Premiera Education Group is redefining education but not by trying to reinvent the field; rather, our focus has been on reaffirming time-worn verities, such as the inalienable dignity of every person, the essential importance of strong and sustainable teacher-student relationships for learning, which are based on compassion, empathy, care, trust, and respect, the necessity of having engaging, collaborative, and positive professional communities of care, where safeguarding and child protection predominate, dependable systems where every person is valued, seen, and heard, where all have equal access to opportunity, and where what Robert Marzano has identified as the 5 traits of high-reliability schools are present.
Since the COVID pandemic, a much greater emphasis has rightly been placed on holistic education, and we at Premiera have responded to this imperative by developing our own unique well-being program. Our special framework encompasses the pillars and values of Islam as well as incorporating the best of the humanistic traditions. We insist on putting pupils at the centre of every initiative, and then building all our programs around them.
We understand that many pedagogical approaches, such as Constructivism, Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences, Piaget’s Theory and Stages of Cognitive Development, Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development and Scaffolding, among others, all claim to put the pupil’s learning needs first, but the application of these theories always gives rise to an implementation dip or gap, which is the difference between espousing and effectively applying a theory in the classroom. We at Premiera believe we have designed effective solutions to address these gaps and correct them in teaching and learning.
Our emphasis and sensitivity on assimilating what Margo Gottlieb called thesociocultural dimension of academic language, and extending this to what Benjamin Bloom called the Affective Domain of learning, or what Marzano has identified in his revised taxonomy as the Conative Skills, reinforce our belief that developing what Daniel Goleman called Emotional Intelligence or EQ is crucial to developing well-rounded learned individuals who are prepared for any challenge life throws at them.
In a nutshell, our core educational philosophy is that pupils must be cared for, minded, and protected within a strict duty of care framework, where their emotional and cognitive learning needs are embedded within their sociocultural circumstances, and these are in turn embedded in instructional programs that provide integrated, authentic, informed, and skill-based learning opportunities. We apply the same set of criteria to teachers by building reflective professional learning communities after the seminal work of Richard DuFour and his team at Solution Tree.
As is clear from the foregoing, we at Premiera have not so much reinvented sound educational models and practices as we have redefined what works best within our own unique frameworks. These frameworks assimilate those systems by putting people first and keeping them first as the main driver of our programs. This is evident most recently in our work to integrate what Douglas Fisher called Restorative Practices, which is just another way of affirming our commitment to building relationships for learning around the well-being of all concerned and involved.
To find out more please contact us at Premiera Education Group.
