The Moroccan educational system’s focus on memorization and outdated pedagogical teaching methods is futile, admitted the Supreme Council for Education on Tuesday.
As Morocco’s Education Ministry undergoes a radical reform of its components, the Council intervened, calling for the establishment of a new model for managing the education that focuses on soft skills, comprehension and innovative teachings, to limit the shortcoming of Morocco’s current system, enforced for decades.
The Council suggested transcending this mechanic approach, and putting more emphasis on helping students develop skills through new initiatives and metrics that prioritize their interests.
The Council’s recommended changes intended to adapt education and training programs in Moroccan institutions to meet the needs of the students, based on active learning and intellectual independence rather than the conventional transmission of information.
Bottlenecks for Moroccan Education
The “TARL Morocco: Promising Beginnings for Innovative Tutoring” paper looked at the difficulties the Moroccan educational system faced with regard to the standard of instruction, with the public sector having much more low-performing students than the private sectors.
50% of students had poor performance in reading, mathematics, and science. Among high school students, the figure increased to almost 70% in all three areas, according to data from the PISA-2018.
86% of students in rural areas and 66% of students in urban areas are deemed to be “low performers” in reading comprehension, according to PISA-2018.
Approximately 55% of students in the wealthiest quartile, as opposed to 87% of those in the lowest quartile, are low performers.
In an interview with Hespress EN, Professor Hassan Madi of higher education and expert in education explained that “through these figures we were able to identify a number of issues with the Moroccan educational system, including a problem with the quality of the learning programs and trainings, the quality of educational institutions and educational frameworks, and a problem at the level of languages.”
Radical Change for Radical Results
Accordingly, the council stressed the significance of creating committees for the ongoing renewal and modification of curricula, programs, and training as well as the continuous evaluation of schools, to assure a follow-up with these schools’ pedagogical performances.
The council demanded that schools play a more active role in society by entrenching values such as social justice, gender equality, and the practical implementation of decentralization and independence for educational institutions.
The restructuring of the education and training system, necessarily requires “renewing competencies within the deciding bodies, the tasks of the directorates, giving priority to regionalization, and providing them with material and human resources to carry out all these methodological projects regionally,” according to the education specialist.
The Council advocated for incorporating families consistently in educational institutions’ management and culture, by fostering close ties and regular communication with parents and students’ caretakers.
“The new school should take into account the best interest of the learner and the teacher combined, which requires a necessary transition to a model based on the learner’s skills and learning gains, as well as integrating cultural, artistic and sports education into programs and including them in school time” according to Malika Bendher, an education and pedagogy specialist.
“Educational institutions need to expand the circle of consultation with all actors in the system, including the actual involvement of families, while evoking the coordinating nature of the entire educational system,” she added in an interview with Hespress EN.
The council emphasized the need for developing an impartial, recurring evaluation of educational institutions’ performances on both a quantitative and qualitative level, as well as for disseminating the findings.
To help sustain learning successfully, the Ministry of Education needs to adjust the contents, programs, curricula and texts, activate procedures to ensure spatial justice and ensure equal opportunities among all learners, says Bendher.
In addition to anticipating risks by preparing the necessary human and logistical resources, the Ministry should well also implement modern technologies in schools.
The education specialist suggested “limiting charged and demanding curriculums, prepare students’ minds to adjust to new digital conditions, tailoring their education to their social and lifestyle preferences, and teaching problem-solving and situational awareness.”
The council highlighted that for these reforms to be effective, it will have to to strengthen the educational system’s human resources through selective and competitive recruitment, fundamental and ongoing training, and bettering the physical and moral conditions of the workplace.
The TARL report emphasized the importance of giving instructors the resources and training they need to succeed to improve the efficacy of education and, ultimately, students’ results.
The TARL approach requires students to be grouped according to their skill level rather than their class. This educational approach aims to give them each tailored support and help them advance to the next level by matching activities and materials to each child’s level of ability.
Theoretically, this approach is based on “combined activities for maximized learning,” a pedagogical approach designed to assist children in establishing the fundamentals of reading and math.
During the first attempt operation carried out in a school in Tamesna, progress was seen only three weeks following remediation utilizing the TARL approach.
The competency level in subtraction increased from 10% to 61% while the proficiency level in Arabic reading increased from 23% to 54% for fourth-year elementary students.
The percentage for fifth-year elementary students in French grew from 5% to 20%. In addition to a decrease in the performance gap between the low performance group and the high performance group of 35% to 3% in subtraction, 54% to 33% in Arabic, and 51% to 36% in French.
Reform Highlights since 2021
The Education Ministry has teamed with the American Language organization AMIDEAST and national specialists to develop textbooks, and teaching practices that will shape the English competence of thousands of students in a test run next year.
Additionally, Primary school pupils in Morocco will begin studying Amazigh in the upcoming academic year, according to the Ministry.
The language will be gradually added to primary school curricula beginning in the 2023–2024 school year, with the goal of having it widely taught by the 2029–2030 school year.
The Ministry also established a program to train 1000 candidates annually to be “capable of rejuvenating the faculty of researchers, which will witness significant retirement rates in the coming years.”
However, the Council is calling for improvements in human and material resources to deal with the lack of school faculty, the decentralized implementation of these reforms, and the adaptation of educational programs taught in schools to students’ skills and personal contexts.
We re looking forward to seeing a serious reform in educatio system that will bring about drastic changes in the teaching and learning methods adopted for many years and deemed to have inefficient and outdated