Teach Middle East Podcast
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Teach Middle East Podcast
Future-Proofing Students: Bloom World Academy's Bold AI Initiative With John Bell
Bloom World Academy in Dubai has implemented a pioneering AI qualification program, reflecting their innovative approach to education while maintaining a balance between technology and traditional values.
• School starts at 9 AM rather than earlier, respecting students' sleep needs and family time
• Offers flexible schedules (8 AM-5 PM) with optional enrichment activities
• Creates a family-first environment with spaces for parents to work and socialise
• Uses Learning Achievement Passports for customised learning plans for every student
• Implements "stage not age" grouping based on ability rather than strictly by age
• Partners with Code School Finland for an AI certification program
• Teaches AI to all students from age 4 through a spiral-based curriculum
• Balances "authentic intelligence" and "artificial intelligence"
• Emphasises communication, general knowledge, and adaptability alongside technical skills
• Maintains 90% teacher retention through wellbeing initiatives and planning time
Visit bloomworldacademy.ae to learn more about our approach to education and AI integration.
John Bell's Bio: A highly experienced senior educationalist who has worked in the education sector for more than 42 years, Mr John Bell has led Bloom World Academy since its founding in 2022. Now in his third year as Principal, Mr Bell continues to bring academic rigour to life, delivering an educational experience that ensures every child is academically successful, socially happy, and emotionally attuned and resilient.
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Speaker 2:Hey everyone, lisa Grace here welcoming you to another episode of the Teach Middle East podcast. Today I'm talking all things AI with John Bell, principal of Bloom World Academy, Dubai, and they have a unique program happening at their school where they're offering a qualification in AI to their students, and I'm very, very curious to find out why they've taken this turn. We can understand why because AI has become pervasive, but it's quite unique to see a school take the bull by the horns and charge forward with innovation and with implementing a course specifically for their students. John, welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 3:Hello, thank you. Thank you for inviting me.
Speaker 2:You're most welcome. I was talking to you off air about Bloom World Academy. I think our listeners would love to know what makes Bloom World Academy unique, what makes it a special place of learning.
Speaker 3:Well, that's a lovely way of putting it. We are a special place of learning. Since the very beginning September, august, 2022, we've been able to put a vision into action. It was about doing things differently. Because of many reasons, not least my own personal experiences of working in schools for many years all over the world and in Dubai I didn't think we were getting it right in education. I still don't think we're getting it completely right in education in many schools all over. So we set about trying to right some of those wrongs.
Speaker 3:In some regard, we've looked at everything we offer absolutely everything we offer and we've asked the question right from the very beginning is why bother? Why do this? What is the difference and what impact? Mostly, it's the most important question what impact does that have for children, for learners, for students, that everything's done with that in mind? So the first thing that made us unique they've got the headlines was we chose I didn't think it was controversial if you grew up in London when I did in the 1970s, everybody went to school at nine o'clock in the morning.
Speaker 3:We decided, we asked, we asked KHDA could we start at nine o'clock in the morning? We thought that was a wise choice, primarily because of traffic in Dubai just to beat the traffic. Sleep patterns, yeah, arguably, I think children get over at 6, 6.30 or going to school that early. I remember vision of seeing on various roads in Dubai. My job taught me previously. My last job taught me to different schools children sleep on school buses and I thought it's not a good start to the school day. And last but not least, I didn't think it was a great start for teachers to be up so early. If you're going to be a great teacher, you need to be up super early to be really, really on top of your job. With that combined, we were given permission to start at nine. Therefore we go to four, but then we offered something even more unique I think it'd be more unique or as unique a flexible day.
Speaker 3:So we actually offer a day that actually really goes between eight o'clock and five o'clock and parents can choose and children can choose what they do in that first hour of the morning or that last hour of the day. They can stay, they can go um or they can do bellas, which are our enrichment activities, all part of significant part of their learning. So that was our big bit of kit to start with. But what was inside? We talked about customized learning was the and everybody talks about personalized learning but frankly it's impossible. You cannot personalize to the nth degree when you're running a busy institution. So you customize, you give children some things. That's slightly different and that was all based around a couple of big things really.
