Teach Middle East Podcast
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Teach Middle East Podcast
The AI Conundrum: Navigating Technology While Preserving Critical Thinking With Barry Cooper
Barry Cooper, founding principal of The Global College in Madrid, explores what educators should prioritise in the new academic year, with particular focus on navigating AI challenges and fostering critical thinking.
• Barry's journey from considering priesthood to banking to finding his true calling in education
• The Global College's vision of internationalism with at least 50% overseas students
• Their innovative entrepreneurship program in partnership with IE University
• Why AI is the "big ticket item" for educators this year
• The four principles for healthy AI use: understanding AI, understanding the topic, using AI as a collaborator, applying critical thinking
• The importance of focusing on student understanding rather than just content production
• How student agency and voice are central to The Global College's approach
• The need for safe spaces where students can discuss complex global issues
• Current challenges in university admissions and higher education systems
• Why teaching remains "literally the best job in the world" despite its challenges
Connect with Barry Cooper on LinkedIn to continue the conversation about education, AI, and preparing students for a rapidly changing world.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/barrycoopereducation/
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Hosted by Leisa Grace Wilson
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Twitter: https://twitter.com/leisagrace
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You are listening to the Teach Middle East podcast connecting, developing and empowering educators.
Speaker 2:Hey everyone, this is Lisa Grace and this is take two. By the way, I just tried to record without even checking what season we're in. Guys, we are in season six of the Teach Middle East podcast. Welcome, welcome to a new academic year, Welcome to a new season of the podcast, with amazing guests lined up more amazing than I deserve and I think it just keeps getting better and better.
Speaker 2:I have with me Barry Cooper, by the way. Barry's got like a whole middle name going on situation there. It's Barry Anthony Cooper. He is the founding principal of the Global College and we're going to chat unscripted today about what we need to be focusing on as educators as we go into this new academic year. So Barry doesn't even know the title of the podcast.
Speaker 2:That is how cryptic I have been, ladies and gentlemen, because I'm thinking you know what. I don't want robots on this podcast. I want to add value and I don't want people going off and rehearsing some gibberish to come and spit at me and spit at you, my wonderful listeners. By the way, before I even called Barry in, I have to say you guys have been phenomenal. Rashid, who is our editor and podcast statistician, big word actually came back and said we are now at 37 and a half thousand subscribers. So talk to me about how much you guys have made me so happy with that number. I can't imagine that many people listening to me droning on in their ears, but I thank you, I thank you, I thank you. Thank you, Barry.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the podcast thank you very much and it's actually a real pleasure for me to be here, because obviously I've read your stuff and I've listened to the podcast and seen kind of your posts on social media. So I was quite chuffed when you said, hey, do you fancy coming on? And I did, of course, to get to ask, oh, what are we talking about?
Speaker 2:so yeah, let's go for it so here's the thing with the podcast and with the people that I try to reach out to and talk to. I want to get their views, I want to get their insights on what we need to be thinking about in education, and I follow you on LinkedIn particularly, and I read your stuff. There are people that when their posts come up on LinkedIn, I don't scroll and I do scroll past others. I'm sorry, I'm human, you know the scroll is real, but I do stop and read and I love the fact that you tackle some of the bigger questions in education and I also love the fact that you're coming from a learning perspective, and I also love the fact that you're coming from a learning perspective, not an I-know-everything kind of perspective. So I love that. Barry, tell me a little bit about you, because I know you did a stint in Dubai, so I want you to take me back and give me a quick career profile.
Speaker 1:How far back do I go? Ok, a long time ago, in a part of East London far, far away, I thought I was going to be a priest. Far away, I thought I was going to be a priest and then I thought I was going to be a soldier. This is my uncle's profession and my father's profession, so it kind of this is how we, how we roll who's the priest?
Speaker 2:who's the soldier?
Speaker 1:uh, my, my uncle was a priest and my father was a soldier, briefly. And then, yeah, he, he was pensioned out on an injury and then I went to university. I loved studying and I made that mistake that we all do when we come out of university and think money and the city and banking. And I dove into a job in the city and I hated it from day one. Oh my word, I was clawing, I was tunnelling, it was can I get over the wire? Can I get under the gate? Anything I could do to get out.
Speaker 1:And a friend of mine who was leaving teaching because it wasn't for him to go and become quite a successful police officer actually he worked in the flying squad I said, look, I reckon you should think about teaching. Okay, I'll give it a go. So I thought about it. I talked to some people and then I got this part-time role at Epsom College in the South of England, on the condition that they trained me up. And so I was part of the GTP, which was the thing that came before Teach First, and I did my qualifications there and it was great, it was amazing, it was brilliant, because I got to learn from this brilliant group of people. So I shared classrooms with James Postle, for example. I shared a classroom with him. He is a really successful director of admissions is I think he's stepping back from that now. I shared a classroom with a guy called murray todd who's now the head of wellington in india. I learned from a guy called alan scatting, who's the head of the department, and I just I learned, I learned, and I learned as a young guy and this is the whole thing for me is teaching and being in a school for me has always been about me learning and then me trying to give that back as much as I can.
