Guiding Question: Student Engagement, Communication Skills, and Gender Parity

April 21—As I prepare for the first day in our week of school visits, I find myself taking a little time to reflect on my guiding, framing question.  I began, months ago, thinking about how much I would like to observe how Moroccan teachers and schools engage students, prepare them to be confident speakers, and help them to engage in discussion.  While engagement, speaking, and discussion are still very much what I will watch for, I realize that my interest in gender dynamics and gender parity in schools and society is just as important as these more pedagogical focus areas.  My own teaching schedule at home consists of Contemporary World Literature, during which we often discuss world news stories about gender dynamics in different countries around the world.  We also analyze the ways that writers address gender and portray characters as we study novels and literature.  While we were in Rabat, I wrote about the lecture on gender dynamics and how one world news story in my class piqued my students' interest on gender in Morocco here.  I continue to find myself even more intrigued with the ways that Morocco, so low on the World Economic Forum's "Gender Parity Index," addresses gender in schools and society. 

Back at home, I also teach an all-female course called "Positive Peer Influence," which is a peer support and counseling class.   In this class, we focus the ways that students can support their peers but also often discuss the ways that female-identifying students experience school.  My final class is called "PASS," an acronym that stands for Pioneer Academic Success and Support.   While both genders take this class, the students on my roster are the female students while my colleague - who I collaborate and team teach with daily - has the male students on his roster.  So I find myself in a unique situation as an observer of Moroccan schools and society - I teach courses that explicitly address gender differences and student needs, and also in a country that ranks higher than Morocco in the "gender parity index."  It seems to me that my guiding question needs to address gender in addition to student engagement, speaking, and discussion.    So as this host school week commences, I'm going to frame my observations with this question:

How do Moroccan schools and teachers ensure students are engaged in their learning and develop strong speaking and discussion skills while promoting gender parity in the classroom?

I'm sure I'll continue to tweak this question, but I feel confident that it will give me lots to watch for in the coming days.