With the government’s decision to shut down schools until further notice, the closure of Madrasahs and Supplementary Schools must also follow. We have written the following advice for head teachers and senior leaders after receiving a number of requests for guidance from partner institutes.
It is pleasing to see that many institutes are eager to continue the spiritual and moral development of their pupils from home as this crisis has made the nurturing of character strengths such as resilience, cleanliness and compassion more important than before.
The following points are a summary of our advice:
1. Senior leaders must consider what action plan they want to put in place within their institutes to ensure learning is continued remotely until it is safe to return to normality.
2. The senior leadership team must agree upon what they can achieve during this period. Any decision made should take into consideration the challenges and opportunities that are specific to your institute and community. E.g. is teaching using an online platform a realistic possibility for your staff and your community or would it be an obstacle to achieving your objectives.
3. Similar to schools, adjustments must be made to the scheduled end of year assessments this year. Consider whether deferring or cancelling is the best option for you or if there are other methods of assessments that can be utilised, such as project based or online assessments.
4. Lastly and most importantly, this is the perfect opportunity to engage, empower and equip parents to lead at home, with your support.
Your options:
· Option 1: Home Learning Packs
Equip and empower parents with resources to become the lead teachers and set up a support team consisting of experienced staff members to offer remote assistance and remain contactable as and when required.
· Option 2: Online Learning
Move all classes to a live online teaching platform with teachers delivering as they would normally outside of this period.
· Option 3: A Combination of Home Learning Packs and Online Learning
Given the uncertainty about how long Madrasahs will remain closed and given the sudden nature of the shutdown, many institutes will be feeling rushed and unprepared. They may not feel ready to move swiftly to online learning. If you fall within this category, it may be an idea to start with basic home learning packs for a few weeks whilst the management buys time to work out a viable plan for online learning and trains staff/ parents. Thereafter, steps can be taken to move to online learning once you have confidence in your systems and staff.
Supporting parents:
Whichever option you choose, we believe that your institute will benefit from providing the following support to parents:
1. Prepare and distribute home learning packs of resources and activities for parents to facilitate learning with their children at home and spell out clear outcomes that can be achieved during this period.
2. Provide online training and video tutorials for parents to guide them through the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of subjects that children need to learn.
NB: If you move quickly, then you may still be able to offer face to face training to small groups of parents before a ban on small gatherings is officially imposed.
3. Provide telephone and/or online support for parents through video calling apps such as Skype, FaceTime, Google Hangout, WhatsApp Video calls, Microsoft Office Teams or Zoom etc.
4. For the above to work, you will need to have a core support team of staff and administrators trained and actively working from home to support parents as and when required.
Considerations for online teaching
If you are considering going down the online route, there are many considerations to think about, ranging from, which applications are best suited for your needs, GDPR implications of processing and sharing confidential and personal information to technical training of staff and parents etc.
To get you started, please see below for basic considerations. Over the coming days, we will be signposting educators and parents to a tutorial demonstrating some of the Apps that can be used as part of a transition to online learning.
· As an institute, you must take the time to train your staff on using online teaching platforms should you decide to go down this route.
· Parents will need to have access to laptops or smart devices such as iPads or phones on which they can download the relevant Apps.
· If they have no access, parents should be advised to borrow or purchase devices where possible.
· You may want to put out an emergency fundraising campaign to source/ loan second-hand laptops to help equip those parents in need.
· Record and upload videos to demonstrate how to teach subjects, facilitate learning and evaluate progress.
· If any of the online learning apps are too complicated or challenging for your community of parents, then a simpler alternative for video-calling is WhatsApp or FaceTime. Most people are familiar with these apps, although they have their own limitations. It would require teachers to timetable 10-15 minute long video calls for each pupil each day.
How does this work?
Here is an example of one Madrasah’s approach to online learning.
Safeguard your physical, mental and emotional health
In this unprecedented crisis, the goal to prevent harm supersedes the importance of bringing benefit others. We advise you to make decisions that put the health and safety of your staff and children first.
Whilst safeguarding their physical health is important, we urge you to take time to assess and protect the mental and emotional well-being of your staff, students and their parents.
We should try our best not to overload parents with unachievable tasks at a time when they will be experiencing panic and distress themselves. We will be penning a blog post in the coming days with advice for parents about managing their well-being and trusting their parenting instincts.
We pray for protection from this illness and hope that we come out on the other side, fitter and stronger in our health, faith and character.
We’re here for you
In good times, we were always there for you; in difficult times, our character matters more now than ever before.
We have a suite of free downloadable resources for institutes and parents to use which are available on our store here. Keep a look out for weekly updates as we will be adding more resources for your use.
For those who require something more substantial for Islamic Studies, we have decided to offer our curriculum at a discounted price in light of the sudden demand. Please visit our store for more details. There are plenty of creative resources and activity books to keep your children engaged and uplifted.
If you require any further support from our team or access to any of our resources, please do not hesitate to get in touch.