Speaker 1:And so I did Epsom and then moved to Scotland with my wife for 10 years and did every single job you can in the school apart from being head. So I was the director of admissions, I was director of marketing, I was the academic director, and then we wanted an adventure and moving overseas. So we did three years in Shanghai with Wellington, shanghai, which is amazing, and then helped open Brighton College, dubai, with Marco Longmore, who's an amazing guy, absolutely brilliant head, really fantastic leader. And then this opportunity opened up in Madrid and during COVID we were thinking can we get back a bit closer to home and my wife, being far smarter than me, speaks Spanish and it was kind of an opportunity for the family.
Speaker 1:So we up sticks just at the end of lockdown, came to Madrid and, working with the team behind the global college kind of worked to get it off the ground and we opened in 2022. So we've just had our second cohort through. So we're a 16 to 18 school, so we just do the IB diploma at the moment and we've just had our second cohort through. I'm really proud of them. I'm going to make a point of not talking about stats at all, because I think it's all about the individual and there's some great kids who are going off to do really interesting things and I'm very, very happy for them.
Speaker 2:So the Global College is just for post-16?.
Speaker 1:At the moment we're IB Diploma, so obviously we're a startup school. So we decided, instead of starting at the younger end, we would start at the older end and see how that developed. So it's an ongoing project.
Speaker 2:OK, so you're going to build and go down the year groups as you build that name. What's behind it?
Speaker 1:the Global College that name what's behind it, the Global College. That was when I arrived, but the thinking behind it was really to try and be as international as possible. So we're in Madrid and we, very specifically, we intentionally ensure that at least 50% of our cohort are from overseas. So we're not Spanish. So in Madrid you'll find different types of school and the international slash private schools. You'll find different types of school and the international slash private schools. It's a half and half often. So you often find it's very dominated by overseas or it's very dominated by Spanish, and so we wanted to try and have that global mindset about internationalism but also to, you know, walk the walk and make sure that we were bringing the Spanish of the Spanish school, but also bringing the internationalism and the globalism to a global school. So that's where it came about. It's kind of a name that was designed to be an intention, almost.
Speaker 2:So tell me what are some of the unique things that you guys are doing there that you think is worth talking about.
Speaker 1:The unique things we do. We've got this great relationship with IE University. So if anyone your listeners will probably know about IE. So I started life as a business school, is now a full-club university, has a vertical campus in Madrid, fantastic place run by a really energised team that I really get on with. I was fortunate, they were quite nice and they put me on their advisory board for headmasters. I think it's because we have a relationship and I was down the road. But there's some really fantastic people like Miguel Costa, who runs admissions, mark Hurtado these people who are really kind of driving a fantastic university.
Speaker 1:Now, with them, we run an entrepreneurship program. So we kill the timetable for, in total, probably about seven or eight days during the course of the first year for our dp1s and the idea is to get them connected with university professors who come in because it's ie and it's business and it's entrepreneurship. You know they do this all the time and they give us this crash course in entrepreneurship for our dp1s. And when we talked about this and we were setting this up, we said we don't want this to be about the next Bill Gates and the next Steve Jobs or whatever. We want it to be about the real importance of our entrepreneurship, things like problem spotting, problem solving, ideation, teamwork, communication, all these sorts of things. So it's as valuable to someone who wants to be a doctor as it is to someone who wants to go and study business or economics at LSE. So we really wanted to focus in on the skills, and the team are absolutely amazing, and what we do is we take the kids on that journey all the way to the point where they have to pitch an idea and they have semifinals and then they have finals. So there's a great Google campus here in Madrid and we take that over for the afternoon and we get our finalists up on stage, we have someone come in as a guest judge and then the winners I think actually this year was the top two get to pitch at the equivalent at ie university and they usually hold their own.
Speaker 1:So it's about encouraging skill development, encouraging the idea of entrepreneurship, which I think is a really important part of moving forward in our modern world, and also getting the kids doing something out of the box and doing something difficult and getting them to struggle, because sometimes it can be all about let's do the rope learning, let's do the math problem. No, no, no, no, no. I want you to go. Start me a business about ride share, go. So it's something different for them to do. That's one thing. How many things am I allowed that I'm proud of Go ahead with at least?
