Experiential Learning in UAE Classrooms: Bringing the MSC Curriculum to Life with Little PM

“Examine the origins and purposes of the UAE constitutional provisions.” When I first taught a Year 6 class in Dubai, I was taken aback when I first saw this objective in the MSC curriculum. Not only did I feel that my subject knowledge was lacking but also, this seemed like such a knowledge-heavy concept that would be difficult for children to assimilate and later recall. How then can such challenging objectives be approached, even for teachers who are more familiar with the curriculum and country? At Little PM, we believe in creating learning experiences for children that bring to life the objectives and help them truly embed new ideas.

In his seminal 1984 book Experiential Learning: Experience as The Source of Learning and Development, David Kolb summarises learning as "the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience" and this aligns perfectly with the Little PM ethos of an heuristic approach to learning. Rather than passively receiving knowledge, the units developed by Little PM enable children to develop their own learning through tasks that are carefully designed to allow them to make connections with their prior experiences. Furthermore, some of the core values of Little Project Manager are teamwork and communication: children will work collaboratively to complete tasks. This approach stems in no small part from the work of scholars such as Piaget, whose constructivist theory of learning posits that learners actively construct their own knowledge rather than passively receiving it.

What does experiential learning then mean for the teaching of Moral, Social and Cultural Studies? If we look at the framework for MSC and delve deeper into the language used for the objectives for all year groups, we see that many of these are framed as actions and behaviours not merely facts or ideas to learn. Let's take as examples, three objectives from different strands of the curriculum from different year groups.

As a teacher, it may seem a little daunting to know how to bring these concepts into a lesson and help the children fully understand them. The MSC textbooks that are available to support the teaching of MSC contain some useful ideas but we can build on the suggested activities and create a deeper understanding for the children by bringing these objectives to life. The curriculum, such as in the examples given above, does not just want children to learn an idea in their classroom and keep it isolated from their life. These are real world skills to do with engaging with the community, engaging with the environment and bettering oneself. The very nature of these skills means they are meant to be experienced. They are meant to be taken out of the classroom and into the real world. If we only ever teach these skills with a theoretical approach, then we are not preparing the children for how to apply skills to their own lives.

Two Little PM units have already been trialed in a British Curriculum international primary school and it will be illuminating for those not familiar with Little PM to see how such units can operate. The following units were specifically designed to be appropriate to be completed within a single lesson: however, all Little PM units can be tailored to different contexts.

The workshop "Welcome to our School" was held in three parallel Year 4 classes. This was the classes' first experience of such a project and all children were able to understand and engage with the project in a meaningful way.Children worked in groups of 4 or 5 and all were able to produce a quality product in the time period: a guide, with an accompanying map for children new to the school. Some input from the teacher was required to help in the process of selecting a team leader but otherwise, the children worked well as a group, in large part thanks to the checklists provided in each pack, which are an integral part of Little PM units.

The workshop "Creating a Law in the U.A.E." was carried out in a Year 5 class. Due to the nature of the task, the children were in groups of various sizes with one program manager (appointed by the teacher) overseeing the coordination between groups. The workshop allowed children to understand one of the more complex aspects of the MSC curriculum - namely the structure and function of the U.A.E. constitution - in a fun way: they proposed a new law and it was passed through the different Federal Authorities (represented by different groups of children) before finally being ratified by the teacher, acting as the president. The curiosity of the class naturally expanded the task into a wider examination of national policy but the main structure of the workshop was closely and successfully followed. The children especially enjoyed the practical representation of the Federal Authorities with Lego, which opened the workshop.

The examples discussed above focus on a single objective from the MSC curriculum but this is only one way in which Little PM activities can be used in a school context. Many schools nowadays take a thematic or topic based approach in which children will engage with an overarching theme across many subjects. This may take the form of a key text in English lessons which is linked to a wider geography history topic such as the physical geography features or the Stone Age. Such an approach is now widespread and companies such as the International Curriculum Association help schools to embed a topic across multiple subjects and even go beyond this to think about personal learning skills and global mindedness within the topics.

I am a firm supporter of a topic based approach, yet we must always consider what it is like from the children’s point of view. As a teacher creating a plan or mapping out a topic across multiple subjects, the cohesion of the learning will seem obvious to us; however, this might not be the case for children. At Little PM, we also support schools in designing their units in such a way that the children are able to see the thread of their learning across the curriculum and make connections between their work. We want children to understand if they are, for example, making a model of a Viking longship DT lesson, that this is linked to reasons for migration, but also to human impact on the environment such as the deforestation in Iceland. The experiences that children have across the curriculum need to be linked together so that the children are forming deeper learning connections. This should be even more of a priority in schools that have an array of different specialist teachers, which is often the case in international schools. It is very easy for children to believe that what they do with their music teacher is isolated from what they do with their art teacher or their main classroom teacher. Little PM helps schools to design units and the accompanying resources in such a way that the children understand that the experiences that they are having are all tied together.

For those familiar with the International Primary Curriculum, the idea of Learning Goals that children should demonstrate rather than simply learn and regurgitate will not be new. Within the IPC, the learning goals are identified as either Knowledge, Skills or Understanding, meaning there is a distinction between facts that children simply have to learn, skills that they should demonstrate and how they can share a deeper understanding. It is interesting to further look into the IPC approach particularly when it comes to the assessment of the different objectives. As of now, assessment within MSC is largely left to the discretion of schools, leading to varied approaches in reports. There is the SSBT assessment but schools may use this only as one part of the judgement when deciding what grade to give a child. How then can we assess objectives that we identify as needing to be demonstrated rather than simply written down? The IPC uses assessment rubrics to help teachers understand if a child is able to demonstrate a specific skill. I have previously taken the approach of analysing whether the different objectives within the MSC framework should be considered as knowledge, skills or understanding (or a hybrid) and that was a great help in assessing the children. This works best when experiential learning activities are designed to allow the children to demonstrate these skills and that is where the units developed by Little PM are particularly beneficial. They are structured and carefully designed activities built around MSC framework objectives that provide clear opportunities for children to engage with these objectives.

In many ways, the MSC curriculum has key skills that help children make sense of their learning such as in history and geography and indeed there are strands with the MSC curriculum that are specifically devoted to these subjects. The objectives that we find here are the building blocks that allow children to engage with the subject such as map skills, timelines, social change and the use of primary and secondary sources. Given this, it has presented many excellent opportunities for schools to reinforce and teach MSC skills through their topics in foundation subjects. From the start of the 2025-26 academic year, the guidelines on teaching MSC have changed so that the objectives must be taught explicitly in MSC and Social Studies lessons. It is important to remember, however, that this does not mean that the objectives from the MSC framework cannot also be referenced and retaught in foundation subjects. In fact, making these links and deepening the children's understanding of the objectives in a variety of contexts can only serve to benefit the children's learning.

In addition to guidelines on the teaching of the MSC curriculum, we must also bear in mind new government priorities to include AI in the curriculum. This may not be such a dramatic change as one might initially think: the Information Processing and Information Literacy strands within the MSC curriculum already deal with how to research and assess information gathered on the Internet: using AI tools is really just an extension of this. Furthermore, since Large Language Models and image generating tools are now part of the norm, we would be doing our students a disservice if we did not bring these topics into the classroom. At Little PM, we are developing new units related to AI that seamlessly connect to skills with which the children and teachers would already be familiar, for example, a unit on AI Hallucinations guides children to use books and trusted websites to determine the accuracy and reliability of images generated by AI models. At Little PM, we are constantly ensuring that the resources we are producing are helping teachers to be prepared for any changes in the curriculum so that they can deliver a robust experiential and relevant learning experience for their students.