Abbas Husain, Director, Teachers’ Development Centre has been involved in teaching and training teachers for more then two decades. His extensive teaching experience and the training he has received as well as conducted, makes him an expert on teaching and learning methodologies. His focus has been on training teachers since he feels that it is the most effective way to enhance the learning process of students.

What made you enter the field of teaching? And from a university professor, how did you come about to training teachers?
I belonged to a middle class family and I did not have a role model of teaching in the family. None of my father’s side of the family or my mother’s side of the family went into teaching. So it is sometimes hard to explain where this impulse came from, but I knew at the age of nine thatt I wanted to be a university professor. And in that sense I have been singularly focused in getting all the skills that I would need to make me a university professor, and keeping away from all the things that would take me away from becoming one. So that single minded focus has guided me all my life.

As far as training teachers is concerned, I benefited from a University’s Grants Commission Diploma course that was called ‘Teaching English as an International Language’, in 1983. This was run by the Ministry of Education, Allama Iqbal University and the University of Manchester. The course opened up my mind to what can be done with teachers so that they become ‘effective teachers’ and learning from foreign professors as well as our own stalwarts, was an excellent experience. It brought about a major change in my perception. As a result of that course and my performance in it, I earned a British Council Scholarship to go to Manchester for a year. So I have an M Ed. in English as a foreign language. Of course that gave me a whole bag of tools and strategies of what to do. So when I came back from Manchester in 1986, I realized that I can teach students all I want but I won’t change the education scenario of the country. It is only when I train teachers that each teacher will go on to teach 30 students and there will be a multiplier effect. Once a penny dropped into that slot, I decided to move on to full time teacher training.

So in light of all these educational development programs that you have attended and training workshops you have conducted for various organisations in Pakistan, how would you say adult learning is different from the way children learn?
There are categorical differences. Adult learning and children learning are two different dynamics. I believe that very many teacher trainers are not effective when they infantilize teachers. You can say to a little child “learn” this it will do you good’ - you can not do that to an adult. An adult needs to be shown the relevance of things straight away. Adults have a set of habits, mindsets, experiences and prejudices. These are not a burden for a trainer but a resource to tap into. By taking care of adult learners’ needs, we can enhance their learning capabilities.

Do you honestly believe that learning is a life long process?
I believe that as we grow older, (because of our experiences) we create clustered networks of ideas. We have an increasing impatience with ‘smooth’ talk. We understand the complexities of life and we know that things are not simple. That cynicism others consider as an aversion to learning. That is not true. That is actually an aversion to the hocus-pocus passed off as learning. True learning continues. I believe that learning is also connected to personality types. I have met 65 year olds that are more open to learning than 29 year olds. Curiosity as a ‘state’ and ‘trait’ are very different things. Curiosity for a momentary thing is a state, but a relentless quest for asking questions and a desire to know, is a trait. I believe that people with ‘trait curiosity’ will remain young in their approach to learning forever. Sadly parts of our education system turns off this trait very early. It needs to be fostered in schools, and if it’s switched off there, we lose the child’s approach to learning as a person.

What is the impact of learning on young children?
Our research and observation tells us that as life becomes more complex in the modern world, children need to start off with a certain set of skills that need to be developed at school. There is a whole critique of this approach as well, that believes that schools are repressive. They do have a valid point. Schools can change their approach to learning from being tedious and boring to joyful and encouraging. However, there are a set of competencies that a child can acquire only in his growing age from 0-15, and not beyond that. So learning at a young age is important.

Also, if you read Steven Pinker’s research, it shows that a human being is hard wired for learning. Children as young as a few weeks old respond to patterns of sounds and smells. That is how early our learning begins! So we can safely say that a child comes to school with his/her desire to learn intact – it is the school that switches it off.

