BSME Talks | Tom Duckling, Headmaster, Dubai College

On this episode of BSME Talks, Nalini is joined by Tom Duckling, Headmaster of Dubai College, revisiting his fantastic workshop at this year's BSME Annual School Leaders' Conference - but through the lens of today's regional uncertainty.

What is the true purpose of school—and does it change in times of crisis?

From the power of phronesis (practical wisdom) to the contagious nature of kindness, Tom explores how empathy, curriculum design, and a focus on human flourishing can shape not just better students, but better people. The conversation also touches on the relevance of stoicism, the ethical challenges of generative AI, and why we shouldn’t shy away from the struggle of learning.

A thoughtful listen for educators navigating complexity with purpose.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Hello, and welcome to this episode of BSME Talk, the podcast that brings you real conversations about the things that matter in international education, both in the Middle East and beyond. I'm Nalini Koch, I'm CEO of BSME, and I'm delighted to be joined today by Thomas Deckling, Headmaster of Dubai College, to discuss character education. Tom hosted a really excellent workshop at the recent BSME School Leaders Conference in Abu Dhabi a couple of months ago. And we're going to explore what he talked about in that workshop a little bit more today, but with a particular focus on the context of what's going on around us in this region at the moment. So firstly, welcome, Tom. It's lovely to have you with us. Talking about the foundation of character within a global context first. Your presentation at the BSME conference talked about the purpose, the purpose of a school, and you posed a question to everybody attending your session, which was what was the purpose of your school, your schooling? And there were some really interesting conversations coming out of that, people still talking about that when they came out of the workshop. In your opinion, how do international schools in the Middle East, who often cater to some really diverse student bodies, define their core purpose regarding character? And do these moments of crisis change that and that purpose at all?

SPEAKER_01 1:40

Yeah, great. I mean, there's two points to that, isn't there? So the reason I started with that, what is the purpose of your school? Is I actually genuinely don't think we ask enough in education. What is the point of education and what is learning? I think they're two foundational questions that most people don't really have an answer for. Now they might have an answer for, but or they have different answers for, right? So it's quite amazing that in this in this sector that we're not entirely coherent and clear on that. And equally we maybe don't spend enough time thinking about it. So the purpose piece was a point to make people think about what their own schooling was for, right? And and the key part of your question, I think, is related to international. The word international is really important there, right? So most people, and I was obviously BSME, I was predominantly speaking to a British audience. Most people went to a school, and my question was, did their school have a purpose? Right. And it's worth anyone listening to think, did their school actually have a purpose? Now, to make a massive sweeping generalization, if you went to a private school or an independent school or a values-based school, it's highly likely they did have a clear guiding purpose, whether that be values they wish to impart, or indeed a kind of slogan or a logo, and you know, a kind of uh that kind of motto sort of thing, right? So that's that's one thing. And sometimes those people, again, let's let's use a cliched example, Eton is looking to create you know world, future world leaders and that sort of stuff, right? So that there is a tangible purpose. If, like me, uh you went to a you know a state school, there's an element of what people think, which is that state school is something you go to, it's the motions you go through, and sometimes it's about facilitating future opportunities. And for some people, uh that means that the school structure is about supporting the labour force and supporting future employment activities. So I guess my question was really also what is the purpose of school and what should the purpose of school be? Now, to your pit about internationalism, I do think international schools have gone towards values-based education, holistic education, and character-based education. Most schools out here will have an ethos, and most schools out here will say things like they're trying to create better people or kinder humans. And the minute you enter into that realm, you're not just supporting a labour force, you're actually looking to create better people, you're invested in human flourishing, human growth. So I would argue that most of the schools out here, whether or not they explicitly call it character education, have a value-based structure. Uh, why is it relevant today? I mean, it couldn't be more relevant, really, could it? I mean, I was listening to the watching the news, like everyone is stuck to the news at the moment, and talking about the impact of individuals on the world at the moment, the significant impact of some significant individuals who will go unnamed but are easy to think about, uh, and how their actions and reactions are causing global waves around the world, right? Now, you know, the point of character education is to get to a point as this point of phrenesis, okay, this this practical wisdom. So you do it in school and then you set people up to go out into the world where they practical wisdom, essentially, you make good decisions, you have integrity and you you make balanced, thoughtful, ethical decisions. And I would argue that right now, if we had the world's leaders who had a bit more practical wisdom, we'd probably be better off.

