Transformative Teaching: Changing the Lives of Our Students

Our Prophet Mohammed ﷺ was a model for excellence in every dimension. His teachings transformed ignorant and backward Bedouin into world leaders.(see: The Greatest Teacher of All Time). 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?

The models of education which we have borrowed from the West are not capable of doing so. In fact, these educational methods cause damage to the personality of our students. Today, because of shock and awe of the West, we follow Western models blindly. 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 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 ﷺ 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 ﷺ, May Allah T’aala fill our hearts with the Noor of His Knowledge, and allow us to transmit this spirit to our students,

Islamic Pedagogy

{bit.ly/4c13knZ} I’ve spent my whole life in academic institutions, first as a student then as a teacher. I taught for 15 years in the USA, 6 in turkey and 25 years in Pakistan. In this talk, I would like to draw some lessons from these life experiences. An Urdu version of the talk is: Islamic Styles of Pedagogy (urdu). The English video below is followed by a writeup:

Our religion teaches us that each life is infinitely precious. Each individual life is potentially as valuable as the entire humanity. Our students have enormous potential, and it is our job as teachers to bring out this potential. I found that this effort to bring out the hidden potential in the students to be of immense value, and extremely fruitful. Countless books have been written on the principles of etiquette (Adab) for Islamic education, extracted from the Quran and the Hadith. I will just mention a few. Our knowledge should not give us Pride. Instead, it should make us humble. We should value our students as having more potential than ourselves and we should take care to value their time and to give them useful knowledge. The Prophet ﷺ made Dua for useful knowledge and sought protection from useless knowledge. We have a tremendous opportunity because our students, if inspired and motivated, shape the future of the world – just like the students of our Prophet ﷺ did. Whereas our religion teaches how to become the best human being that we can be, modern education is designed to suppress and destroy this potential, and turn us into human resources, interchangeable parts in the capitalist machine for the production of wealth.

Since I myself was educated in the West, I experienced and absorbed the dominant Western pedagogical models. It was long personal journey to recover from the damage done to me by this educational process (see: Recovering from a Western Education) . It is worth providing a brief summary, so that the reader can understand where I am coming from. In the 1970s, I studied at MIT and Stanford and then for 15 years I taught at top universities in the USA. I left for two reasons:

1. my children were growing up and I didn’t want them in public schools in the USA where they would acquire American culture
2. I felt that I was being paid for the job of educating the children of foreigners when our own children in our own countries were not educated and this was my responsibility

When a chance offer materialized, I left and spent six years (from 93 to 99) at a leading Turkish University. After that I moved back to Pakistan, and have been teaching here since. I found my experience as a teacher much more satisfying because I felt that these students are my students and their successes were my success, and their failures were also my own failure. So, I tried very hard to make sure that they would succeed. My students responded to my efforts by giving me their best performances, and many graduates are now placed in good institutions in Pakistan, and around the world.

After my return, I noted many differences that forced me to change my approach to teaching from the one I had learnt in the West. While in USA, I saw that at the top universities, the best students were highly competitive and also very confident of their skills. In Pakistan, especially in the Public Sector, I found that the students had a defeated and colonized mindset. They could not imagine that they could be the world’s best. However, in terms of raw talent, our students are just as good as anywhere around the world. Unfortunately, the imitative educational system we have is designed to destroy their capabilities – they learn to aim low like the crows, instead of claiming their birthright to fly high (See: The Way of the Eagles bit.ly/42CCjTp ). Students can only achieve according their ambitions, and it is the job of the teacher to believe in the students, and to teach them to reach for the stars (See: Reaching Beyond the Stars: bit.ly/azRBS ).  

There is another, much bigger, difference between the role of the teacher in Market societies which now dominate the world and in a traditional Society traditional Islamic society.  In a market Society a teacher is paid for his work and he does educate the students in return for his salary.  As opposed to this, in an Islamic Society the teacher is a mentor, a life-guide, a counselor, an advisor, and he acts in a parental role. He worries about the personality development of the students. But the most important job of the teacher is to create desire and enthusiasm for the pursuit of knowledge in the students. In my experience, I have found that the greatest obstacle to high achievement is lack of self-confidence in our students. The students do not even try to learn because the experience that they have had with learning is very bad. They have been trained to not try to think instead just to memorize. Trying to master alien subjects in a foreign language has proven so difficult, that they consider themselves incompetent, and incapable of learning. They cannot identify the real causes for their failure: the educational system, the subject matter, and the teacher.

Building the confidence of our students is essential if we want stellar achievements from them. This requires work on multiple fronts. One the psychological front, we need to work on decolonization of minds. Defeats and failure on every front for the past two centuries has led to a defeated mindset in the Ummah as a whole. But, in addition to building psychological confidence we also need to provide the skills to match. Creating confidence in car-driving skills, without teaching the skills, will lead to crashes. It is the teacher’s job to build this confidence, and this starts by believing in the potential of our students. If we believe that our students have the potential to change the world, they will perform to fulfill our expectations. In addition to self-confidence, we also need to rebuild the shattered confidence in our heritage religion, heritage, and culture. I also have several lectures on this topic which are linked here: How to Launch an Islamic Revival.