Speaker 1:another one, I think something I really love is that we've really worked hard to encourage a collegiate sense of agency for our students and for our, you know, the team members, and for the parents as well. So there's this constant conversation and we work on that process, that idea of always trying to find a way to say yes. So if a student or a colleague comes to me and says, hey, I've got this idea, it's a bit mad, but my first instinct is always right okay, let's keep saying yes until it becomes obvious this isn't the right thing to do. And I think from that we've had some really interesting projects, both kind of staff driven, where they take hold of their own interests, and we have projects that you know obviously involve the students but more importantly the students, where we've had people set up their own charity, set up their own social movement. We've got a school charity that's now in its third year that's being handed down from the very first year, that works on food and resource collection for natural disasters.
Speaker 1:So you may have, you know, we had something here in valencia. Previous to that there was the earthquake in morocco. So it was these things that the children really wanted to get involved with, but very student-led. And, you know, for us as a team, we tried to take a step back and be that safety net to say, ok, you've run into a problem, let's talk it through. But I think that idea is not metricised I can't measure it but trying to really foster student agency and I think that's something everyone buys into.
Speaker 2:I love the fact that you guys do that whole entrepreneurship piece. I was talking this summer to a friend of mine about, obviously, exams and his child does not want to go to university. He actually wants to become a farmer and the dad is like. The dad told me of all the people in the world that she was like can you talk some sense into him? And I was like, technically I don't think I'm the right person. Because if he's really sure about what he wants to do as it relates to farming and he really does have a plan and he's not using it as an excuse to skive off, I would say to you let him go do some courses in agriculture. Use that university money that you've saved up to give him a head start. Maybe lease him a piece of property, help him buy some equipment if he has a solid plan, because in the end he could go back and study at university later on when he's made his money or he's done what he wants to do, or he could just never go back and be an absolute smash hit success. It really is about getting to the bottom of who he is as an individual and what he aspires to do, not the whole cliche go to school, go to university, because that's what I did as a parent. So, yeah, I love that whole entrepreneurship piece, because some students might, through your program, discover, hey, do I really want to continue this or do I want to now go off and really do that idea that I've had? And when you hear from lots of entrepreneurs, they dropped out of school I'm not advocating that hello, but if that's your path, that's your path.
Speaker 2:I want to shift gears, though. This is the start of a new academic year. You are ahead, and the whole podcast is about what we need to be mindful of as we are going into this new shift, this new year. What are some of the and I want your top three. You're speaking to educators, you're speaking to school leaders, and I want your top three. You're speaking to educators. You're speaking to school leaders. What do they need to be mindful of going?
Speaker 1:into this new year. Well, I would never presume to lecture anybody about what I think they should be doing. I think every single context is different. I think every single school is different. I can tell you what I'm focusing on and then people can take kind of that not as a school, as individual.
Speaker 2:So you're not lecturing, you're saying in my opinion, this is what I think needs.
Speaker 1:Okay, all right. So my opinion I think the big ticket item at the moment is AI. I think that's the big ticket item. That's what I'm focusing on. It's day one with the team. I'm going to be talking about it next week. Day one with the students. A week after that, I'm going to be talking about it with them, about how we use it, how we understand it, how we see it, both in the short, medium and the long term, and how to do two things, I think one, maximize the benefit for them and two, avoid them falling into the traps that I think it is laying for us and it's laying for educators. It's laying quite a few.
Speaker 2:What are those traps? Don't move, stay with it, stick with it.
Speaker 1:Okay, what are those traps? I think the traps. They're how do I describe them? Cognitive. So it's about thinking.
Speaker 1:I think one of the biggest issues we have as an industry in terms of teaching is we've been metricised both by groups owning schools who are interested in the bottom line, by governments who are interested in the statistics to prove that they're better than the people who came before them. So, numbers, numbers, numbers, metrics, metrics, metrics. What matters to the people who are pulling all these strings at the is the, the things that you can show for what you do, for the people in the classroom. What we're really interested in is does you know little jenny or little timmy understand more today than they did yesterday? Now, with ai, we have this fantastic opportunity for young people to get great grades, do their homework, push ideas, just produce, produce, produce, produce, produce. It's a trap that we can fall into to just deliver and hand over a thing, to get a mark, to move on to the next stage of our lives. And that is a trap both in the immediate term, because once you get there you're not going to know what you're doing, and in the long term, in terms of the eroding of our way of educating, and there's lots of people that are talking about this. It's a very great broad space. I think what we have to be mindful of is how we encourage understanding in our students, how we encourage thought in our students. What do you think should be the one and only question that we ask our students? Not where's your essay, but what do you think about this subject? What do you think about this idea? How would you take this idea forward?
