Qatar Academy senior school faculty welcomed educator and author David Chadwell for a series of professional development sessions on the single gender classroom model which the school will be implementing beginning next school year. Chadwell, currently holding a teaching post in Egypt, is a renowned expert of the model having coordinated single gender programmes in South Carolina and writing the book A Gendered Choice: Designing and Implementing Single-Sex Programs and Schools in 2009.
His three-day visit provides the Qatar Academy administrators and teachers with extensive background, working strategies and real insight to ensure that the model will work and be adaptable to QA. The single gender program is being developed in selected courses of the Middle Years Programme, covering students from Grades 6-10 and with the intention of enhancing student learning while maintaining cultural traditions.
David stressed that in MYP as it is with most curriculums, male and female students must have the same standards with access to the same subjects and being offered the same range of choices for courses.
“We were very fortunate to draw upon the experience and expertise David shared with our faculty members,” Qatar Academy Director Dr Eric Sands said. “We will continue to reach out to experts within the field of single gender education while cultivating and securing from within our own faculty a knowledge-based approach to this method of instructional delivery”.
The Peninsula