In order to act as a guide, a mentor, and a life-coach, we need to create a very different relationship from the one that we are accustomed to. In a market society, the teacher’s only concern is to teach a subject he has no other relationship with the student. Instead we have to become helpers and partners of the students in their quest for knowledge. We have to switch the students from striving for scores to become knowledge seekers. This is a very difficult transition because the students have been burnt in the past. The thirst for knowledge comes naturally; it is part of human nature. But, students have been frustrated by past educational experiences. Both the subject matter and the teaching style has been designed to discourage students to search for knowledge. Students have tried many times and have failed. They have acquired the false belief that we are unable to learn. To switch their mindsets, we must change our own mindset and style of teaching as well as the subject matter. We vastly underestimate our students. Instead of discussing the big problems facing our society, facing the ummah, facing the world, or facing us in our personal lives, we teach them nitty-gritty details of trivial questions which make no sense and deprive them of the excitement of learning. If we engage with them on problems which actually matter in the real world, and teach the technical stuff as part of what is needed to solve them, they would be very eager and excited and keen to learn. I have found personally that when I started this approach, it was immensely valuable for the students. The students became engaged and interested, and acquired skills. Instead of the textbook approach which builds micro skills and defers engaging with the real world, we start with a real-world problem and then develop whatever tools techniques theories we need to solve the problem. We can also address life experiences and discuss how we go about solving problems that we face in our lives. Whenever we relate something to the experience of the students either as individuals or social problems that we face as communities, they will be very eager to learn about those. For more details about how to implement this educational method in teaching economics, see “How to Motivate and Inspire Students (URDU)“

Lecturing is a very poor way to generate learning. To learn, the students must tackle the subject, must engage with it, and struggle with it. One way to do this is the inverted classroom. We assign students some reading or some materials or some video lecture and then in class we discuss it. One method that I found useful is to put up a list of questions that I plan to discuss. Put up one question on the blackboard, and ask every student to write the answer to that on their front of them in on a piece of paper. Now, exchange papers and then ask a student what is the answer that is written in front of you. Then have a discussion – “is this the correct answer?” “what is the flaw in it?” “how should we grade it?” etc. In the end all of the students acquire a much deeper knowledge not just by learning the right answer but by also learning the wrong answers and the way in which they are wrong. This is tremendously helpful for learning.

Changing the methodology for assignments and exams is also very valuable in generating learning. We can give them take-home exams. By habit, they will initially copy from each other and cheat. We have to inform them that the take-home will not be graded. Actually I need to know how well you’re doing and by looking at your answer I will know what you have learned. If you cheat and deceive me, I will be unable to help you.  Initially, students do not believe this, but eventually they come to realize it. This takes the stress out of exams. They can self- grade the exams in their own classrooms. We can randomly distribute the exams among the students, grade them together. We ask students to discuss the answers and come agreement on what is good and what is bad. This methodology for assignments and exams creates much more comfort and much more learning on the students than the stressful methodology currently in use. It also provides us with a lot more information about what the students are learning, and about the students who are good, as well as those who are having difficulties. We can create small groups of students and ask the good students to help those who are having trouble.

One questions that came up on this material was that we teachers try very hard but when it comes to midterm we find the students fail miserably. Actually this should never happen. It should never  come as a surprise to us what the students are doing on the midterm. If, at the end of every class we assess what the student has learned, we will know exactly what the students are capable of and what they are not capable of. We should be building skills in every class, and we should be evaluating our students progress in every class. If we do this, we will know exactly what the students are capable of doing, and will not have any surprises regarding their lack of learning on the midterm. This is our job as teachers and if the students fail that means that we have failed them. Instead of thinking of exams as means of evaluating our students we should think of them as means of helping the students to learn

So to summarize the job of the teachers is to inspire, to motivate, and to build skills. We have to teach the students that they can do whatever they want to do, and to teach them to reach for the stars. We have to motivate them that acquiring an education, even though it’s a struggle, and even though studying and trying to solve challenging problems can be frustrating, it is worthwhile. Knowledge is extremely valuable, and can change our lives, and change the world. But in addition to this inspiration and motivation, you also need to build skills. If we teach students confidence but don’t teach them how to perform, then performance failures will crush their confidence. So confidence and skills should be developed in parallel. That’s the job of the teacher and that’s both very difficult and very challenging and also extremely rewarding. In fact, it is the most rewarding task in the world: all the prophets were sent as teachers. As teachers, we follow the highest profession. For more details, see Principles of An Islamic Education May Allah T’aala give us the Taufeeq to fulfill our responsibities, to change the lives of our students, and through them the world, for the better.