Speaker 1:I think the issue with AI is it stops conversations, it stops interactions, and only in interactions, only with experience. Experience only with action, only with questioning. And this is like. This is going back to some of my favorite philosophers you know, it's camus and sartre and heidegger, you know. Can we get to a point where students are really grasping the nettle and grasping the ideas that they have in front of them? If we step away from that, if we go and I get emails every day about AI, this and AI, that and this will improve, go away.
Speaker 1:What we want to be able to do is we want students to understand where they were, where they are, how they got there, and it's through the doing, it's through the struggle. And if they're not struggling and they're not learning through that struggle, then what's happening is we're absolving the responsibility to do. We're absolving the responsibility to do, we're absolving the decision-making. It's like going to a restaurant and asking your date what you should have. Sorry, no, you have to do the thing. Ask her what she likes and say, oh, I kind of like that as well. What do you think I might like? If I like this and this, you can have a conversation with AI. You can use it as a facilitator, you can use it as a collaborator on your project. But if you for a second hand over to these AI tools you're prerogative to have those thoughts then we're running into some dangerous ground. So that's a very kind of you know.
Speaker 1:I've been doing a lot of reading about this this summer to try and figure out what I think you know in that Schopenhauer way. It's like I'm writing a book, so I know what I think. If you know what you think, write your own book. But I think it's really important for us to, as we go into the new year, encourage thought, encourage critical thinking, encourage philosophy, encourage reading, encourage history, encourage geography, encourage politics, encourage people to look around. I think in the uae especially, you have an amazing opportunity because there are 200 different nationalities that live in the uae. You have every single opportunity to go and talk to someone from azerbaijan or kazakhstan or peru or, you know, north macedonia, wherever it may be. You have this chance to say what's it like there, tell me about you, and to build those connections, collaborations because that's what a school is is a collection of relationships, and I think the more we build on that idea, the better we're going to be able to use the new technology that will keep on coming and it's going to come like a tidal wave, and the more tools we have to deal with it, the better we'll be able to deal with that technology when it gets here and to use it for the best ends of our students, because I think as teachers, we're not.
Speaker 1:I mean for me, this is why I don't like talking about stats or things like that. I don't really care about the grades. I care about how well have I helped that student understand themselves and the world, and I think that as a mission statement for all educators is probably it's probably intrinsic in most of us who work in schools. That's what we really want. We want them to have that light bulb moment. It doesn't matter if it's an A star or a C. If it's something that's gone up from where they previously were, it's a win, with no matter what you can tell. I'm passionate about this, can't you Sorry?
Speaker 2:I'm going off on Listen. I'm here for it, but I need to ask you though I hear all the warnings that you're giving, and I can also hear my listeners in my head going. Then how do we implement it?
Speaker 1:Absolutely yeah, but that's the really difficult thing, and that's where it's not down to one person to tell everyone what to do. It's down to teachers talking to each other and coming up with ideas. I think the implementation it will be an evolving kind of you know, body of work over the coming years about how we implement these ideas, how we relate to technology, how we work with technology. I think for us at the college, we work on four principles in terms of kind of AI. So you have to understand what AI is. So both teachers and students have to have an understanding of what an AI actually is before you start using it. You have to understand the topic before you start using it. So these are, this is principles. This isn't. You know, you can't legislate this, you can't punish people for not doing it, but this is what you want them to do. It has to be used as a collaborator and anything that comes out of that has to be used through a lens of critical thought. So those are our four laws. So we based them off Asimov's laws and I've spoken about this before just in terms of how. Because you can't legislate the tech, because all of these companies are giving this to you for free, which means, sorry, we're the product, because we're building this thing for them with the interaction and with everything else. So if you're going to use it, fine, use it, but legislate yourself and use it within a framework that you know can protect yourself and can ensure that you're making headway. And this is just a starting point.
Speaker 1:I mean, I would love for people to write to me or tell me actually, you know what, barry, you need to think of this as a different way, because teaching is a team sport. I mean, we're all in this because we want kids to get better, we want kids to succeed. That's it. I mean, I don't care if I teach them or if somebody else teaches them. It's still my responsibility. And if I can help somebody else, fantastic. I know for a fact 99% of teachers would turn around and say, if I can help that guy, yeah, I will. And any idea is a good idea. Yeah, there's no such thing as a bad idea. Yeah, it might not be right. Then I mean, okay, right, okay, the 0.1% of bad ideas. But you know what?
Speaker 2:I didn't want to interrupt in teaching.