Do you believe that there are different learning styles for each individual? Could you tell our readers about some of them, and whether these styles can be incorporated into our classrooms?
Indeed we all have human modalities of learning and preferences and these preferences can be put under three broad categories; bodily kinesthetic, audio and visual. With the theory of multiple intelligences we have added some more. I believe that even when these differences in learning styles exist, we should be careful in making them so individual and unique that children cannot be grouped together and put under one room. If that becomes the case there will be no learning because there will never be enough teachers. At the same time, I also believe that the teacher should open up possibilities to allow for different modalities of learning in the same classroom rather then the insistence that everyone should do the same thing at the samer time. There is space and time available in the class for children to explore different modalities even when the same thing is being taught. When one child might prefer writing an essay answer, another might prefer making a flowchart to explain what he is trying to say, and another still might prefer a drawing, and all of these should be acceptable.

What are your comments on the national curriculum and its exclusion of social ethics as a subject? Should it incorporate social values and norms?
One of the oddest things about our system is that in theory it is immaculate, but when it comes down to implementation there are major problems. You have to understand that the education system in any country is broken down into different aspects; there is the policy level where the curriculum is decided as a set of competencies that is required, and then the syllabus which is a broad outline of how much of each subject is to be taught at each level of education. To support the syllabus we have the textbooks and teacher training. I don’t think changes are required in the curriculum documents or at the policy level. It’s when you come down to teacher training and textbooks that you see a big gap. Teacher training I believe is the lynchpin. This is because you can have a horrible text book, but if you have a trained teacher s/he will know what to do with it. But if you have a great textbook and an untrained teacher, you will still not get the same results.

The problem with the system also is that we have discarded “civics” as a subject and it is not incorporated into the system through enough textbooks. The syllabus is overshadowed by history as a subject and simple day to day things like traffic management and road safety are left out.

How should learning and teaching take place between a student and a teacher? Do you think it’s possible for a teacher to learn from his or her students?
I marvel at the fact that my students are grateful to me when I am in fact grateful to them. To be a teacher you have to be a learner; the day you stop learning you are out. To be a teacher you have to learn new and new methods to ‘connect’ and ‘correct’ students. Children need to be shown connections between ideas and for that the teachers need to see the connections themselves. They must also be able to make corrections very deftly. Moreover, if the teacher cannot make connections of the present world to the child’s life, the learning will be hampered. For the child to enter class and realise that his/her own life, culture and language is of no consequence in the classroom, where s/he is only being demanded to write things which are of no consequence to him/her in copies, it will be difficult to retain things. And then we expect the child to remain interested! Teachers should accept that they are apprentices to any body of knowledge that they are teaching to the learner. Teachers should have the ‘lets learn together’ approach, and should admit that they are also students of the same subject, only they learnt some of it a few years earlier then the students. Teachers should be open to the idea that there yet might be a better way of doing things. When the learner sees this approach of the teacher, a whole new dynamics emerges and a new relationship takes place between the teacher and learner.

We’ve spoken about students and we’ve spoken about teachers, lets now come to parents. How can parents facilitate learning at home? What should parents keep in mind when creating a learning environment at home for their children?
Many parents ask me about which school to put their children and I tell them, “please don’t worry about the reputation of the school. The distance is a bigger problem.” Don’t make your children leave the house at 6:30 in the morning for school starting at 8:00 AM and make them come back home at 3:30 PM for classes finishing at 1:00 PM. That will make a child hate learning for the rest of his/her life no matter what you do. You pack off a child to school, cold tired, and possibly hungry so early in the morning and make him/her come back so late in the afternoon, and you expect him not to have a lack of concentration or problems such as anemia? Put the child in a school closer to home, regardless of its reputation or lack of - that should not be the issue.

The issue is creating an atmosphere at home where a child can learn. People say, “my child doesn’t read.” My reply to them is “when do they see you read?” Children imitate. When they don’t see a parent read, why do you expect them to pick up a book? Any house which has 50 books in it will have children which go to university. This might be a categorical statement, but it is a fact! And by books I mean any kind of informative reading material. If there is DEAR (Drop Everything And Read) time at home, times of silences when the TV is switched off and everyone reads – there will be learning.