This blog is from one of COBIS' Supporting Associates, Steplab

Written by Abeer Sakka, Vice President for Teaching and Learning, GEMS Education

GEMS Education, one of the world’s largest and longest-running private K-12 education providers, operates 47 schools across the UAE and Qatar, serving over 140,000 students from 180 nationalities across four curricula: British, American, Indian, and IB. With over 15,000 educators, GEMS sought to create a unified, evidence-informed model of world-class teaching across its network.

Challenge

Given the diversity of GEMS schools and the scale of the network, the challenge lay in achieving consistency in instructional quality and professional development. Leaders identified the need for a shared framework that could clearly define great teaching, translate research into practice, and ensure every teacher had the tools and language to deliver high-impact lessons.

Action: Teach Like a GEM Playbook and Steplab partnership

GEMS developed the Teach Like a GEM (TLAG) Playbook, a codified instructional framework that translates great teaching into clear, practical steps. It brings together eighteen evidence-informed techniques drawn from the work of Doug Lemov, Barak Rosenshine, and Daniel Willingham. Each technique is rooted in cognitive science and breaks teaching down into precise classroom actions that help every child know more, understand more, and remember more.

To drive implementation, GEMS partnered with Steplab which provided the infrastructure to systematise instructional design and professional growth at scale, enabling consistent, high-quality instructional coaching across all schools.

GEMS built a bespoke TLAG Library of pedagogical strategies within Steplab, aligning every technique, micro-step and rehearsal task with our TLAG Playbook. All middle and senior leaders completed a Coaching Skills Builder course to strengthen their feedback and coaching expertise. Leaders also received in-person training from the Steplab team. 

Utilising the Group PD builder tool, which produces consistent group training sessions across our network of schools, has streamlined the design and delivery of our Practice Clinics and given valuable time back to professional learning leads. School leaders use data and analytics to interpret trends from drop-ins, shoutouts, and coaching reflections, using real-time data to drive informed decisions and continuous improvement.

Impact

Our work to improve our professional development offer has resulted in:

• Greater coherence in instructional language and practice across all schools
• Personalised, immediate feedback through drop-ins and 1:1 instructional coaching
• A shift from evaluative lesson observations to an open-door culture of developmental drop-ins
• Whole-school PD that now embeds modelling, rehearsal, and deliberate practice for contextualised learning
• Sharper, data-informed decision-making through Steplab’s analytics dashboard
• Stronger alignment between professional learning, classroom practice, and student outcomes

Sarah Warncken, Vice Principal at GEMS Wellington Academy Al Khail who were GEMS’ earliest Steplab adopters, highlighted the positive impact a strong, evidence-informed PD programme has had on teaching quality: “This year we celebrated some of our best A Level and BTEC results, and we performed far better than we had anticipated in our GCSE outcomes. A huge number of factors translate to improved outcomes for students, but I am confident that the marked improvement in the quality of what happens in our classrooms is certainly a factor in our performance this year.”

Through this system-wide transformation, GEMS is demonstrating that when thousands of educators share a common professional language and when instructional coaching sits at the heart of professional learning, great teaching becomes the norm not the exception and all students benefit. 

To find out more about Steplab and how they can support your school with professional development that really works, head to their website.

Join Steplab for a free COBIS webinar on The Science of Instructional Coaching on Wednesday 28 January at 1pm UK time. Register here for the session.