Speaker 1:It might not work then, but it might work with this, or you know, you have that other phrase that you always kick in. This could work. If so, you can then moderate it and then you can change it and you can add to it and or you can take away from it. And that's what educators, I think, in the coming year, five years, 10 years, need to be Need to be talking to one another and need to be collaborating with one another. The more we talk to each other as educators, the more ideas we get from one another, the better the outcome.
Speaker 1:I think what people often look for is they look for this central or single idea, this magic bullet. It's not there, it doesn't exist. It's El Dorado. You're never going to find it. So you have to think about what's right for me now, what's right for my students right now and I guarantee every single teacher listening to this there's someone somewhere out there who's got an idea that might help you. So the more you connect this is why I love linkedin, honestly.
Speaker 1:I know I post, but I usually post kind of sitting on a train in the morning and it's the reading of it, it's the other ideas that come back. That's where the benefit is. On socials meetups, teacher meets, all of these sorts of things. And people say, oh, if I go to a conference? I mean, I'm not a big conference fan, frankly. So I think there's lots of people standing up and giving sermons about how great this thing is. On, by the way, it only costs you 9999 pounds person. But the interactions you have, you know, go to a conference, don't go into the play talks, don't talk to people, because I guarantee you in those interactions with other teachers, you're going to get fantastic ideas and you'll meet fantastic people.
Speaker 2:I don't think I've yet met a teacher I you know I couldn't kind of get on with or see kind of how they were doing kind of brilliant work yeah, and I also wanted to touch on something that you talked about in terms of when a student uses it and they use it in the wrong way, there is this risk of cognitive decline that you know they become over reliant. How are schools because you're leading a school how are schools going to be able to manage the use? Because they might be able to block it at school, but they can't block it, block it. So what are we doing? I'd be controversial go on okay.
Speaker 1:So the reality is that there are going to be two kinds of users of ai within schools. And there are going to be users who help use ai to help them understand and get better at what they do and how they understand the thing, and they're going to be people who use AI to do their homework and turn stuff in. The people who use it to help them understand and use it in the right way, they're going to go higher and higher and higher and higher. The people who use it just to turn stuff in are going to stagnate. We are self-interested creatures as humans. This is why AI is like this buffet of free information. You know fast food, we have fast facts. You know, type it in there, you go bang.
Speaker 1:I've got an essay on the Tokyo incident in medieval Japan. But if you can get people to understand the difference between doing it this way and doing it this way, then you're going to plug into the self interest of both the students and the parents, because we, as teachers, have them for those kind of six or seven hours a day, but parents who can talk to them at home and can see what they're doing are going to be able to help reinforce that message. So I think it's about you know. I mean, that's one way of doing. It is is really kind of hitting the self-interest of the students and helping them understand that eventually doing it in this way is going to get you the great grades, the great outcomes and, you know, not necessarily even to university, but beyond and further. You're going to actually understand yourself in the world a hell of a lot better than the person who decided that they were just going to ask chat gtp to do their math and work yeah, I was on um, on Dubai Eye, talking about great inflation today.
Speaker 2:I mean, by the time this comes out, that might have been a week or more ago. But one of the questions the presenter was asking me was why do I think that there is great inflation in certain schools? And I said you know, you're really asking the wrong question. What you should be asking is why are the exams that the students are taking so high stakes at this point? Why are we waiting two years for them to sit down and put on paper knowledge that they've gained, or content let's call it content content that they've gained over the last two years? Why are we asking them to regurgitate content? It's not an application of content, it's regurgitation. And then she said oh, it's because the universities require it. And I go. That's the problem.
Speaker 2:The problem is the universities require them to have these grades, to come and take courses that will then ask them to do what? Learn more information, to spit it back out. So where does it end? And I kind of think the tail is wagging the dog. As they always say, what can be done? And I don't know. We can't answer that, but I just thought of it when you talked about people who would just get the thing to spit out the answer.
Speaker 1:I think there's something that you can play with as school leaders and this is something I tell the team as well is what we need to start with is great teaching. We have to be absolutely brilliant teachers. Grades will take care of themselves, and so I encourage everybody to focus on understanding, to focus on ensuring the students have an understanding of what they're doing, why they're doing it and rather than kind of rope learning. There are many systems across the world that you veer into rope learning, but there are many systems now that are really pushing this other side. So ib, which is what we do, is one of them. So the application side of the skill is something that's rewarded far higher at IB than it suppose.
Speaker 1:It's the slicing of the gordian knot and I don't see we have many leaders around the world who want to do that or it's pressure over time, and it's that eventual pressure over time that then cracks the cracks the stone and sets the monkey free. I don't know. Sorry, I'm using asian metaphors suddenly. Anyway, you know what I'm talking about here's a question for you.