Speaker 3:We give every child a learning achievement passport. Applying every child has an independent or individual plan here or targets the most stable, do the least able to everybody in between, which is most of us. We've all got a plan, a learning achievement passport, so it is individualized. Some of the things we offer, suggesting there is similar to, you know, the child next door. But we decided that was the way to go. That was based on previous experience of working with some really challenging children in london. We had to do that, so we just brought that here, but on a bigger scale.
Speaker 3:And last but not least, I suppose we decided, once you were here, student agency. We decided to really bring student agency alive, give them choices so in the afternoons the younger children can choose what they do. You know it's a planned, it's managed, it broad and balanced, but we give them pathway choices and within those pathways we group children together, based on a concept called stage not age. So we put sometimes children who are maybe six years old with the nine-year-olds, because their level of mathematics may be similar. Why not put them together? Why not challenge them? That also works with languages too. There are some big things. So we put it all together, get this custom, customized approach.
Speaker 3:But what makes us a special place is that we reflect and we review, and what we've discovered fundamentally is not everything in the past is bad and not everything in the future is necessarily going to be good. Some things that were done in the past. We're a really recycled school in many regards. We look at things, we shine them up and we reuse them in our relationships with children. Our big one, biggest probably of the lot is our relationship with parents. We invite them into school. We have cafes. We have people parents that is who work here all day long. It's their base. You know the internet cafe concept. We have parents in and out of school. We have a rigid, strict security code or expected levels of conduct in the school. But parents are in school, not necessarily learning alongside their children, but we offer regular, very regular, at least twice a week parent workshops so parents learn alongside their children.
Speaker 3:I can go on. So it's a combination of things that we all put these, all these things together some recycled, some new, like ai, that we're going to talk about and put them all together, and it's our bloomworld academy customized approach, which I have to say thank you know, thanks to opportunities like this, people are really beginning to appreciate and we're getting quite a lot. I mean, we're as busy as we can be. We're full in two years. We are full. We have waiting lists to come into school, so we're striking a chord with some families out there yeah, I love the fact that you start later.
Speaker 2:I've got kids in school. I'm obviously based in Abu Dhabi, so my kids can't go to Bloom. But that early morning is a killer. And if you don't have that early morning wake up chronotype, you really struggle because you're thinking that you're most awake at night. But the world wakes up early and the school world starts early. So it's quite difficult for a child who sleeps at maybe a later time than normal to get up. And that's why they're asleep on the bus is because really they're just tired. They just need some extra shut-eye.
Speaker 3:Of course they do. But there's also something else going on, which is about the culture of the expat lifestyle. Uh, in jubai and abedali I know down the same to some extent, which is people do things in the evenings. You know, people move here often for lifestyle reasons, so people do go out to eat. Children, as you probably well know we all all well know do lots of things in the evening. Sports, mainly sports clubs. There's a whole network of clubs of every shape, of every size, and children are doing that after school. So sometimes you know just pure energy levels. You know, some of these youngsters are working, physically working. You know, as an adult I think we would feel it to do the amount they do. It's great that they're doing it. It's a lifestyle choice. But you have to be mindful. If you're playing football, if you're playing basketball to nine o'clock in the evening, the time you get home, the time you get to bed, the time you get up, and these are, you know I'm talking teenagers here. But when you go younger, you go younger. Everybody's doing something.
Speaker 3:We do many things in school. Our extended day was designed to be a one-stop shop approach so parents could do something after school the sports, for example, or creative stuff or languages, and maybe that would just be enough. They don't have to drive across Dubai to go to do another club Some still do. But it was also an acknowledgement genuinely of family values, because you know it's called breakfast, you know, eat with your children, sit around the table, have a discussion about what the day ahead is going to bring, and I think those special moments are important in growing up. You remember those things with your mum, with your dad.
Speaker 3:One of the byproducts has been fascinating of the latest start, we have lots and lots of dads dropping children off less, if you like, drivers or bus travel, and I don't know where I've captured the dad market, but I think a lot of dads quite clearly are dropping children off and then going off to work and they've built their day, almost building their own day, around our times. And also we see, I do see transactions going on in the school, parents down in the cafe areas working, you know, doing serious deals. It seems to me I don't know really what they do, but there's a lot going on, a lot of technology things going on. So there's been a lovely spin-off that we've tried to genuinely give family time, because actually our motto, one of our mottos we've got quite a few, but one of our big ones is that we are a family-first school and we also believe strongly that you know families that come, and we have many.
