 Bismillahirrahmanirrahim. 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. So I'd like in this talk to draw some lessons from these life experiences. Our religion teaches us that each life is infinitely precious. Our students have enormous potential. They can be ozalis, Ibn al-Hassam, Ibn Khaldun. And it is our job as teachers to bring out this potential. I have found that this effort to bring out the hidden potential in the students to be of immense value, extremely fruitful. Countless books have been written on the principles of etiquette 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. And we should value our students as having more potential than ourselves and we should take care to value their time and give them useful knowledge. Because the Prophet ﷺ made dua for useful knowledge and sought protection from useless knowledge. We have a tremendous opportunity because our students can turn into world changers and they can shape the future of the world. This opportunity is also a tremendous responsibility. From notes on my personal journey, I studied at MIT in Stanford and then for 15 years I taught at top universities in the USA. I left for two reasons because one was my children were growing up and I didn't want them in public schools in the USA where they would acquire American culture. And the second was that 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. This was my responsibility. So I left for Turkey and spent six years there and then in various universities in the Pakistan. And I felt this much more satisfying because I felt that these students are my students and their successes were my success. And I felt that their failure was also my own failure. So I tried very hard to make sure that they would succeed. The differences that I saw was that at the top universities, the best students were highly competitive and also very confident of their skills. Whereas in the Pakistani public schools, I found that the students had a defeated mindset. They could not conceive of the idea that they could be the world's best. So there's an interesting survey of abilities in leading countries in which the USA students always tend to do the worst on math. But when asked how well you think you did, they express confidence that they have done very well. As opposed to this and in exact contrast, the Japanese students score extremely well on maths, but they say that we have done very poorly. So the amount of confidence that you have is not necessarily proportional to the skills that you have. A critical difference in the role of the teacher in market societies which now dominate the world and in a traditional society, in an Islamic society, is that 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 counsellor, an advisor. And he acts in a parental role and he worries about the personality development of the students. In terms of personality development, I have found that the greatest obstacle to 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. So building their confidence requires working on two fronts. One is the psychological front, which involves decolonization of minds. Our process of colonization for the past few centuries has been one of a loss at every front, which has led to a defeated mindset. But in addition to building psychological confidence, we also need to provide the skills to match. And so it is the teacher's job to do this. And one of the first things that needs to be done is to believe in the potential of our students for massive accomplishments, for achieving great things. If we believe in them, they will perform to fulfill our expectations of them. In all classes I teach, I now start out with a lecture, encouraging students to dream high, have visions. And a few of my lectures were Farib Khurd Shahi, The Ways of the Eagles, and Sitaron Se Aage Mukam Aor Bhi Hai, Jaha Aor Bhi Hai, Reaching Beyond the Stars. These are to encourage the students to have confidence and to reach high. In addition to this personal level of building confidence, we also need to rebuild the shattered confidence in our heritage, religion and culture, on which I also have a lot of lectures, which are linked here. In order to act as a guide, a mentor, a life coach, we need to create a very different relationship from the one that we are accustomed to in a market society where the teacher's only concern is to teach us a subject he has no other relationship with us. Instead, we have to become partners of the students and helpers 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 process. The search for knowledge comes naturally. Students want to learn things, but they have been frustrated by the way we have taught them. Both the subject matter and the teaching style has been designed to discourage the search for knowledge. Students have tried many times and have failed and so have given up. So when we need to switch their mindsets, this requires changing our own mindset and style of teaching as well as the subject matter. We 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 or meaning and deprive 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 which inverts the traditional style of the textbook, it was immensely valuable for the students and got the students engaged and interested. We started with a problem, a real world problem, and then developed whatever tools, techniques, theories we teach in the context of solving some real world problems. Also, we can address the life experiences and discuss how we go about solving problems that we face in our lives. So whenever we relate something to the experience of the students, either as individuals or social problems that they are having as communities or within their society, they will be very eager to learn about those. Teaching is a very poor way to generate learning. To learn, the students must tackle the subject, must engage with it, must struggle with it. And the way to do it, one way to do it is the inverted classroom where you assign students some reading or some materials or some video lecture and then in class we discuss it. One method that I have found useful is to put up a list of questions that I plan to discuss, put up one question, ask every student to write the answer to that on their front of them on a piece of paper. Exchange papers and then ask a student what is the answer that is written and then have a discussion. Is this the correct answer? What is the flaw in it? How should we grade it? 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. And this is tremendously helpful for learning. The questions that came up on this material when it was presented was that we try very hard and we do everything according to the plans but when it comes to midterm we find the students fail miserably. So actually this should never happen. It should never happen that it comes as a surprise to us what the students are doing on the midterm. If we 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 so we will be able to assess what students can do at every stage of the game. And if we are building skills in every class, in every lessons the students progress from one point to another then we will not have any surprises. We will know exactly what the students are capable of doing and what they are not capable of doing. And this is our job as teachers and if the students fail that means that we have failed them. Thinking of exams as means of evaluating our students. We should think of them as means of helping the students to learn. One way to do this is to give them take home exams in which they will initially copy from each other and cheat and we have to inform them that the goal is not to get scores. Actually I need to know how well you are doing and by looking at your answer I will know what you have learned and what you have not learned and I will try to help you do better. So this takes the stress out of exams and they can self grade the exams in their own classroom and we can sit down all of the students and sort of do the grading together by putting out the correct answer and then having the students discuss the answers and come to the 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. 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. They can reach for the stars and we have to motivate them that acquiring education even though it's a struggle even though thinking and trying has a lot of risk and a lot of struggle required. It is worthwhile, it creates tremendous results. They can be what they want to be, they can achieve whatever they want to achieve 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 drive the car they will crash the car because they are over confident of their skills. So confidence and skills should be developed in parallel. So that's the job of the teacher and that's both very difficult and very challenging and also extremely rewarding the most rewarding task in the world. All the profits were sent as teachers and so we follow in a very high profession.