AAA+

“We adopted the Triple A+ model at Sky School (now Amala) as the core pedagogical approach for designing a secondary education programme for refugee youth from scratch. Working with learners whose education had often been disrupted, and whose lives were shaped by displacement, uncertainty, and responsibility far beyond their year, we needed a model that went beyond content far delivery.

Our goal was to build a constructivist learning experience that enabled learners to develop the skills, understandings, and agency required to make positive change in their lives, their communities and the world. The AAA+ model offered a clear, rigorous, and ethical way to do this: honouring lived experience, foregrounding big ideas, and insisting that learning is much more powerful when it can be transferred and applied.

The AAA+ model became a powerful mediator for every aspect of our curriculum and pedagogy. Beginning with awareness, we intentionally anchored learning in students’ prior experiences, identities, and contexts, recognising these not as obstacles to learning, but as essential assets. Through abstraction, students are upported to move beyond the particularities of their own stories to develop transferable concepts and understandings. Finally, through application and deliberate practice, learners are challenged to use their understanding in multiple contexts - in the classroom, their personal lives and their community, developing mastery. This structure allowed us to design learning that was deeply contextualised yet rigorous, adaptable across cultures and countries, and resilient to the complexities of refugee learners’ lives.

Seven years on, the value of the AAA+ model can be clearly observed across our classrooms - from Jordan to Kenya to Thailand. Students consistently describe their learning as meaningful, relevant, and transformative, and we see this reflected in their ability to apply their understanding beyond the classroom: to engage critically with social issues, contribute to their communities, and navigate new educational and life pathways with confidence. For us, AAA+ has proven to be more than a pedagogical approach: it is a practical model for designing education in complex, diverse, and rapidly changing contexts: one that places learner agency, deep understanding, and real-world application at its centre.”

— The Co-founders of Amala, the world's first Refugee High School Diploma

To find out more about Amala see https://www.amalaeducation.org