Speaker 3:We have 88 nationalities of children, for instance, children from all over the world, no dominant culture in the school. We create our own community and with that we try to give parents that infrastructure, support that new families to the country that may not have backup, may not have grandparents down the road, we try to find all that kind of backup too, and so having time at the beginning and the end of the day and through the day for some parents to meet each other provides, I think, some kind of scaffolding to their lives as much as it does to children's lives.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's interesting because you never think of those things as considerations for school. You know, expats coming over not having a backup, kind of helping them to form that network that will help them in times of need, that's quite thoughtful of the school. Tell me a little bit more about what you are doing as it relates to teacher well-being, because if you have those days that are extended, how do the staff work into that? Do they have to come early? Do they come late? What happens around staff?
Speaker 3:All of the above. To be honest, yeah, I suppose we do have a culture of work hard, play hard kind of culture. I do accept that. I think we demand a lot of our teachers, but I feel comfortable that what we try to do in terms of their own personal well-being is two things, three things maybe, but certainly the big things are that late to start, if you're not working, if you're not taking something before, know you're expected to do one after school event per week. That may be in the morning sessions, it may be in the afternoon sessions. If that's the case, you can arrive in the building at 8.30. Okay, so Dubai style, that's a bit later than most places. And obviously after school if you're not doing anything, you can go. You can go as soon as you possibly can. So we're quite. You know we work hard during that period, but we also do other things. We have some teachers on quite flexible times. They don't teach in so early in the morning, they come in a bit later. We actually don't have everybody on the same timetable because with now our creation of a pre-university centre, that's what we've created for our older students. We've chosen those carefully. Some of their timetables are a bit longer, some in the afternoons, to fit everything in their day. They've got big days so we don't expect the teachers to actually, if they're teaching late, to come in early. So we do things like that. We also build in literally into our schedule a well-being day for teachers. We actually give them a day to take to, you know, to a deep breath day, as we sort of call it. You can take a day in lieu when you need it and and we build that into our timetable. So we have that every night and we try to do that a couple of times a year. That's quite challenging as we've got bigger. That's the demand, but moreover than all of that, it's just day-to-day care for teachers.
Speaker 3:I'm very fortunate to have a leadership team that do, I think, provide a lot of opportunities for staff, literally. I've just come out of a meeting meeting now where we're planning a mindful not everybody's cup of tea, but a mindfulness yoga session next Friday. Our Friday mornings we don't have any students in school early. Everybody starts at nine. Teachers come in a bit early and we tend to do a well-being kind of session on those days, and you can go on. We do lots of things which are we've built into the budget. For example, we've built opportunities in the budget to do team building and or social events. We do a social event every opportunity at the beginning end of term. We don't expect people to pay for that, we just provide that sort of sociability, particularly at the start of the school year when we're building.
Speaker 3:We We've got 35 new teachers starting again. We're all on growth. Currently we have a 90% retention rate, which is phenomenal remarkable for a school in Dubai. I think we have a consistent and solid for the third year now leadership team. So we must be doing some things right about people feeling the culture of working hard, playing hard, but to some extent they are heard and listened to. They have a big say in the running of the school. Democracy rules okay most of the time and I think people what we do have and I won't go on we have quite a lot of experienced teachers who are attracted to this way of working. They've done other things and our average age, I would say say for teachers is actually a bit older than some schools I've worked in in the past and I think we've, as we have with parents, we've attracted those families that have made a very conscious choice for this kind of education for their child, as we have attracted and we have no problem. We are packed with offers and applications for any job. I just think we attract those kind of teachers that want to make a difference and are quite prepared to try something in a different way.
