Student ownership has been a central focus of my professional identity and campus culture for many years. On my campus, we don't treat empowerment as a data point — it's something noticed in observation and conversation. What ownership looks like varies from class to class and teacher to teacher, because engagement isn't really a number you can graph. It's something you hear when a student can answer three simple questions:

What am I learning? Why is it important? How will I know that I've learned it?

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My campus developed these questions years ago with a consulting group, and we've come to own that premise so fully                                         that students can answer them in nearly every classroom on campus. This year we added a companion focus on                                                        building capacity alongside ownership — because teachers deserve the same three questions applied to their own                                                craft.

     I have the honor of serving as a Collegial Lesson Facilitator, which means I get to visit classrooms and                                                          facilitate non-evaluative, reflective conversations with educators about the strategies, routines, and decisions                                                      behind their lessons. These conversations aren't about judgment; they're validating, inspiring, and empowering.                                              How often are educators given time to visit, reflect, and learn from one another? Not often — certainly not                                                  in my early career. 

     This is exactly what drew me to my guiding question for the Fulbright Teachers for Global Classrooms                                  International Field Experience:

In what ways do Moroccan schools engage and empower teachers and students to own their learning?

 

I went through nine different versions of that question before landing on it, but I knew early in the program that this would                  be my focus, because it's the same question I ask on my own campus and in my own classroom every day.

     In Morocco, I found a country undergoing a genuinely transformative National Educational Reform, and what struck me              was how the reform sought systemic ownership by consulting every major stakeholder — teachers, parents, students, administrators, and community leaders — in difficult conversations about dropout rates, student engagement, curriculum relevance, rural equity and access, technology gaps, and the inclusion of native Moroccan perspectives like the Amazigh language and Darija.                                      As a WASC Coordinator who has sat through many accreditation self-studies, I recognized the process immediately:                                real institutional growth happens when a community collectively names its own challenges and co-creates its own vision.

     In classrooms across Morocco, I watched student ownership show up through collaboration and linguistic agility. Moroccan students move fluidly between Darija, Modern Standard Arabic, French, Amazigh, and increasingly English — and rather than that complexity being a barrier, I saw it become a tool for empowerment, as students translated concepts for one another, sometimes finishing a single sentence in two or three languages at once. Not unlike the Cr-English I speak at home (Croatian-English fusion) or the Spanglish (Spanish-English fusion) I often hear around town. In a lesson I co-taught with my brilliant Team Safi colleagues, I saw the same eagerness to connect and take ownership whether students were answering a structured question in a lesson or presenting their knowledge and pride in country and culture, that I see in my students.

     Students eagerly shared their heritage, traditions, and musical talents wherever we went — an ownership of identity as much as an ownership of learning. I especially enjoyed meeting the staff, students, leaders, and residents at IDMAJ, where the founder identified a need and now empowers marginalized youth, children, and women in underserved urban neighborhoods through education, cultural programs, and community support. It was a powerful reminder that ownership isn't confined to a classroom — it can be built into the architecture of an entire community organization.

     I saw the same spirit in the teachers. Presenting to future Moroccan educators and my Fulbright colleagues at the École Normale Supérieure reinforced for me that professional empowerment is universal. Moroccan teachers I met are adapting national frameworks to their local, cultural realities, building their own supplementary materials, and cultivating deep relational trust with their students, often amid real structural challenges.

     What I came away with is this:

Students are students, and kids are kids, in every classroom across the globe.

They want to learn, to know what they're learning and why it matters, and to connect with their peers and teachers. Teachers want to teach, to reflect, and to be trusted with their craft. Whether and how that happens is not something you can always measure in a chart — but you can see it, hear it, and feel it, on a school visit in Morocco just as easily as on my own campus. Morocco's approach, weaving national dialogue together with everyday relational trust in the classroom, offers a model of how a whole society can cultivate agency, ownership, and lifelong learning at every level.