Why I Started Believing in the E-Magazine as a Teaching Tool
A few years ago, if you'd told me a stapled bunch of student writing would become one of the most useful things in my English classroom, I'd have laughed. Textbooks, grammar drills, listening comprehension. That was the job. Magazines were extra.
I don't think that anymore.
At Mohammed VI Qualifying High School, we've now published five issues of Our School Times, our student e-magazine. Watching it grow has changed how I think about teaching English as a foreign language here in Morocco. It doesn't replace the curriculum. It gives students a reason to write in English that isn't a grade, and the curriculum on its own can't do that.
The Gap Textbooks Leave Open
Ticket to English and Visa to the World are solid books. They teach the structure and vocabulary students need. But they're built around units and assessment. A student finishes an exercise on reported speech and moves on. There's no audience beyond the teacher marking it.
Our School Times flips that. A student writing an article, a poem, or an opinion piece for the magazine knows classmates will read it. Teachers will read it. Maybe parents too. Knowing that someone besides the person grading you will see the work changes how students write. They revise more. They care about word choice. They ask each other for feedback before submitting.
Creativity Needs Somewhere to Go
Class time is tight. The syllabus has to move. A student who wants to write a short story, review a film, or argue about something they care about rarely gets the space for it during a normal lesson.
Our School Times is that space. The kid who's quiet in class, because his spoken English isn't confident yet, gets to show in writing that he actually thinks in complex ways. A student can try a persuasive essay, a comic strip, an interview with a teacher.
And because it's published, the stakes feel real without being punishing. Nobody fails an issue of Our School Times.
What It Does for Language Development
This isn't only about motivation, although motivation matters more than most methodology papers admit. Producing content for the magazine pushes students through the full writing process: drafting, then peer review, then editing. A homework exercise never does that. Students are writing to communicate with a real reader, so they have to think about clarity and tone in English, not just grammar accuracy.
It also builds a kind of ownership hard to manufacture otherwise. Students who contribute start reading previous issues more carefully, noticing what worked, picking up phrases from each other. Peer models, in my experience, do more for vocabulary than another round of vocabulary lists.
A Few Things I'd Tell Another Teacher Starting One
Keep the bar realistic. The goal is publishing student voice. Heavy editing that erases a student's own phrasing defeats the purpose.
Rotate roles. Some students want to design layouts or find images rather than write. Still counts.
Publish regularly, even if issues are short. A thin magazine on schedule builds more momentum than an ambitious one that never gets finished. Our School Times sticks to a steady rhythm for that reason.
Why It's Worth the Extra Work
Running a school e-magazine on top of a full teaching load isn't light. Five issues in, I still find myself formatting layouts at odd hours. But every issue produces writing I wouldn't otherwise see from these students. Sharper. More personal. More willing to take a risk than anything written for a grade.It reaches a kind of student engagement the standard classroom setup can't reach on its own.