SPEAKER_00 4:51

I couldn't agree more. I think it puts it in real context for us as to why it's so important and what the purpose of schools are. Now, you mentioned phrenesis there, we're going to come back to that in a moment, but you personally have a real interest in philosophy, and that that was really clear in your presentation at the BSME conference. One of the other things that you talked about was Aristotle, or one of the other people you talked about was Aristotle, and his idea that the best way to teach morality is to make it a habit. So, specifically, what daily habits do you think are most critical for students to cultivate that practical wisdom, that phrenesis, whilst navigating these complex times and perhaps heightened emotions?

SPEAKER_01 5:35

Yeah, I'm relatively simple on this one, which I start with kindness. Again, you know, if if everyone in the world was doing this, I I genuinely believe kindness is contagious and kindness can embed deeply. I think that once you are kind, I think sometimes we can all be unkind. I think once you continually act towards kindness and act with kindness, and I think if you're within a culture that prioritises and focuses and praises kindness, I think it seeps into your very, very nature and your being and you feel good, right? We we've all seen the research about uh, you know, from positive education about how kindness positively acts you and your own your own well-being. If you are kind to others, you feel good. And I think people learn from that, students learn from that. And I think many schools see that when you make kindness a fundamental part, it's something you challenge as well. You know, I always say to students, we we've got four values here, which kindness is one, and integrity is another. Kindness and integrity go together, right? Kindness is not just about always making people happy, kindness is about doing your best to be kind, but integrity is about making the right decisions, right? So sometimes, you know, whilst I wouldn't ever be cruel to be kind, you've got to challenge things to be kind, right? You've got you have to be aggressive again, probably the wrong word, but proactive is a better word. Proactive in saying that actually that's not good enough as a standard. And you know, we'll always, if you try your best, we'll always help you. But that sort of behavior towards another is not, that's not right. And that and then we're gonna tell you why. I also think empathy is important and very linked to kindness. You know, if you are an empathetic human being, it's quite hard to go back from that point and not therefore look to do good in the world, whether that be through service or your future decisions. And for me, empathy is in intrinsically linked to curriculum design. So, you know, is your curriculum creating situations for empathy? Are you having and discussing global issues? Are you embedding examples and scenarios, whether historical or present and contemporary, whereby you know you elicit empathy from young people and therefore they see a relevance and a point towards the learning that they're going through and a belief more importantly, uh that they can actually go and do some good. I guess lastly, I would source, you know, Aristotle also talks about Arete, right? This pursuit of excellence. And you know, again, I I'm fortunate enough to work in a in a school that is excellent and has excellent people in it, and that that culture of pursuit of the highest standard on a day-to-day basis is a really good thing. I think you embed them by relentlessly focusing on them and communicating them. I think that's a that's a key part of the culture. I think that you know the values are really, really important to kind of be through everything and be the perspective and the lens to which you design your school, you know. Again, my uh my 10 C's for character education implementation, you know, it starts with credo, right? And credo is so you start with the belief. And actually, I think the beliefs can be you know relative to whatever the person is, you know. So if you think resilience is the thing that children need right now, if you think that flexibility and adaptability is the thing that children need right now, or if you think kindness is the thing they need, start with the credo and then plan for putting that in as well.

SPEAKER_00 8:34

Now, you've highlighted something called eudaimonia as human flourishing achieved through the active exercise of virtue and reason over a complete life. Putting that into um some context, how can a British international school community help students pursue this concept of deep well-being, which is what it's referring to when their external environment is currently defined by uncertainty and conflict?

