Taroudant - Morocco’s Ministry of National Education and Vocational Training and the British Council signed on Monday, November 30, 2015, in Rabat the Memorandum of Understanding for the Connecting Classrooms Program, launched to link Moroccan schools with those in Great Britain and MENA region.
Taroudant – Morocco’s Ministry of National Education and Vocational Training and the British Council signed on Monday, November 30, 2015, in Rabat the Memorandum of Understanding for the Connecting Classrooms Program, launched to link Moroccan schools with those in Great Britain and MENA region.
The text of the Memorandum of Understanding signed by Rachid Ben Mokhtar, Minister of National Education and Vocational Training and John Mitchell, the Director of British Council Morocco, stipulates that the focus in this program will be on the six core skills: digital literacy, critical thinking and problem solving, creativity and imagination, student leadership, cooperation and communication, and citizenship skills.
Pursuant to this memorandum, the ministry is committed to create a professional team for tracking the program, choosing schools, selecting teachers and training them.
The British Council undertook to provide support in areas related to the professional development of teachers and headmasters in addition to prizes for schools that will demonstrate good educational practices and develop among students skills that will enable them live and work in a globalized economy.
The British Council will also give teachers access to online pedagogical resources.
Spread over the period of 2015-2018, the program aims to create a network of schools in the region to share their best experiences and improve the quality of education in the countries in the MENA region.
The program will offer online resources and training for about 4,000 teachers, headmasters and principals of schools (3,500 beneficiary schools).
In Morocco, the program will involve 150 teachers, 90 headmasters, 270,000 students and 10 schools in the regions of Souss-Massa Region, Oriental Region and Beni Mellal-Khnifra Region.
According to the British Council, Connecting Classrooms Program has been launched to enable young people “to understand issues of worldwide importance, gain a sense of social responsibility and develop skills to succeed in the global economy.”
In the first version of the Connecting Classrooms Program, launched from 2009 to 2012, 14 middle and high schools in three Moroccan Regional Academies for Education and Training were awarded the prestigious International School Award (ISA), the first of its kind in Morocco and the Maghreb.
As stated in the communiqué released in 2012 by Souss Massa Daraa Academy, winning the prestigious award “came as a fruit of the continuous efforts invested throughout the last three years by the Sous-Massa-Draa Regional Academy team – including the cluster coordinators Mohammed Hassim and Abdellatif Zoubair, who had been in charge of supervising partnership projects within the Connecting Classrooms Scheme.”
Edited by Mohammed Hassim
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