Speaker 3:Oh, I failed to mention something really, really important. We give genuinely, yes, heavy work, heavy teaching responsibilities, but we give significant planning time within to link it through some of the ai things that we may talk about. We give notable planning time to teachers to work together and plan together. And that is because, if I go right, that's the beginning when we offer children choices in the afternoon, we can actually take some teachers out of those choices and just give them planning time because other teachers are providing the lessons. And that's particularly in junior school where traditionally you've got the same teacher delivering everything. We don't do that. That builds in time for colleagues to plan and you ask any teacher, that's their biggest stress planning and obviously for teachers of older students, time to assess and a time to give feedback and mark. So we try to build a lot of that into the working day. So, yeah, teacher-first stuff is really important for us.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's good to hear because I know schools do, as you talk about pride themselves on customization. Some say personalization, more say personalization than they do customization really but I always, as a teacher, in the back of my mind wonder, sort of okay, I understand what that means for a parent, but what does it mean for a teacher? So today's topic is about implementing ethical AI in education and in schools, and I know that you guys are doing something different with AI. Can you talk to me about how BloomWorld Academy is implementing this accredited AI course? First of all, why and how? Yeah, well, you go back a couple of years really realistically speaking, the writing was on the wall.
Speaker 3:You go back a couple of years, really, realistically speaking, the writing was on the wall, as they say. Ai was coming into town and we had to genuinely grab it. We had to. I didn't quite work out why others didn't do it. I'll be perfectly honest, I'm not particularly technical or digital-driven. I appreciate it in others not necessarily myself so much, but I appreciate the abilities of not necessarily myself so much, but I appreciate, you know, the abilities of others to to grasp this thing. But it just seemed to me and look, let's be blunt, let's be super, super blunt about this education has not moved fast enough or adapted quickly enough to the demands and needs, I think, of the current generation of young people, probably several generations worth. Actually, in many schools we are still doing the same. They do the same they may have done 20 years ago, literally literally all right topics might have changed, the dates might have changed, but the, the content wouldn't have changed or doesn't change. It really doesn't. And you've got to remember the generation of teachers that are teaching that kind kind of way have been teaching for a number of years too. So not a lot changes, despite a plethora of initiatives out there In Dubai. I think it's compounded because majority, or a significant number, is changing slowly. Abu Dhabi, just the same. A number of people who have worked here have worked elsewhere, you would think. On the surface, that means they bring things in to the country. I would argue that some of them, if they've been on the international schools circuit, may not be as had to adapt to the greater demands of students. And we're not just on that pace. Some of us are. I think we're in touch, some of us think we're in touch anyway.
Speaker 3:But going back to your point, your question, we genuinely felt two years ago AI was coming into town. There was no way this was not going to get into schools, either via the teacher and teacher planning or ultimately for the student. And what we really thought was most importantly was if you really take the gap between what's going on in the industry or creative professions, any industry the gap between what's going on there and what's going on in school is that, in my experience, 30 years of running schools is the greatest ever. It's the greatest ever. We've always played catch up with technology. We've always played catch up with the latest new element of technology. Always, schools have, but someone's going to teach this stuff and you've got to get your teachers from somewhere who are as creative and technical as the colleagues out there in industry. And they're out there and they're young and and they're not just, you know, time-served people they're creating. That's been encouraged in industry for a long time, but not so much in schools. So we sort of took that on board and I just tried tried to. As I mentioned earlier, it's not just been young people, it's been the creative and technical types that we've tried to get into the school and it was obvious we had to offer something so we can bridge that gap between education and industry.
Speaker 3:And then the other thing that schools mentioned so much is the AI ethics issue. It was always about stop children cheating, plagiarizing, and we are an ib school. This brilliant thing about an ib school is it's skills based. You know you choose your own content you can talk all day about. You know, in a school of 88 nationalities, you know when you're teaching, what you teach. Whose history do you teach? Whose geography do you teach? You know history do you teach? Whose geography do you teach? You know we've all got different perspectives and that's the most wonderful thing about an IB school. That's true internationalism. But skills unite the children. We need teachers who can teach those skills and we just felt that we can no longer really catch children out and stop them cheating.
Speaker 3:You know, a while ago you could, of course you could For many years now you could get technology to help you write a long study and you have lots of long studies in the IB framework. But AI now can write with mistakes. It can write in your style. So once you start to get to that point, you have to start thinking let's embrace AI rather than try to fight against it. So we have really looked at what skills and what elements of AI you need to understand and it was obvious you can spend any energy doing that as a student. You might as well get a certificate to go with it. Let's face it. If it moves, let's give them a certificate. You know, let's give them something in their backpack as they go through education. Let's not just wait until you're 16 or 18 or 19 to get those big exams. Let's not wait, let's get things on the journey.