SPEAKER_01 9:01

Yeah, I mean, I think that's incredibly hard at the moment. Yeah, so the concept of pneumonia essentially is that it's a genuine real happiness defined by a purpose and again not superficial. So it takes away from that short-term happiness, and it's the idea that you do things that you know might take bit of time uh long term, that sort of stuff. If I'm honest at the moment, pneumonia is not particularly helpful to us, especially for kind of epicurus and freedom from pain, uh, given what's going on. As it happens, I've actually been sending out uh, because as you know, I'm obsessed with this sort of stuff. I've been sending out to our parents actually stoicism at the moment. So weirdly, uh, you know, all philosophy and value-based philosophy is good, I think. Obviously, uh, you know, Aristotle's particularly focused on the virtue ethics element of things and the golden meme. But at the moment, I'm really sending out stuff about uh stoicism. And of course, stoicism, kind of the dichotomy of control, is that you know you focus entirely of your actions and you can't control external events, you know, and there's only happiness when you cease to worry about things you can't control. So rather than pneumonia per se, at the moment, I'm I'm really digging into stoicism. As many people know, I've got Marcus Aurelius' meditations on my desk at any one time. It's really interesting how people react to this as well. Uh, I think it's um Epicetus actually, one of the influences on Marcus Aurelius, who said that circumstances don't make a man, they just reveal them to them himself. The idea actually that you know how we deal with this is actually quite showing about us as individuals and that sort of stuff. So, yeah, eutumonia not particularly helpful uh in a conflict, but I would say stoicism astonishingly helpful as a rationale for understanding that there's uh there's not much you can do about things that are outside of your control, but you can control your own actions and behaviours during this time.

SPEAKER_00 10:46

That's really important. Thank you. You also highlighted empathy and human relationships, talking about how they're going to be of increased value in the age of AI. So, despite everything that's going on around us in the region at the moment, AI is still there as a really big part of education, part of the world going forward. How do you think schools can actively teach and assess these human virtues to counteract that perhaps political polarisation, any emotional distress that's going on among students and staff?

SPEAKER_01 11:20

Yeah, I think it's quite important actually to step out this, and I won't do the whole presentation again that I did in that session, but to understand that actually education is we think we're quite self-obsessed, right? So we think that education is exist and humans have exist just for the time that we've been alive. And of course, we know that you know society and humanity predate us by huge, huge numbers, and numbers that we don't necessarily even know the length of. We also kind of make that assumption that you know the year zero was the beginning of society, and we work back from that point we're in 2026, right? But actually, that's not. That's our our calendar, as we all know, is determined by a religious birth, right? So the society's been around for a long time, and therefore, education is the preparation of young people to enter into society, okay? And to do that, you need knowledge, sure, you need to know what's going on in the world around you, you need skills. I mean, even if we went back to previous societies, you need the skills to kind of adapt and deal with that society, uh, or you know, even stay alive, and then of course, you need the values that that society sticks by, right? So, and actually, my argument and the argument I made there was that most of education has been focused on values, right? So, if you go back to either what we consider as formal education, that pre-education, that'd be very values-based. If you go to some of the earliest forms of education we can think of, and one of the best forms of education, now, this is not religious points, but religious schools and religion spread the word of God, and of course, that's literally rates related to the Bible were huge, but also the Bible was trying to encode a moral and a value framework for the world to determine other people's behaviors, right? And insert the Bible with uh replace that with Quran or Torah, it doesn't hugely matter, but that is a form of values-based education, and I guess my point was more that we lost that somewhere, whether it be post-industrial revolution, whether it be post-war. And I remember early on in my career, people say, you know, people saying when they said about partial work, it's not your job to parent them. Uh, all you've got to do is actually get them through the tests and teach them the information. And that's quite a reductive view of what the point of education is actually. It's a very short-termist understanding of a very, very, very knowledge-driven, skills-based form of education that is to pass tests to enter into a labor force. And my argument is that international schools, but also with the world schools and with AI, which will fundamentally change our relationship with knowledge. It will change the way we use knowledge, the point of knowledge, the value of knowledge, the different forms of knowledge that we need. I think creativity will become more valuable. And my argument really was that therefore schools are going to lean back into value rather than introducing character education, that actually character education predates our current conception of an educational system. So that that was sort of uh the argument there.

