Abu Dhabi Education Council organizes meetings with school leaderships

During the meeting, H.E. Dr. Mugheer Khamis Al Khaili, ADEC Director General, emphasized ADEC's keenness to enhance student's national identity while keeping pace with highest international standards that ensure students acquire the required knowledge and skills will enable them to compete globally.

H.E. was accompanied by senior management from ADEC and various educators.

"Mastering English language is a key component of ADEC's 10-year strategic plan since it's the language of modern science and technology. Our main aim is to provide our students with all necessary tools and means to help introduce scientists, inventors and thinkers," said Dr. Al Khaili.

Participating in international assessments, such as CEPA, PIPS, etc., has shown that students' scores are close to those obtained by their peers in OECD countries, said Dr. Al Khaili, adding that the number of students joining higher education institutions without the need to participate in any foundation programs, has raised from 3% to 10%, while the percentage of students who passed the CEPA test has significantly increased from 3% to 60% over the past few years.

"ADEC's main focus during the next period of time, is to enable school administrations to play a leading role in the education field. Through the new structure, School Operations will be in charge of implementing ADEC plans and initiatives," indicated the Director General.

Many of ADEC's new initiatives and programs were discussed during the meeting to include "Irtiqa'a", Empowering Educators, Teacher Evaluation and eSIS programs.

PISA

Jarrod Hingston, International Assessment section Manger, explained that PISA exams are conducted under the umbrella of OECD in order to measure student skills in Reading, Mathematics, Science and Problem Solving. The exams focus on identifying student capabilities using knowledge and skills required to meet everyday challenges; encourages students to become lifelong learners while helping students to collect required data on learning outcomes, school and the social environment.

Teacher Evaluation

Ms. Fatima Al Bastaki, ADEC Cluster Manager, said that the new teacher evaluation process is based on four teaching standards: profession, curriculum, classroom and the community.

"Teachers will be mostly judged on their classroom performance which bares greater appraisal points for their evaluation. Evaluation phases are divided into Pre-Foundation, where the teacher is not meeting the performance standards or is meeting them at only a basic level; Foundation, where the teacher is partially meeting some of the performance standards; Emerging, where the teacher is consistently meeting some but not all performance standards satisfactorily; Established, where the teacher is consistently meeting most performance standards satisfactorily; Accomplished, where the teacher is consistently meeting most performance standards to a very high level," said Al Bastaki.

Empowering Educators

Professor Abdullateef Haidar, ADEC Advisor, spoke about the Program which aims to provide school leaders and teachers with appropriate professional development programs that enable them to improve their professional performance level and subsequently help improve student learning outcomes.

Irtiqa'a Program

Irtiqa'a (Improvement) is the first national program of its kind that assures quality of education and is dedicated mainly to materialize quality in school performance, as indicated by Ms. Mariam Saqr, ADEC Inspection and Monitoring Program Manager.

"All schools, whether private or public and working within the Emirate are deemed registered with Irtiqa'a. It is a chance for the community to get acquainted about quality and performance at schools that in turn helps identify strengths and areas for improvement. Through assuring that all schools provide top quality education, the program emphasizes its role in setting education as the mainstay for the emirate of Abu Dhabi to catch up with the most sophisticated education systems achieved worldwide. Individual characteristics, cultures, curricula and school systems shall be all considered, but not to the detriment of the approved standards of Irtiqa'a. The pilot program will be implemented in 12 schools across the Emirate," said Ms. Saqr.

Tama'an Program

Dr. Karima Al Mazroui, Arabic Medium Section Manager, briefed the attendants on ADEC's "Tama'an" (Observe Carefully) Program which aims to further enhance the student assessment process via an ongoing assessment scheme which based on exposing students continuously to different types of high quality reading and writing texts that allow them to be more interactive.

"The program aims to ensure students fully utilize their time and potential through reading and writing; research and exploration; collaborative team work; familiarity between learner and texts; emphasis on language functional skills; provide the student with the opportunity for reflection and expression; as well as provide the teacher with clear and diverse assessment tools," Dr. Al Mazroui said.

A brief on ADEC's eSIS/ERP applications was presented by Firas Al Tamimi, Applications Manager, and Waleed Nassouli, IT Project Manger.