ATTITUDES IN CLASS AND MODERN TEACHING OF MOROCCAN PHYSICS-CHEMISTRY TEACHERS

In recent years, education in Morocco has undergone a curriculum reform that aims to place the student at the heart of educational activities, to make him/her an actor and responsible for his/her learning. Such reform requires changes in pedagogy and the practices of pedagogical actors. We conducted a qualitative study among 13 physics and chemistry teachers in Moroccan high schools to improve learning methods for solution chemistry. This study aims to understand why Moroccan students favor memorization over to the detriment of reasoning based on theoretical models of solution chemistry. We start from the assumption that students cannot be held solely responsible for their way of reasoning; we can also make the teacher responsible. We believe that the pedagogical approaches and teaching methods used in the classes do not promote the development of the pupils’ personality and limit their capacity for analysis and synthesis and their possibilities of acquiring conceptual and methodological tools. In this research, we have considered doing a qualitative study using two data collection instruments: the interview and classroom observation. The results clearly show that teachers position themselves as repeaters and distillers of knowledge; therefore, modern teaching methods rarely seem to be present despite multiple educational innovations and the continuing and initial training. Furthermore, our attention was caught by the inconsistency between the attitudes of teachers in the classroom and their beliefs expressed during the interview about the strategies and teaching methods used.