SPEAKER_00 14:02

So we get to re-embrace that, hopefully. Sticking with AI for a second, what ethical challenges do you think generative AI introduces to the teaching of character? And how can we ensure as educators that technology serves as a tool for ethical growth rather than perhaps a distraction from it?

SPEAKER_01 14:22

Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, there's lots to this one. Our catchphrase with AI here is don't steal the struggle. So, you know, learning is about struggle, showing that resilience and that growth from real challenge. And there's no doubt whatsoever. My wife uh is an English teacher, and she says that in the last three years she has seen noticeable changes in the literacy of the young people she teaches, even in very, very good schools. Uh, you know, fundamentally, we're all doing all the time, right? We're we are writing less, we are outsourcing more, uh, and I guess the bitcular bit in terms of the ethical side of that. So firstly, there's the ethical nature of kind of authenticity and ownership of your work, and we really in schools uh need to labour that in as it happens, and this is slightly controversial view. Um, I think that the explicit curriculum and teaching of AI is not particularly valuable because I think it's changing so quickly and it will be redundant the minute you put it in. I think the teaching of ethics around technology and the usage of AI, I think is an incredibly, incredible, valuable part of AI education. And what is more worrying to me actually is how AI or sorry, how young people are operating and using AI to ask moral questions, right? So, you know, a lot a lot of the research is showing whether it be the embedded chatbots through cut some of the apps they're using, where there's an AI constant friend there, they're actually consulting them with them on ethical and moral decisions as well. Um, and this for me is a huge responsibility for us as a society and as a school, whereby we have got these predetermined values and morals that find. And are we now going to rely upon an LLM and an algorithm to impart not moral decisions? Do we trust those moral decisions? How, where do those moral decisions come from? You know, again, we've all read the research about the embed biases that are in LLMs and how that can change things, you know, even related to misogyny, given most of them are created by males or they are drawing from a fundamentally patriarchal society. So I think it's the probably the most important part of the whole thing. I actually was reading the other day some research by a professor called Shane McLaughlin, and here's the key point to your question, right? And what he was looking at was phrenesis, so those that are determined with phrenesis, as in practical wisdom, how do they use AI? And what he found was those that have a higher level of practical wisdom use technology more ethically. They use it to support those with a lower level of practical wisdom used it less ethically and were more likely to rely upon it hugely and question it less with less criticality. So I think this is absolutely the most important thing.

SPEAKER_00 16:54

That's really, really interesting and certainly uh worth us all uh spending some time learning a little bit more about that if you don't feel you know enough about that already. I'm going to finish with uh a question coming back to your 10 C's. You mentioned your 10 C's of character education earlier in our conversation, things such as credo, culture, etc. Are there a particular two or three of those that you think are the most immediate critical focus points for school leadership in the region today? And if so, why those?

SPEAKER_01 17:24

Or are they all important? Well, it's the 10 C's are about an implementation plan for how to make sure you've got character education. So it starts with the credo, which is the belief, then actually secondly goes to the calendar to make sure you've actually got space, you know, because I think equating, are you using are you using your time wisely and valuable? I think calendar management is the core and basis of most schools. Then, of course, is the curriculum element, which is the third C. And then the fourth element, once you've got the curriculum and the calendar correct, how do you communicate this? What culture do you have? And then also building space and time for the things that we know help growth, right? So creativity helps individual growth. I think that's going to become more valuable in an AI world. And the second one actually is competition as well, right? I think that character growth comes hugely from competition. People are a bit uh negative towards competition, and they think it instantly kind of you've been competitive. Well, I disagree. Like I think you can be competitive badly, and I think comparison, as they say, is a thief of joy, but I think competition actually really stimulates uh a drive and also a resilience, as well as losing, right? Making mistakes is really, really powerful. Uh, and then the last three are change, so how we deal with change. And I suppose if you wanted to ask me to put one that is the most relevant right now, maybe maybe uh preparing children to be adaptable in a period of change feels good. And then also challenging the things when they don't go right. And lastly, the hardest one of all is capture. How do you capture and distill and understand uh what's going on in your school as well? So, yeah, but at the moment, probably change, I would say.