Speaker 2:You, because I know we've talked the AI and I'm kind of. You know, you get to that saturation point with AI where, like, okay, I'm all AI-ed out, now I cannot do one more talking point on AI and yes, it's here to stay, we get it. But what else should we be focusing on as we go into this new academic year?
Speaker 1:I mean for me, I think internationalism and globalism and understanding the world in a broader sense, I think is a really important part of our role today. I think it's vaguely connected to what we were talking about in terms of AIF, but in terms of what people are digesting in their mass media and their news feeds and their social media, I think being able to have conversations, honest, open conversations, kind of chatham house rules conversations almost with young people about what's going on in the world and what they think about it, I think is incredibly important and it's becoming more and more difficult to do because people are coming at especially young people 16 to 18, you know, in fact, younger 13 plus are coming at problems with very entrenched views that need to be challenged. I'm not saying that I need to tell people what to think. I just want to make sure people know how to think and and that's the key thing, for I think for most education is helping young people to think through what's happening, both immediately, where they are their immediate context, their local context, the national context and the international context. I think you can rattle off a number of issues happening around the world that, while they don't immediately affect them, they are symptomatic of things that may, and I think it's really important for them, whichever political side you fall on, when, yeah, some of these in my mind are just, it's a slam dunk this is right, this is wrong. I'm not going to get into that now.
Speaker 1:This is not a moment for me to talk about politics, but I think for teachers, wherever we are sitting down and helping a young person understand where they are and what they think, I think is both a responsibility but also a massive privilege for teachers. I think that, for me, is kind of quite foremost in my mind, especially because, as an international school, we have students from around the world and this is where it comes from. I think, for me, they need to come to a safe space, so they need to come to a space where people can express their opinion and they can express their opinion and both are treated with respect and understanding and then discussion, but at no point is anybody made to feel that they have been kind of pushed to one side. I think that's really really important. I think another thing that's for me, I suppose, kind of from that internationalism side, it moves into things like dei, so which I will get into politics now. I've seen this be pushed to one side in America, for example, which, on top of the issues with American universities, has seen a decline in the number of people applying to American universities from overseas a whole other issue. But it's like that conversation with someone in a bar Are you a feminist? And the person scoffs at you. Well, why do you say that? Well, do you believe in inequality? Well, yeah, of course I do. Well, okay, so let's have a conversation about it.
Speaker 1:Diversity x Inclusion I think, again, it's kind of a field covered with landmines, because people are often unsure how to tread and how to work with people from different backgrounds. But, no matter what, it's our responsibility as educators to use these ideas, to move it forward and to create a safe space for young people, no matter their views, no matter their race, ethnicity, religion, views, orientation Couldn't give a monkey's. My job is that young person sat in front of me. Orientation Couldn't give a monkey's. My job is that young person sat in front of me. And I think that as well in the world we're seeing, I think is going to become more important as we progress, especially as it all ties in, I suppose, to the issues of media saturation, ai saturation and so on. So those are things that I'm thinking about anyway.
Speaker 1:And then there's I mean university applications. Oh my God, should we talk about that? What on earth is going on? So I mean America. The administration is possibly, you know, doing untold damage to its fantastic educational brands across America. People are not applying.
Speaker 1:The UK emitting more local students than ever before, so the numbers are up. So we don't know what's going on there. So the model of predicted grades is now, well, for the uk especially, is all up in the air. What does that mean for predicted grades? How do we then judge that when we're helping students apply via ucas? So there's so much that's kind of bubbling up and I think there's a great deal of uncertainty. Don't get me wrong.
Speaker 1:The guys at UCAS, who are a charity I think they're a charity or public body, they're public. I think, yeah, love them, love them to bits. I went to the UCAS conference, international One in Edinburgh this year, met loads of them. I think they're fantastic. I think they do a great job in very difficult circumstances, but it's getting the universities, ucas and everyone else to kind of work together and it's not a level playing field because there's secrets on secrets, on secrets. So, for us, trying to help a young person fulfill an ambition like well, just give us the honest information. Can we try to help this person fulfill their dream of going here and doing that? And it's incredibly difficult and I think that is something that, as a sixth form college which is effectively what we are it's what we're going to be working on this year as well. So, for us, the very first person they hear from, apart from me, when they come into the college is a director of university admissions, because it's a two-year sprint when you're doing IB.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I though, because I read the news article that talked about the amount of students that have signed up to go to university this year and how high the number has been in the UK, and I'm like it's not what I expected. If I'm honest, I actually expected the opposite. I wonder what's keeping those numbers high.
