Learning and Teaching
What makes Dubai College Unique?
Our classrooms nurture our students to go above and beyond, our principle aim is for all students to fullfil their potential and to leave the college with a love of learning.
We are unashamedly academic, our highly qualified and passionate subject specialists challenge our students to nurture both their intellect and character.
Our teaching environment draws upon the most effective and relevant pedagogical research, providing our students with the opportunity to be develop their voices and to truly understand how they learn. Our approach draws upon cognitive science and dialogical techniques, fundamentally designed to support students to develop as lifelong learners.
To achieve these aims we aim to develop and nurture our teachers’ professional capacity in one of five main pedagogical areas:
- The Science of Learning: Creating metacognitive awareness to enhance self-regulation and higher order thinking.
- Oracy - Dialogic Learning: Creating an equitable classroom where students feel confident and challenged through Harkness.
- Beyond the Curriculum: Creating opportunities for students to gain context to their learning and provide additional challenge.
- Digital Pedagogies: Offering opportunities for innovation in teaching and learning through designing digital learning activities.
- Optimising assessment: Ensuring assessments are strategically planned and their challenging success criteria are shared with students.
The pedagogies are driven through various professional learning opportunities but mainly through the Collaborative Learning Groups led by the Specialist Leaders in Education (SLEs). To ensure that we fulfil both our own strategic objectives as well as those of the UAE we have amalgamated the DC teacher standards, the KHDA inspection framework and the research from the Institute of Positive Education into a Grand Unified Theory.