutions, setting its own course with programs that inspire creativity and collaboration. Consistently top-ranked, Carnegie Mellon has more than 13,000 students and 110,000 alumni worldwide.

At the invitation of Qatar Foundation, Carnegie Mellon joined Education City in 2004 to deliver select programs that will support and contribute to the longterm development of Qatar. Today, Carnegie Mellon Qatar offers undergraduate programs in biological sciences, business administration, computational biology, computer science, and information systems.

About 400 students from 38 countries call Carnegie Mellon Qatar home.

Information Systems: The Information Systems Program is based on the internationally recognized degree program from Carnegie Mellon’s Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, offering the rare combination of academic rigor and the intellectual freedom to work outside of traditional disciplinary boundaries. The program teaches students to analyze, design, implement and test information systems, with a strong foundation of professional communications, quantitative analysis and organizations.

Learn by doing

Business Administration: The Carnegie Mellon model of management science was developed over 50 years ago and involves analytical decision-making in complex business environments. Today, nearly all leading business schools include elements of the Carnegie Mellon model in their curricula. The program emphasizes a quantitative, analytical approach to problem solving in the core areas of accounting, finance, economics, marketing, operations, management information systems and business communications.

A world class education in Qatar

students acquire skills that transcend technological trends. The program encourages creativity and provides the fundamental skills to develop new technologies: mathematical reasoning, algorithmic thinking, and programming. A strong theoretical component provides the formal tools to remain current as technologies and systems change.

Computational Biology: At the forefront of scientific discovery, computational biology is driving significant advances in fields like biomedical imaging, genomics and proteomics. Carnegie Mellon realized the potential of computational biology early on, offering one of the first degree programs in this area in the United States. A highly selective and rigorous program, the curriculum is grounded in the disciplines of biology and computer science, with a strong component of physical science and mathematics.

Computer Science: Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science is one of the world’s top-ranked programs. Throughout their undergraduate education,

Students at Carnegie Mellon Qatar learn beyond the classroom through a slate of unique enrichment opportunities. Most students choose to study abroad during their four-year education, and many travel on academic trips that enhance classroom work. Students who intern receive on-the-job experience, which adds an important dimension to their undergraduate education.

Research is part of the fabric of a Carnegie Mellon education. Students engage in a wide variety of research endeavors, such as independent studies, senior and honors theses, summer internships and funded projects as junior researchers.

Small campus, big spirit The CMU-Q student body is exceptionally diverse, representing 38 nations. Students form a busy and active community, participating in clubs, organizing large-scale events, traveling for service and academics, and competing in local and international contests. The low student-to-professor ratio means students receive unparalleled individual attention.

Graduates who make a difference Graduates from CMU-Q are highly sought-after: most choose careers in top organizations, while a significant number pursue graduate studies at international institutions. With 11 graduating classes, the total number of alumni is nearly 800.

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By Emily Vardanega, ASD Alumnus Class of 2018

T

o leave Australia and travel to the Middle East was a memorable trip. I moved from my country of origin to undertake an extraordinary life in Qatar.

My introduction to the American School of Doha (ASD) was in Grade 5 as an Aussie expat in 2011 and thus, my adventure was underway.

ASD’s journey begins in a caring, comprehensive community, and this year we celebrate the school’s 30th anniversary. The school offers an American curriculum; Pre-Kindergarten to Grade 12, highly suitable for expatriate families and Qatari nationals. Our prestigious school, forged in diversity, provides a strong sense of community with a commitment to facilitating academic success and personal growth based on strong values.

Operating under the policies and bylaws of a twelvemember Board of Directors and a nine-member Board of Trustees, chaired by the U.S. Ambassador, ASD has served students in both originality and unity.

Founded in 1988 and opened in a villa to serve a small number of expatriate families, ASD began to supply a high-quality American education demanded in Qatar. With the explosive growth of Qatar in 2005, new expansion projects resulted in the construction of Middle and High School campuses on adjoining land, and a complete transformation of the Elementary School. From 2013-2017, ASD underwent a $35M Campus Improvement Project to increase capacity and improve facilities across the entire school. This project maximized the school’s

footprint allowing for an increased enrollment up to 2250 students from Pre-K to Grade 12. The surge of growth has resulted in the creation of a progressive school with impressive facilities and varied programs. The new facilities have also allowed for participation in a range of sporting, cultural, or social activities on the ASD campus.

The student body can maintain their passions in many sporting and artistic activities. ASD has a full-sized soccer pitch, and a smaller soccer field for Elementary students. Additionally, two twenty-five-meter swimming pools; one outdoor and a larger indoor pool suitable for competitive events, the only baseball diamond in Qatar, a 400 meter track, and an indoor climbing wall. The lush campus of twenty acres is one of the greenest and most enjoyable in all of Doha.

ASD’s academic programs have been a forerunner in professional learning and curriculum development, and the school enjoys a regional and worldwide reputation for excellence. Elementary and Middle School students follow a U.S. standards-based curriculum. High School students can choose from the Advanced Placement program (AP) and the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma program as part of their American High School diploma program. ASD is fully accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC) in conjunction with being a certified IB Diploma School.

Since 2011, my character has been shaped by my school’s values and diversity. ASD has empowered me to respect others’ opinions and fight to overcome adversity.

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Any graduate of ASD has the opportunity to develop into a magnificent young person. Individual’s taught in this international setting have been provided a unique insight upon differentiating societal views, the value of acceptance, and the positive actions required in this changing world. Whether we remain here in Qatar or return home to study, ASD Alumni are prepared to make a difference as positive active global citizens.

ASDoha Celebrating

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American School of Doha One Community Learning Together

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Ideas that shape your world start here.

Carnegie Mellon University attracts a certain type of student: motivated, inventive and driven to make a difference. Students come to Carnegie Mellon to learn, create and innovate with the very best. They leave with the passion, connections, credentials and lifelong friends who will help them change the world. www.qatar.cmu.edu

Biological Sciences • Business Administration • Computational Biology • Computer Science • Information Systems