Speaker 3:So we started and we're offering a number of programs. We have researched many and we decided for our oldest students we would offer a BTEC program High level. It's going to stretch us and subsequently what we've discovered is BTEC can't keep up with us. The BTEC program isn't appropriate to deliver to sort of 14 to 16-year-olds. It was much more geared to maybe 22-year-olds who want to go into the accounting industry, and I'm not exaggerating. That's how it was going. So we regrouped on this and now we are in conjunction with, in partnership with Code School Finland and, as many know, the Finnish education system is always been lauded as a great success story. We're the only school, I believe, that I've linked with Code School Finland which is effectively the Finnish system of crediting AI programs and we're delivering that program to our 14 to 16. Next year it will be our 14 to 18s and on top of that this is the most exciting news effectively we will be delivering a version of AI on what's called a spiral-based curriculum from our very youngest. So our very youngest, our four-year-olds, will be dipping into the world of AI and how to use it, and a spiral curriculum means you just come back to things year on year, but at the right level, ultimately culminating in certification. So yeah, we've delivered it now to our elders. It's really good, I mean.
Speaker 3:I'll give you an example. I know I'm talking a lot on this, but it really has worked. A group of our students have just won a Dubai-wide prize in AI ethics, debating competition, and won an internship in one of the leading law firms within Dubai. Because we have been working with them I believe not me personally on the ethics of AI, these children are informed and mark my words, we have a generation of children, much maligned, I have to say. But the teenagers these teenagers, more than any other group and I've been through many groups over the years this group will change the world.
Speaker 3:Certainly the ones we've got. They have a moral compass, they have ethical views of the world. They've grown up in a period where the environment particularly, as you know, but also AI now has asked questions of them social media, how to look after yourself on social media. For a big group of students, they get it and my job, I think, as a progressive educator, is to realize that these are the things that are going on in their lives and our ambition is that we not just protect children from these things, we encourage them to really use them as powerfully as they can.
Speaker 3:But the flip side is also to know when they're being used, when they personally are being used by AI. We do a lovely thing on. How many times has your face been seen today? You know camera recognition all over the place, in our school, on the way to school, in the supermarket, and it's, you know, when you start thinking about that. That's all AI. It's all generating information about you somewhere.
Speaker 3:Um, I think it's a big question to put to students about how they feel about that. That's the ethical side. But, and then the other side is why bother? Why do I need all this information? And the other question is okay, how do you do that? Then, how do they do that? Then the next question after this what are we going to do with it all? When you start doing that, you naturally have a program Already. I've just invented a curriculum by just asking those questions. So, yeah, a long answer to say we would have been irresponsible, I believe, not to have introduced AI to squad Flip that question into the other way around. I would be going to the rest of the world. Why aren't you doing it? And, as we found out, there's been announcements about it being compulsory within the public sector, within Dubai. You know, that's a sign. That's a sign that we have to do this well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm actually quite interested to learn as well how your teachers are using it. We talked before about time and about the fact that teachers have a lot of planning to do, et cetera, so first I want to talk about the teachers and then I want to go back to the students. But how are your teachers using AI? Do you know?
Speaker 3:Yeah, a lot. That's the answer. The quick answer is a lot what?
Speaker 2:are they doing with?
Speaker 3:it planning, mainly using it as planning tools. Um, space, you know it's really. It's um, yeah, ai, with some teachers started because they were technically able, they were interested, and that's where it started. It's like every, almost in every other walk of life, you know, people have their interests and we've got I can name the teachers who may be our champions, you know, know a bit more than the others, pure, pure personal interest. And then some of that spilled over into a classroom or classrooms. You see it genuinely, the other day, we did a big presentation to parents and we, we launched, if you like, what our school is going to be next year. We, we call it bloom. You know, mark for hashtag for our fourth year. What are we going to look at? What are the changes? And we had a it was the best from a personal point of view one we had done, uh, in terms of interactive. We asked parents questions In real time. They were able to answer. It was on the screen. We had ways of making their information graphical before our very eyes. That was one teacher that did that. She led that for us. So we've got that level of skill set.
