Teaching That Transforms Lives

Our Prophet Mohammed ? was a model for excellence in every dimension. His teachings transformed ignorant and backward Bedouin into world leaders. As teachers, can we follow in his footsteps? Can we teach in way that transforms the lives of our students, and gives them the vision to change the world?

Today, because of shock and awe of the West, we follow Western models blindly. The models of education which we have borrowed from the West are not capable of this. In fact, these educational methods cause damage to the personality of our students. To understand why these models lead to harm, we need to study the historical roots of Western theories of knowledge. Modern education provides technical skills but teaches us nothing about ideals, visions, or the purpose of life. At the root of this crisis of education is a transformation in our theories of knowledge, which occurred as a result of the Enlightenment of Europe. As the conception of knowledge changed, so did the methodology and substance of education, which is designed to provide valuable knowledge to the young. In this post, we will discuss this transformation in epistemology, and its harmful effects, as well as what can be done to counteract them. This is a continuation of a previous post on Islamic Pedagogy. The video below is in English; for Urdu Version of the talk, see: Transformational Teaching (URDU).

Centuries of battles between Catholics and Protestants on an unprecedented scale of brutality and destruction led to the Great Transformation in European Thought. Enlightenment thinkers rejected the heart and soul as sources of knowledge, as their historical experiences showed that this led to perpetual bloody warfare. They were optimistic that rational thought, combined with objective observations, could arrive at all knowledge worth having. Over the centuries that followed, this epistemological shift had consequences that went far beyond what they could have foreseen. The rejection of God, Life after death, and Judgement Day led to increased focus on this world, making the pursuit of pleasure, power, and profits the goal of life. This provided the intellectual foundations for a shift to a capitalist society, where market relationships came to dominate social relationships. In the realm of education, this was reflected in the transformation of the role of the teacher as a mentor, guide, confidante, and life coach, to an anonymous specialist hired for the provision of subject-specific skills. In modern education, students and teachers have no social relationships outside the classroom. In a previous post on Islamic Pedagogy, I suggested that we need to revive and renew our teaching methods, to achieve better outcomes. In this post, I provide some specific suggestions on initial steps we can take in this direction.

The mindset of most teachers is that we are paid to “deliver” a specified subject matter to students. We are also responsible for evaluating the students on their grasp of the subject matter. After having delivered the subject matter in the best possible way, the teacher is not responsible for ensuring that the student puts in the work required to master the subject. This is starkly different from the parental guidance mindset of Islamic pedagogy, where we take pride in the achievements of our students, and take their failure as being due to our own failure to inspire and motivate the learning process. A subtle distinction is involved here. Students cannot learn unless they make their own efforts, and struggle to master the subject. In this sense, students' failure results from their own failure to make the required efforts, and teachers are right to put the blame on the students. However, in a deeper sense, the failure of the teacher lies in failing to motivate the students to put in the required effort.

I would like to discuss some specific steps we can take to change our teaching styles, in the context of two questions raised by teachers at Akhuwat University, where I was explaining these new pedagogical methodologies. One of the teachers asked about what to do if, despite our best efforts, the majority of students fail the midterm. Another teacher was concerned that there was some security breach allowing students to get access to his midterm, and suggested tighter security procedures to prevent this from happening.? Both questions reflect the influence of the market methodology for teaching, instead of the parental guidance methodology. Parents take pride in achievements of their children, and feel responsible for their failures, even though they do not teach them at school. A teacher who takes a parental interest in his students would never be taken by surprise by failures in the midterm. This is because he would monitor the progress of his students on a daily basis, and know exactly what they can and cannot do. Similarly, learning that students are getting access to the midterms would not lead to questions about how to improve security. Instead, we would be concerned about how to improve honesty and integrity of the students, and also, how we can provide them with the skills required so that they feel confident in their abilities, instead of feeling the need to cheat.

But can we really monitor the students on a daily basis? And how can we motivate them to study outside of class, to get the skills they need to pass exams? ?Doing this requires efficient time management techniques, as well as changes in teaching methodology. ?The conventional teaching methodology creates a hostile and adversarial relationship between students and teachers. The teachers are trying to keep quizzes secret, and make them difficult, to deny students points. The students are trying to overcome obstacles created by teachers' stinginess, and get points. Instead, we must start by telling the students that we are partners and have the same goal: to create the maximum learning for the students. If they take partnership seriously, the students will immediately demand that we give them 100% marks on all quizzes and assignments. Thus, we must clarify that our goal is to create good learning outcomes. It is the knowledge that will lead to marks. It defeats our purpose to give marks without knowledge, because students will never learn, if they can get scores without learning. From experience, I know that this is a difficult message to convey, and has to be repeated many many times. Throughout their career, students have been concerned with marks, not with knowledge. They make an effort to learn only “if it will be on the exam”. It is hard for them, and for us as teachers, to focus on knowledge instead of marks. Doing so requires more than just talking about it. We must show students that knowledge is valuable.

