AISNSW Creating Cohesive Communities Podcast

SNIPPET:

But if we just create an environment that's welcoming, warm and you kind of ignite their inquiry, you could possibly break their insecurities and give them opportunities. And these opportunities could be life changing.

JULIA:

Welcome to the AISNSW Creating Cohesive Communities Podcast series, developed by the Association of Independent Schools NSW.

Mohammed Naanouh is an experienced science and HSC biology teacher and currently is working as the well-being coordinator at Al Sadiq College in Greenacre. Throughout his tenure, he has taught all stages and has made significant contributions to the transformation of the school's well-being framework.

Notable achievements of Mohammed's include the introduction of a culturally relevant health system based on intercultural understanding capabilities, the implementation of a vertical streamed mentoring system and creating a family like setting all aimed at fostering a sense of belonging and support among the students.

In addition to his coordination duties, Mohammed has also taken the initiative to develop programs that are specifically designed to empower students, encouraging them to explore their interests, develop their strengths and embrace their individuality.

Join us as we discuss the value of teachers supporting diversity and enhancing student belonging, learning and well-being.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF COUNTRY:

Before we begin, we would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands and airways in which we are meeting and broadcasting today as we share our learning, we also pay respect to elders both past and present, as it is their knowledge and experiences that holds the key to the success of our future generations.

Hi, Mohammed, and welcome to our Creating Cohesive Communities podcast.

It's just amazing that you're here with us today. Welcome.

MOHAMMED:

Thank you, Julia. Thank you for having me today.

I really appreciate this opportunity to share my story with the audience and I hope my stories today resonate with them.

JULIA:

Absolutely. Let's just get into it. Can you tell us a bit about your role at Al Sadiq College?

MOHAMMED:

Yeah, sure. So I've been at the school for seven years. I started my career there, just being a a regular science teacher. Actually, before that I just doing some casual work. I was teaching a bit of Arabic, a bit of religion, a bit of PE, bit of history, everything. So it was just more of a casual teacher there and then and then that then they spot opened up from my permanency and I applied for the science teaching role.

And then with that came my senior biology teaching role. So I've been doing that for seven years. I've been there for seven years. My science teaching in particular, but then for the past five and a half years, I've actually transitioned into a wellbeing role.

I've started off with Stage 4 coordinator, then Stage 5 and stage 6. We've revamped the whole system, including Head of House and I've been involved in like the creation of culturally relevant houses in our school where we have pride in the ethos, but also we kind of fuse that with the Australian values and the norms of society.

I had a big role in that and in particular, I've written the framework that supported that big idea, which is based upon the vertical system, the family settings and the building of our identity for the kids.

So that that's my background. It's been quite colourful and full on, especially in the well-being related stuff, but my teaching in general has been quite exciting there.

JULIA:

Ohh amazing. I just it's just amazing to hear the diversity of experiences and how you're now where you are at. So that actually makes me think if we can just take a few steps back.

Why teaching? What made you decide to become a teacher?

MOHAMMED:

See that that question for me is very easy to answer because a passionate teacher always knows the moment where they wanted to become a teacher.

For me, my journey started in Year 10. So I was in year 10 at my local Public. I was in the public school at the time, and I was I was a musician, so I was the head of Arabic band there. We used to play some Arabic music for our school. We used to perform.

So the music teacher at the time gave me the opportunity to organise the orientation sessions for the Year 6s coming into our Year 7s for the following year and what my role was to organise films with background music, teach the kids about Arabic scales, about English scales. They include minor and major and quarter tones in Arabic. But more importantly, he gave me the freedom to create and deliver the content that I that I found very, very fun and enjoyable.

So that moment made me think I was like, OK man, this feels good. I went home for the next few days. I was like this little experience where I'd spend the whole day teaching year sixes from different schools. It gave me this like amazing feeling. And then as the years went by, I went to year 12, I got my HSC results. I met with my mentor and it was that moment was quite crucial because I was either gonna go towards a medical science type of career or a teaching degree, and I feel like that moment in Year 10 triggered my decision, from the discussion I had with my mentor to go towards the teaching path because I felt so good and then the feelings that I get right now are very similar to the ones that I had in Year 10. And that's why I really love teaching and I continue to do so with so much enthusiasm every day that I do so.