Speaker 1:What it universities are packing them in because they're underfunded and the public bodies they rely on on tuition fees to ensure their institutional sustainability. My prediction for the next three years is we'll see universities merge, um, because they won't be able to sustain themselves, especially, yeah, the smaller ones that have you may be arrived in the last kind of 20, 30 years, or the specialist ones will be kind of woven into larger institutions. I think it's almost inevitable, because we're going back to in the uk anyway, going back to whatever. It was tony blair when he pushed the idea of 50 of people going to university. I remember that, yeah, but that's great, but okay, is it sustainable? Does it actually fill a need in the country? What is it you're actually offering these people? Because you're not sending two and a half million kids off to study classics every year?
Speaker 1:These are individuals and it's one of the things I really get to my goat about government policy when they talk about universities like the one giant blob and it's not. Every single student I've ever taught is an individual and they are important and they are amazing and they deserve better and to be lumped in with this, you know, with a government statistic, and so thinking about what is they want to get out of their further education? Providing something that's useful for them, that is fit for purpose, I think, is the responsibility of government, responsibility of the institutions that are still and I still say this I think British universities offer probably, pound for pound, the best university education in the world, and I think it's true. I would put the top 10 universities in the UK up against any other top 10 universities anywhere, and I think they really do an amazing job and they teach brilliantly and they're fantastic research.
Speaker 1:And what are we doing is a you know for the brits or this thing, I suppose. What are we doing? It's? I think it's a bit of a mess and it's something that worries me about the students I have joining us now, in two years. How am I going to help them get to the place they really want to go to do the thing they really want to do?
Speaker 2:Yeah, big question. Apart from that, you're about to head back into school. We're already in staff and students going next week. What are you excited about? Oh, everything.
Speaker 1:I love it. I absolutely love it. It's the best job in the world. I mean, teaching is literally the best job in the world. You get to be in a situation where anything you do or say can change the way a young person sees themselves or sees the world. You can help someone fulfill their ambitions. You know it's kind of make a wish. You know where. That's what we're there for. Our job is to take these young people and help them achieve those ambitions.
Speaker 1:I think it's a brilliant, brilliant job. I mean I still teach as well, so I I'm still in the classroom, so I teach our history course at the college, and for me that is a great opportunity as well, because it means I get to know the kids. I get to understand as well for the college what's going right and what I'm messing up, because you know, if we're going to be completely honest and open and frank, we always make mistakes, and if I haven't made at least two mistakes by the time I have my second cup of coffee, then it's been a really good day, and so it's. It's being connected and I think what I'm excited about I think the relationships that you build every year with new people, new team members, the people that you've been working with that you love and trust because they are I mean, I'm working with some of the best people I've ever worked with. Honestly, they are absolutely amazing educators and they really not only understand the responsibility of education, but they love it as well. I think that's what, when we're looking for people that are coming in, we're really looking for people when we hire into the college that character of people who get up in the morning and go, yeah, this is going to be cool. I want people who are going to do something mad. I want people who are going to excite the students. I want people who are going to take an impromptu field trip to Toledo. I want people who are going to blow up the chemistry lab, because through that I mean not literally behind me, but it's through that that you get the experiences for the students that they, you know they learn together.
Speaker 1:And I think my my best experience in the classroom last year was I was teaching possibly the most boring lesson I've ever managed to teach. I I don't know what I was getting wrong. I was getting it was so wrong and they weren't understanding it and I was like I'm not explaining this very well, and then one of the students started talking to the other ones it was kind of like this and they, oh okay. And then someone else turned to her and said so, and then two more people turned to her and then I sat down and this student just took over the class and started teaching how she understood it, and I thought that's brilliant. That's how I'm going to do it next time, because that's what you do You're there to help other people learn, but as teachers, we're all lifelong learners and I think every day you're learning something in class.
Speaker 1:I think there are two moments in teaching that are really important. The first is when you realise you know you're not the smartest person in the room, and the second is when you realize you never were, and it's about then taking all these different ideas and bringing them together, and by the end of any lesson, they should feel stronger, and teachers should feel stronger as well, because you're learning from them as you go. Yeah, but not by romantic, I don't know.
Speaker 2:No, I think you're right. I think you are very right. I do think it is the greatest job in the world. And then people are going to be like, if it's so great, why did you leave and don't become a journalist? But you do go through phases in life and I do think what I do is tantamount to teaching as well. We're at the tail end of the podcast. How can people find you, barry, if they want to connect chat, you know?
Speaker 1:I make coffee? Um, yeah, it's. Um, no, I'm. I'm on linkedin. I'll always answer kind of request to connect, always happy to chat. I'm very happy to chat. People want to kind of, you know, just yell at each other about ai and what are we going to do. But yeah, I'm very, very interested in connecting with people. We're kind of growing our project here in spain so we're also, over time, we'll be looking at, you know, bringing people, more people, on board. So if people are ever thought about shifting tack and moving to sunny madrid, let me know you're not using this podcast to recruit barry.
