The Educational Project Bahrain

Tomorrow I talk off for what looks to be a great three days in the Middle East. It will be my first time back to the Arabian Peninsula since we left Saudi Arabia in 2005. Needless to say I’m brushing up on the few words of Arabic that I know.

It’s an honor to be invited. The Education Project was set up by H.H. Shaikh Salman bin Hamad Al-Khalifa, The Crown Prince of Bahrain and Chairman of Bahrain’s Economic Development Board. The objective of the conference is to:

look at solutions for the gap in quality of the global education system. The Project will showcase seedling models of innovation and success in education, and encourage commitments from the private and public sector to adapt these models for wider roll-out.

The conference is broken into strands and once you commit to a strand you stay with it for 2 hours. Some great long-term discussions on the future of education systems globally. The list of key speakers is enough to get me excited and to think I’ll be sitting at a round table with some of these people discussing education on a global level (yes….I am way in over my head here).

I’ll be participating in following strands:

• What We Teach: Skills, Creative Thinking & Abstract Problem Solving, Religion
• Globalization and Increased Competition – The Good and The Bad Side of a Shrinking World
• E-Learning
• Empowering students, parents and the community

I’m sure I’ll be blogging and twittering about the conference as I have a feeling some conversations are going to make my brain hurt.