8 Reasons an American Education Will Put Your Child on the Path to Future Success

“American education is so much more than a single curriculum. We teach children about life, it’s quite holistic” shared Lisa. At the core, what students are expected to know and understand is the same across various curricula for each age group. The difference lies in lesson planning, delivery and the assessment of student attainment.

At Dunecrest, our education program engages students in real-life problems that make it truly authentic and immersive. Our reading and writing programs are rigorous. We have an excellent literacy program from Columbia University in New York. We understand that our students are digital natives and that embedding lessons with the latest educational technology make for interactive and exciting learning experiences.

A stand-out factor for an American curriculum school is it’s whole-child approach to learning, with strong social and emotional programs that are embedded into the learning. At Dunecrest, our Science program is embedded with design-thinking standards, which then brings real-life projects for students to apply their learning. Our students in Grade 7, for example, are working with a Virtual Reality (VR) production company and the CSR team of a major automotive brand to produce a VR game that shows how speed and the number of safety violations increase when driving with distractions like mobile telephones.

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This program will help raise awareness of the dangers of texting while driving. It’s also a wonderful opportunity for our students to acquire marketable skills while working alongside innovative companies in the local and regional markets. Our cross-curricular approach means topics are reinforced across different subject areas with STEAM learning that brings alive concepts across Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics.

This is actually not a curriculum aspect but a whole-school aspect. Good American schools think past the curriculum, and consider the wellbeing of students, their learning and engagement. Schools have to think of creative ways to have leadership opportunities for all students. At Dunecrest, we aim to develop conscientious people who will make a positive impact on their communities and the world beyond. With this ethos in mind, we embed leadership opportunities in “service to other initiatives.”

This year, you will find, our fifth through tenth graders taking a course on cooking and then organizing the prep, cooking and serving of food while making lunch for workers at a labor camp in Al Quoz. You’ll find our Middle School students in Fujairah spearheading school efforts to clean up the reef and our High School Students in Kenya, visiting the communities we support with safe, rechargeable solar lights in lieu of dangerous kerosene lamps as part of the One Million Solar Lights Project.

We are continually assessing our students’ understanding through the use of internal and external data to give really strong feedback instead of having high stakes testing. Assessments take place three times per year, and this gives us valuable insights. It also encourages students to grow and teaches them to know that learning is a process as well.