Speaker 1:That is I'm using it to to meet new people and to explore new ideas. But you are a teacher. Let's just rewind a little bit and go back to I. You know I read your stuff. This is every single thing I've ever read from you always sounds to me like a teacher is writing it, no matter what. So I don't think you ever stopped being a teacher once you've done it for even for five minutes. My mate, who became a police officer he didn't stop being a teacher. He spent 10 years in the force, moved to America. He's become a teacher again. It never leaves you. It never leaves you.
Speaker 2:It's in your blood. It's in your blood.
Speaker 1:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:So, people, if you want to connect with Barry, he is on LinkedIn. Talk about LinkedIn. I'm trying to get more educators across the region to get onto LinkedIn. Some people find it cringe. I like it because I've, you know, curated a nice community on there, but I encourage them, barry, encourage them Absolutely cringe.
Speaker 1:I think it can be the most cringe-inducing experience of your life if you end up kind of just following all of these, you know tech bros or whatever bros up, kind of just following all of these, you know tech bros or whatever bros insert kind of adjective here, bro, who want to sell you lots of things, or the humble brags, or you know it's like I'm pleased to announce oh, spare me, no, stop it. But if you kind of pick the people that you're interested in, you'll find, find people on there. I follow marketers who talk about marketing in a really interesting way. I follow anthropologists. I follow philosophers. I follow people who run their own businesses. For me it was really interesting to follow different kinds of careers people who are lawyers, people who are in finance, if that's what you're interested in. For me I'm interested in what are all these industries doing so I can better advise the young people I've got in my care.
Speaker 1:I think you know my posts. I mean I just I write whatever I'm thinking about during the day, so I'll I'll put stuff out, and I might put stuff out for a couple of weeks on philosophy and ai. Or I might start talking about the importance of art. I might start talking about what we're doing at the college or interesting ideas, or often I'll go through a phase of just reposting stuff that people are putting out there. What I do find as well is often people will repost articles that are actually quite interesting. So if you've got a kind of a cohort of teachers that you follow, people will repost these articles. I've I pick these up quite often from different. It's like, oh, hello, didn't realize that, fantastic. And you start to pick up this. You know it's like an information hello, didn't realize that, fantastic. And you start to pick up this. You know it's like an information feed. And as well, if you've got a collection of people that you're connected with, who you think in the same way or part of the same industry, then you're suddenly starting to see connections where you didn't realize there were connections. And for those people who are looking at I'm not trying to pick people up for jobs in Spain, I promise no. But if people are interested in it, especially for people who might not be in the UAE, who are listening to this follow teachers in the UAE to see what they're doing as long as they're not posting about brunches every Sunday but follow people who are there, who are doing fantastic jobs in the UAE or in the wider GCC area or in Europe or in China, or the amazing schools that are now opening in Africa. So the world is your oyster as an educator at the moment.
Speaker 1:I think it's a really exciting time to be a young educator because there are international schools kind of bursting out all over the place. Brighton College has just gone into Vietnam, charterhouse has opened in Nigeria and Lagos Rugby is opening in Lagos. Wellington is opening in Lagos. So Nigeria, a country I visited a couple of times, loves some jollof rice and it's a fantastic. I mean, it's a fantastic country. It's a fantastic country with a fantastic culture and heritage. And you know, one of the first books I ever read from a non kind ofative English speaker was Chinua Achebe, and I read Things Fall Apart in 1991 or something or before that, and it's eye-opening. And all of these things are now open to young teachers who are interested in exploring where the teaching might take them. So I think the world is there on social media, whichever social media you use, but you have to have your bs detector out, yeah, because there's a lot of it so, and with ai there's a lot more oh my word, so many ai responses and ai comments and I was like why?
Speaker 1:why are you doing this? I back to this whole idea of metrics. It's like why do you want loads and loads of followers? It doesn't mean anything. What I'm really interested in is having a conversation. I think that's what most educators are interested in too.
Speaker 2:So get on guys, Get going and become a part of the community and block the cringy, the cringy stuff. There is a block way. There's a block button.
Speaker 1:Oh, liberal use of the block button.
Speaker 2:I am a big fan of the block button yeah, thank you so much for being on the podcast, barry thank you and I offer my apologies.
Speaker 1:I didn't really mean to try and hire people through your book. I'm now really good, stop, stop, I'm just. It's a. It's a real privilege to be on your podcast. Yeah, as I said before, you're you're one of the people that whenever you post, I do not scroll past. I do. I read everything you put out, so it's a real pleasure to have a conversation with you likewise.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much.
