Comparing Reported Classroom Practice in Public and Private Schools in the United Arab Emirates

This is a comparative study of science classroom practice in public and private schools in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. The vast majority of science teachers in these schools are expatriates, specifically recruited from overseas to teach through the language medium of English. Since both groups of teachers come from a diversity of international backgrounds (though predominantly from ‘Western’ countries) it might be fair to hypothesize that the range of classroom practices of private and public teachers would be broadly similar, accounting for differences in individual school systems such as resources, class sizes, training opportunities etc. We surveyed 248 public school teachers and 66 private school teachers, and asked them to rate statements about their science classroom practices, such as whether they encouraged students to work collaboratively, employed inquiry based learning strategies, adopted hands-on student centred approaches to learning in science, applied science to real life and drew connections between science and other subjects. Contrary to our hypothesis, it was found that there were extremely significant differences between the responses of the private and public school teachers. We make some suggestions for why there might be such a chasm in reported practices of public and private school teachers.