Dear GAA Families!

Welcome to the 2023-2024 school year at GEMS American Academy of Abu Dhabi.  

I am extremely excited about this school year. We have new courses which will challenge our students to be more creative and innovative than ever before. Through the accreditation process we will partner with community members to increase the home-school partnership, refine expectations and increase engagement in learning through curricular and pedagogical adjustments. Finally, and most importantly, we will ask students to Own Their Own Learning at GAA. The GAA Secondary team will be employing strategies to have students come to school with a purpose each and every day. Secondary students will set three goals this year:

• Academic goal in a course of the student’s choosing

• Approaches to Learning goal

• Community, Action and Service goal

Our conversations about your child’s learning will revolve around these goals throughout the school year. 

Students come to school to learn, to earn credits and to graduate with a High School Diploma. At GAA, we also come to school with a purpose – a purpose to try new opportunities in classes and after school activities. It is our hope that through these opportunities students discover areas of interest. We expect our students to engage and advocate for their learning. We also expect GAA students to get involved. When they do, results improve.

I look forward to learning with you, 

Garth Wyncoll

Secondary Principal

Secondary Curriculum Overview

At GAA, each student’s program is made up of a combination of different courses:

• GAA Core Academic Courses/IBDP Courses

• ADEK Required Courses

• GAA Elective Courses

For promising Grade 11 and 12 students we offer the opportunity to take the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme. 

GAA also offers honors classes in English and in Mathematics courses for grades 7-10. Placement in honors is determined by recent trends in standardized tests, school academic achievement, approaches to learning/behavior, and teacher recommendation.

Department of Education and Knowledge (ADEK) requirements vary depending upon a child’s nationality and religion. (Our school uses information provided by parents during the school registration process.)  

In order to comply with ADEK regulations, every student has specific course requirements for Arabic Language, Islamic Studies and UAE Social Studies according to one of the following four categories:

• Group 1 – Arab Muslim

• Group 2 – Arab Non-Muslim

• Group 3 – Non-Arab Muslim

• Group 4 – Non-Arab Non-Muslim

Click below to know more about our Program of Studies, IBDP Program (Grades 11-12) and ADEK Equivalency requirements (Grades 9-11).

Parents will receive an email with a link to electives (via Google form) once their student is enrolled at GAA. If you have not received an email for your 7th or 8th grader to select your elective classes, please contact our registrar at registrar_gaa@gemsedu.com 

In education, the term standards-based refers to systems of instruction, assessment, grading, and academic reporting that are based on students demonstrating understanding or mastery of the knowledge and skills they are expected to learn as they progress through their education. These knowledge and skills are known as standards - concise, written descriptions of what students are expected to know and be able to do at a specific stage of their education. In schools that use standards-based approaches the standards determine the goals of a lesson or course. Teachers then determine how and what to teach students so they achieve the learning expectations described in the standards. At GAA, curriculum standards are defined for each course and specifically indicate what the student is expected to learn and demonstrate on assessments.

Throughout each course, the completed assessments help the teacher provide feedback and learning targets as well as track progress toward proficiency of each curriculum standard. When assessments target multiple curriculum standards, a proficiency level is determined for each one. Our proficiency levels are:

• Mastery

• Proficient

• Developing

• Emerging.

Please see below presentation to help you understand Standard Based Grading:

For Students

Setting up your school accounts:

At the time of enrollment, each student is assigned a school google account and email. Parents will receive an email with the instructions and student login credentials.

Once new student logs in to his/her school gmail account (ending with @gaa-ad.com), they will find emails from support_gaa@gemsedu.com regarding:

• School Wi-Fi network connection information

• Google classroom invitations from each of their subject teachers (NOTE: This will be sent at the beginning of school year, once their individual schedules are finalized).

Digital Platforms

PowerSchool is the platform used by our secondary teachers to take assignments, standards-based grading and attendance for each Period/ Block.

Google Classroom is the Learning Management System that simplifies creating, distributing, posting class work and engaging students in learning online. The primary purpose of Google Classroom is to streamline the process of sharing files between teachers and students. 

The below link has a short video to take you through the initial steps. Further details would be shared to the students by their teachers. Please check student School Google emails regularly to get the latest updates from the teachers.

If you have any difficulties in logging into the systems, please contact us by our email support : support_gaa@gemsedu.com 

For Parents

PowerSchool is the platform used by our secondary teachers to take assignments, standards-based grading and attendance for each Period/ Block.

There is a parent portal login available, which will be sent by email through support_gaa@gemsedu.com If you do not receive the credentials within two weeks, please contact support team at support_gaa@gemsedu.com 

We would recommend to use Mobile App as well to get instant notifications on Absence Attendance. Login credentials will be the same both for mobile app and website.

Google Classroom - There is an option for Parents to receive Summaries of teachers for your students classes. Parents could select to either receive the summaries on a Daily, Weekly or Monthly if you have a google email. If the your email is a non-gmail account, by default it gives the option to receive summaries on a weekly base only. You will receive an invite on the primary contact email address registered with GAA, from the respective teachers of the student. Watch this video for guidelines: https://youtu.be/0WxGwUUlawo 

Teacher emails: Middle and High School parents can also expect to receive direct emails from teachers. NOTE: we strongly recommend creating a separate email account for school communication only. 

To know more about parent digital platforms, please check out Communication Page of Welcome Pack.