Speaker 3:But what has happened? Slowly but surely, probably not slowly but surely, just fast but surely. Many teachers use it to plan, to circumnavigate hours and hours of research in something, key questions they want to ask in that classroom. Word banks, all those kind of things are generated in a moment. We are a school that's encouraged that to happen through training as well. So so all our students on entry, same as our teachers, all the older students get an Apple Mac and all our younger students get an iPad, and so digital literacy is taught from the very beginning with our students how to use this, how to use this machine. We also train our teachers. So Microsoft Copilot is a big bit of kit we use teachers, and another big bit of kit we use is in our juniors section of the school we have oh gosh, it just slipped my head, it'll come back to me in a moment Our teachers are using AI not just to plan but particularly to create presentations for students, interactive presentations, and I've seen most recently which I loved.
Speaker 3:This was a really good bit of AI work. We've got teachers creating historical interviews. So one class I observed they were interviewing Winston Churchill on the origins of the Second World War and there he was on the screen answering questions as Winston Churchill to their answers. In fact, you know it was a real live interview where I had generated the image, obviously used his language, but that could be misused if it wasn't the hands of a great teacher who was coaching the children on the kinds of questions that you should ask. So there was a real role for the teacher in that three-way relationship in that room. So our teachers use it a lot and a lot more, I'll be honest with you, a lot more than I originally knew when I thought, oh, this is a great idea. Some of them just looked at me and said yeah, of course we do.
Speaker 3:So that was great. They'd moved on themselves. But we definitely have, I would say, seven or eight, maybe a little bit more, champions of this, the people, the go-to people, where they really know how to manipulate the AI technology, that we have their way around things. Because at the moment, I've got to tell you we are bombarded in schools, bombarded by companies that want to come and train you up or offer AI-based services, and it's quite difficult to navigate your way through. Every one of them look quite good. So we've invented a bit of our own and we're taking our chances, of course, but you know, there's something I'm sure that by the time I've finished this meeting with you, there'll be something else on my desk about AI. It's that busy about AI all the time.
Speaker 2:Quick question Are there any downsides to this?
Speaker 3:I know, good question. I think it's the best question. I think it's really important. The downside is making sure you maintain a blended economy of learning. The downside it might be too easy to revert to ai coming up with your answer. We've got a book fair going on outside, just outside my office, uh, this week. Uh, real books. You know, touchy-feely real books.
Speaker 3:There is definitely a massive appetite with parents and with learners to still be able to, particularly with parents, though, particularly for children to be in touch with real books. Particularly they want their children to have writing skills, the lost art of cursive handwriting still in demand actually, so that old and the new come together. They still want children to be very articulate. Of course they want children to be verbally articulate. That we can do and that goes well with AI anyway, because that's about how you interrogate AI. But the downside might be maybe the lost art of handwriting, the workbook, organising yourself in a sustained, we find, with older students writing at length, and we're going to have to work hard at that blended economy to make sure that technology not just AI, by the way, but technology doesn't overdominate. So I say to parents all the time we have a blended economy here, your children will learn to write here. They will leave you a note on the kitchen table saying they're going to be late, rather than just texting you. We will have that kind of value to, dare I say, more traditional skills. So you've got to be mindful as a school that you can swing too much away, um, too much screen time too much. Revert into the quick route.
Speaker 3:However, my quip back, if I went full circle, would be to say to, I think, artificial intelligence and we have a phrase here to explain all what I've just said we talk about the other, ai, authentic intelligence. We have AI authentic intelligence and AI artificial intelligence. We value both. And we value authentic intelligence because that's the child learning and developing their own skills. They're growing their own brain to actually raise, ultimately, their levels of intelligence, to be able to manipulate and use artificial intelligence to its maximum. So the two go together, and this is how I articulate it to parents. We do authentic intelligence, we do artificial intelligence and the two can go very neatly together.
Speaker 3:But what you've got to do as an education establishment really got to do is think about it, to step back and say what do children, what do young learners really need? And you've got to be brave enough. I was in a conference yesterday, spoke to lots of people and said how did you do that? Why did you do that? And I said well, we're very lucky because we were initially a new school and we didn't have to convince anybody. We've just gone for it and we've been supported. But you've got to, as school leaders, have got to take risks in this area. They've got to take risks, I think.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it is a matter of balancing, like you said, some of the older things that we do in education with some of the more modern things, including AI, without losing what education is all about, and I think education is about humanity. So, as much as we want to embrace artificial intelligence, there is that human side. So my final question to you is apart from artificial intelligence skills or the skill to use it effectively, what other skills do you think students will need in this very tech-driven future that's ahead of them?
