I am not always in the classrooms. I do observations at the school with different focuses depending on my goals for the year. This year, part of my focus is child protection. This is also a topic that I believe we can develop at a national level. Child protection is about our responsibility in the education sphere to protect students from harm. That means making sure our environments are safe physically but that they are also emotionally supportive and nurturing environments for everyone within them. This requires education for everyone who is in our schools whether they are students, teachers, parents, volunteers or support staff. We all need to be prioritizing safe practices. This is especially important now because it is not just the physical environment but also the digital environment that students are exposed to that can expose them to risk. We have to build into our curriculum opportunities to educate students about the risks their digital footprints leave and to be careful and thoughtful with the ways they interact with the world digitally. Outside of work I also try to engage with wider conversations about education and culture. I have participated in various conferences, locally and internationally, and presented TEDx Talks. These engagements have allowed me to connect with others who are interest in similar issues and allowed me to engage with schools outside the Qatar Foundation network. One talk that I gave was about stressing the need for context to be built into our education systems. I believe if we want education to be authentic and if we want kids to actually solve the problems that are going to exist in their world then we cannot disconnect education from the environment that surrounds them. If I want to solve the problems that exist in my community I have to be able to actively bring in my community to the classroom with me. So if we want kids to understand climate change we have to be creative about the way we make it real to them. If you say that climate change is going to make the world hotter, it’s kind of a non-issue here because it’s already pretty hot anyway. We have to be creative about the ways we talk about these issues because we need there to be a sense of urgency. How can we show what the effects of deforestation has here in Qatar?  How can we make the burning of forests for palm oil in Indonesia or the decimation of the rainforest in Brazil really resonate with students here and the part they can play in preventing this?  It is very important to localize these global issues. Because we are a part of the world. We are not peripheral to it.