SPEAKER_00 18:54

I think it's probably a bit unfair of me to ask you to select one, but thank you for giving us that overview. I think it'll be really useful for people. Now we wrap up each BSME talks episode by reflecting on the significant influence of teachers. Teachers often have a far-reaching ripple effect that we perhaps can't imagine in our day-to-day life. So, with that in mind, Tom, I'd like to ask you which of your teachers had the biggest influence on you and why?

SPEAKER_01 19:20

Yeah, so I've I've done I've mentioned this guy before in uh in podcast I've done previously, and uh and I've actually reached out, I've recently reconnected with him, which has been nice. So I had a Northern Irish, really tough politics teacher, he was a tough man. And actually, I was a little bit wild, and as people know, I can be a little bit silly from time to time, uh, and I and uh but I respond quite well to uh to challenge. So, you know, he put the fear of God into me. You know, firstly, he made me as a kind of 16-year-old go home and read the original text of like Hobbes' Leviathan and you know, reading rules and Locke and that sort of stuff, and and then Marx. So, you know, I read uh I read the Communist Manifesto about 16 and in the original text because I he was so relentless in his questioning, uh, which obviously had a huge formation in what I'm passionate about and what I went on to study. And then I guess further than that as well, I my particular example with him is when he in the in this about this time actually, in the in the parents' evening prior to my A levels, uh he basically just destroyed me. He in front of my dad, and I was in a single parent family. In front of my dad, he was just absolutely brutal to me and just basically said I was gonna be a complete failure uh and it wasn't gonna happen. And then uh I you if you do that to me, there's only one outcome. I went home and I worked like an absolute machine, and I ended up, I think, getting close to 100%, uh 100% of most of my models in my politics A level at the time. Uh, and I was furious, and and I and I went and you know, kind of said, Look, you you said I'd be a failure and this is what it is. And he just very calmly said, No, I didn't. I said, Oh, you know, that's that's what you needed at that time. And he was obviously totally right. And I just I love and for me, that all of this together, right? Because there's the role of knowledge there, there's the role of education, he's imparting knowledge, but there's that human element, right? Which is, you know, again, I'm I'm horrified when people say things like, Oh, we won't need schools in the future. And I, you know, if ever the last few weeks provides us with anything of being online, you know, we we absolutely need schools for that particular element, you know. So that individual possibly changed my life in my future through pretty nasty, real nastiness at the time, right? But with intended nastiness, uh challenge, and you know, was cruel to be kind because he knew that's what I needed at that time, and then led to me being a success, which is the benefit of education. So, yeah, that's probably the best example, I think.

SPEAKER_00 21:36

I love that. Stimulated that drive and really lit a fire inside of you. And lovely to know that you've reconnected with him.

SPEAKER_01 21:43

Yeah, but yeah, just don't don't ever tell me I can't do something. I think it's the case. But yeah, no, I have recently reconnected with him actually. So uh it's funny because I I gave that similar answer on on another thing, and he didn't he got he got to him and he contacted. So yeah, that's why.

SPEAKER_00 21:57

Oh, fantastic! Lovely to hear of it, and thank. So much for joining us today, Tom, and for sharing your thoughts. Thank you to those who are listening. We do hope you've enjoyed this episode of BSME Talks. Please join us again soon for another conversation. Happy teaching