We spoke to Jeremy Newton, Senior Principal at Misk International School for Boys and Girls, a COBIS Applicant School, about their recent undertaking of the COBIS Programme for Middle Leaders (CPML), which was delivered to their staff in both Arabic and English for the first time.  

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Why did your school decide to do the CPML?

Our vision is to become a top school for leadership by 2030, enabling our students to enter the world’s leading universities, and to serve their nation and the globe.

We are a young school, just eight years old, and our dedication to leadership includes fostering the growth of our expanding staff team into effective leaders themselves.

With an experienced senior leadership team in place, our recent focus has been on developing the next generation. We have clear succession plans in place at all levels and are actively supporting career progression by developing the talent that sits at middle leader level.

Critical to this was securing the right training partnership – specifically, an organisation capable of delivering high calibre training bilingually. This addresses a common challenge in international schools, where native-language teachers often have limited access to professional development delivered in their mother tongue.

What challenges did you need to address,or did you have areas you wanted to improve?

Our middle leadership team is comparatively experienced, but because our organisation is complex, with three schools, nine school buildings (separate Boys’ and Girls’ Schools) and capacity for over 1000 students, middle leaders are usually heads of department, and in their first leadership post. They might run a team of two or three people, and may not necessarily have had a similar position in a previous school. Often this means that they haven’t had the chance to reflect on leadership, or complete meaningful training programmes.

Our goal was to provide them with a common language and understanding of what excellent middle leadership looks like. However, we also needed to tailor training for our specific requirements. The Misk Schools vision is ambitious and quite unique. We wanted to equip our middle leaders with a toolkit of skills, strategies and ideas to drive forward their own area, while also empowering them to contribute to the school’s overarching development plan.

How did you find the process?

Communicating with COBIS is really easy. The CPD team is very responsive. It is clear that the organisation really cares about what schools around the world are doing and what they need, so initial conversations around us delivering the programme were straightforward. Of course it was a bit more complex because we wanted to run it bilingually which was new for the COBIS team, but this was embraced as a very positive step.

I trained to become a facilitator of the course myself which proved to be a great opportunity to develop my own skills and become familiar with valuable resources. I found the course to be extremely effective, allowing me to share ideas with people in similar positions, and then launch into it.

It was a more significant undertaking for us compared to most other schools, because everything needed to be interpreted and translated, and COBIS trusted us with that. The whole process was smooth and collaborative, with open dialogue. None of our many ideas were rejected out of hand, which resulted in us feeling supported at every step of the way.

What were your key takeaways from the CPML?

That it really is possible to make the best CPD accessible to all staff, whether they speak English or not. I would recommend that all schools with a multilingual staff team consider delivering training bilingually.

The CPML is an internationally recognised course, and what I’ve learned is that we have many colleagues around the world who would greatly benefit from being able to take part in it in their own language.

I have also learned that being bold and making decisions to suit one’s own context and needs, and keeping your own staff team at the centre of your decision-making is essential – and of great benefit to them. The eight teachers we had in the first cohort have all gone from strength to strength since completing the course. Indeed, many are in line for promotions and all are delivering excellence in their own area.

You did the CPML as a dual language course. What adaptations did you have to make for this?

Firstly, you need to have a mindset shift. The default approach is to assume that an English speaker will deliver the course with the support of a translator. But this approach maintains an English-language dominance – bias even – which undermines the impact for second language English speakers. I do not speak Arabic, but my co-facilitator speaks both English and Arabic, and she was there to lead alongside me as an equal.

Secondly, you need to consider the materials. We translated the whole online platform – every single link in the whole website was in both English and Arabic, every resource was in English and Arabic. No language came before the other, reinforcing the balance and equity of the course.

And finally, session planning requires attention to detail. Being light and concise in the content is important. We didn’t veer too far away from the existing materials, and we built our slide deck and presentation materials to exactly replicate the pre-reading materials. We made sure everything was married together, which meant that readers in either language weren’t trying to piece things together.

How has the CPML impacted your school and leadership team?

Only positively. We have shown our international, Saudi and Arabic-speaking staff that our CPD program is for everyone and we mean it. As the first to deliver the CPML course bilingually, we have pioneered new ground which we hope will serve as an inspiration to COBIS and other schools.

Most importantly, for the people who did the course, it has delivered on our shared goals. We had young, talented middle leaders who wanted to grow and develop into the future leaders of the school. They are now well on their way to doing just that.

For more information on the CPML, click here or contact our Director of Education and Professional Learning, Janette Quinn.