Speaker 3:Well, almost unquestionably and undoubtedly they need join them together, but there's probably three big things that we promote. I think we've really considered the children need in this technical world that we currently live in anyway, and goodness knows ultimately how more technical it will get in due course or technological it it will get. I still think the art of communication, what you and I do now, whether it's on a screen, um, screen skills actually are quite important skills. Can you, can you interact generally over a screen, but, moreover, those communication skills close up, there's ability to interact, to talk to anybody about anything, and I think one of the things we promote real globalization, real internationalism is based on and it went out of fashion but I'm re-promoting it general knowledge.
Speaker 3:We talk about skills skills all day long. You can learn skills. Skills do allow you to manipulate information, do allow you to access information, but sometimes you just got to know stuff. You just got to manipulate information, do allow you to access information, but sometimes you've just got to know stuff. You've just got to know stuff and if you know a little bit about whoever you're talking to, you know a little bit about their world, about the city they came from, the football team they support. If you know a little bit, it breaks down the barrier, it makes the overlap happen. I say to the students, or certainly the older ones, when you go to university and you're sitting in that university refectory, that university bar, you're going for your first sports team trial. If you can break down the barrier by knowing something about the guy next to you, where he's from, that will get you everywhere. When you go to an interview for a job and you're able to talk about the, you know the wider things in the world, really powerful, so general knowledge. We must not lose the art of knowledge gathering and that's to be interested. That allows you, I believe, to do or grow networks.
Speaker 3:Networks is a bit of a dirty word, it could just say friendships. It allows you and these children in international schools. They have friends already from all over the world. It's more of a case of how they maintain them, which ends up in a place which is, in my opinion, is we call it the skills, if you like, or the aptitude and attitude to deal or navigate through an ever-changing world. But in more colloquial terms, it's knowing what to do when you don't know what to do. Skills that combines a whole multitude of things resilience, resistance. The sun will come up tomorrow.
Speaker 3:Skills, optimism Okay, it's not the end of the world. We can solve it, because you do get crisis management, but it's often created by social media. You have crisis management it's the end of the world stuff, because something on social media is really upsetting. So there's the skills to be able to navigate away from that, solve it and then, if you'd like to develop the one thing which is absolutely fundamental in life, you've got someone to turn to. You know how do people get out of problems, how do you navigate through a difficult world. You often know someone who will help you, often maybe a member of the family, not always. It's called friendships, it called connections, and they are built on generally I think generally, but I would say they are built on general knowledge, knowing something about someone else's world, empathy. They're built on communication skills that you can articulate that and express yourself, and it's built on the ability to be optimistic and bright.
Speaker 3:And we're going to solve its skills. That's, I believe, the children. We have got a bloom world academy. We are growing those skills alongside or in parallel with the massive technical shift that's going on in education about how children learn and possibly even you know why they should learn certain things. So, going back to put a neat bow on our conversation, what I would say, where we started off about what's unique about or special about Bloomworld Academy, is that we generally, generally and genuinely it's child-centered education.
Speaker 3:We absolutely need to work with our young people and our families about those twin to me, those twin bastions of being a very competent survivor in this very challenging world. Know your technical stuff, but also know your human stuff, your interrelation stuff, your communication stuff and what is the capital of you know what is the capital of I don't know switzerland or something, just know stuff because it will help you at some point, will genuinely come into play in your life, and people love knowing that you know a little bit about them. So that's what I think is really important in more, if you like, old-fashioned skills or recycled skills that perhaps we just take for granted, but we have actually highlighted them, those future-proofing skills for children alongside the other side, which is obviously all the future-proofing skills you need around understanding AI. So authentic and artificial coming together Brilliant. Thank you so much, john. Okay, thank you very much for the opportunity. It's been nice. Good questions, I do appreciate it, thank you.
Speaker 2:You're most welcome.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the Teach Middle East podcast. Visit our website teachmiddleeastcom and follow us on social media. The links are in the show notes.