In fact, love of knowledge is built into the hearts of human beings. However, bad teaching and wrong kinds of subject matter have destroyed this faculty within our students. Our Prophet ? made dua for useful knowledge and also asked for protection from useless knowledge. ?Useful knowledge enters the heart. Most of what we teach is useless knowledge. The subject matter was developed to analyze and understand Western societies, and is not directly relevant to ours. It cannot enter the hearts of our students because it does not relate to our life experiences, nor to our own history. Thus, as teachers, we have to make special efforts to connect what we teach to relevant real-world issues that would engage our students. These connections do not exist within the textbooks we use, so making them requires creative efforts on part of the teacher.? The effect of years of struggling with and attempting to understand fundamentally incomprehensible theories, completely irrelevant to students' experiences, has led to a defeated mindset. The students have abandoned efforts at learning, and seek only to memorize answers to questions which they expect to be asked. Repairing the damage requires a lot of effort on part of the teacher. If we start to relate the subject matter to the life-experiences of our students, they will start to take an interest in learning. Furthermore, if we ask them to make intentions to use their knowledge for the service of the Ummah, this will provide them with a higher vision for the purpose of education. Of course, we will also have to change our teaching methods to provide them with knowledge that can be used for the service of the Ummah.

It takes time to build connections between the subject matter and real world applications familiar to and relevant to our students. As a first step, we should focus on developing skills within our students, rather than teaching them a body of materials contained in textbooks. If we are charged with teaching students to drive, we can assess our progress by seeing if they have learned to drive or not. In preparing every lecture, we must ask what the students will learn to do as a result of this lecture. Initially, when we have not learned how to make deeper connections, the skills may just be the ability to answer the questions at the end of the textbook chapter. At the end of the lecture, we must learn whether or not the students have acquired the ability to answer the questions. Generally speaking, because we were also taught this way, we use a one-way teaching process. We lecture at the students, and never find out what they understood from our lecture. When we first attempt to get feedback, we will be very surprised at the huge gap between what we thought we clarified, and student understanding.

There is a big technical problem in getting such feedback. At the start of the lecture, the teacher should write down three questions, and say that in this lecture we will learn the answers to these questions. But if we ask students to write down the answers and submit them for corrections, we will drown in the grading task. The solution is to have the students grade themselves. Leave ten to fifteen minutes at the end of class for this feedback. Take only one or two questions and have students write down the answers to them. Tell them that this will not be graded, it is meant to help them understand the materials, so that they are not tempted to cheat. Randomly switch papers so that each student has the paper of someone else. Then ask the student to read the answer, and ask him to comment on whether or not it is a good answer. Get several students to read answers, and discuss them among the students to arrive at an understanding of the correct answer. Then have every student grade the paper in front of them, based on the common understanding of the correct answer which develops during the discussion,

This method would create a good understanding of students' level of comprehension. If teachers have daily feedback on what kinds of questions the students can answer and what they cannot, they would never be surprised by a mass failure on the midterm. Aligned with the cooperative teaching style is the idea of formative exams. Instead of giving students exams to evaluate where they stand, exams should provide a learning experience. One method is to use open-book exams which ask students to answer questions requiring a level of understanding which goes beyond simple replication of textbook material. Another method is take-home exams. There are many ways to prevent cheating in such cases. One of them is to go over the exam together to test for understanding, and to give a second in-class short exam which is easy for those who understand the answers, but difficult for those who copied them. The essence of all such methods is to engage students in active learning within the class, and to help and encourage them in their struggle to understand the materials. If before the midterm, we have worked through all the expected questions with the students in class, the students will feel confident and capable of being able to answer all the questions. This is exactly the outcome we desire – if we undertake to teach driving skills, we would like all of our students to learn driving, as the outcome of the class.

All this in-class work creates a new problem. Where will we get the time for the lecture? The solution is to use the inverted classroom, where the lecture materials are covered outside of the classroom, and the homework questions are worked out cooperatively within the class. The students should be assigned to cover the lecture materials outside of the classroom. These days, there are an enormous amount of resources available which students can be assigned, which would enable them to cover the substance of the lecture outside of class. But, we all know that it is difficult to get students to read assigned materials outside of class. One method which I have found useful is to give a small quiz at the beginning of class which asks very basic and elementary questions about assigned reading materials. This ensures both on-time arrival of students, and motivates them to do the required study outside of class. Then, class time can be devoted to developing student skills cooperatively, at least in terms of learning how to solve problems and answer questions. Using this method, teachers can easily identify the strong and weak students. The stronger students can be assigned to teach the weaker students outside of class time.

To learn how to change the lives of our students, to motivate and inspire them to change the world for the better, we must transform ourselves, and change both the style and the substance of our teachings, This is a hard task, but has the most rewarding outcomes, because it is aligned with the mission of our Prophet ?, May Allah T'aala fill our hearts with the Noor of His Knowledge, and allow us to transmit this spirit to our students,