JULIA:

What a powerful and incredible process to be part of, to actually experience and then to be able to instill that now as part of the role that you took. That's amazing.

So, Mohammed, why is teaching such a vital role in today's multicultural and diverse worlds?

JULIA:

Mohammad, why is teaching such a vital role in today's multicultural and diverse worlds?

MOHAMMED:

OK, so first thing I want to clarify from my perspective is teaching isn't always teaching a topic. I'm a science teacher. I'm a biology teacher, but that's not my only job.

I like to refer to us as educators rather than teachers because we are teaching a whole bunch of things and we are educating kids about a lot of things, in particular what we're good at. Our domains. In particular, like me, I'm a scientist, but in particular, my domain is biology. Hence, I need to share that with the kids.

So what I wanna now talk about is a very important thing about kids and their backgrounds. So this is me coming from my well-being experience cause I've kind of had experience across all the stages. I've seen the different parts of the students development and they kind of shift quite rapidly. And but there's one thing in common for all of those stages is not every kid is the same.

There's no two kids that I've taught, or I've dealt with in my well-being role that I've had the same story and that's important to know as a teacher.

So the key thing is the key factors that affect students from different cultures and different backgrounds starts off at home. So a lot of the time parents, students have parents who are working, they come from broken families. They probably speak English as a second language. So there's so many factors that kind of influence a kids mental or cognitive development.

So imagine a kid coming with a problem, and their dads at working mum's working, mortgage repayments are coming right now. We have a cost of living crisis. Everyone's struggling, but in particular from my experiences is that the more pressure there is in society, the more disconnect there is with parents and their kids. Because all the parents are worrying about is just putting the food on the table. So where do we come in as teachers?

Well, we spend a lot of time with them. We spend a lot of time with them and we have some very meaningful conversations with them. Now some of the time kids ask me about careers, they ask me about that jobs in the world of science, medicine, whatever it is, and the way I can respond to them is through like infecting them with my passion and also guiding them.

But with that, sometimes kids kind of open up to us. They kind of tell us things. They kind of tell us about their worries, their concerns. They probably tell us about things that they're experiencing with their friends. There could be well-being matters that you might need to refer to the Heads of House or the well-being coordinators in your schools and therefore if we're just helping them just grow we're helping them stabilize their thoughts and we're helping them with their career guidance from our domains, that's very important.

The second thing I wanted to talk about, especially with migrant parents, or students who have parents who've come from overseas. A lot of the time, when these migrations occur, the main reason why they come to Australia is because they want their kids to have a better life than they had from in from their previous countries.

So a lot of the time they come from Third World countries, developing countries or even war-torn countries and their parents in those countries are just working, as labourers, they're farmers. They're just struggling just to put v ery minimal like food on the table. And when they come to Australia, they want this better life for their kids.

What we could do is help the parents by giving them some comfort in guiding their children to a certain path that would benefit them and therefore their efforts migrating to this country would be like better off for them and yeah, that's my answer to that question.

JULIA:

Really quite amazing. You've touched upon so many important aspects about student well-being and how important the relationship is between a teacher and a student and considering the part of a ecosystem and that everybody's story is different. And to be able to honor that. Thank you.

So on that note. What would be 3 key events that have influenced your approach to educating today's in today's modern class?

MOHAMMED:

OK, so the three events that I've had kind of have different themes.

So the first one is when I first started my career in Al Sadiq college, I had a very supportive head of department. She gave me that freedom to teach the way I I teach. She didn't really micromanage me. It was a lot of freedom for me to create resources, to modify programs, to explore different ways of teaching and apply them to those kids and sometimes I took a really, really hard class.

I'm talking about students who couldn't really read and write in year 10 and trying to teach a topic like Newton's laws or genetic mutations to kids who couldn't really write was kind of a nightmare in someone else's perspective. But the fact that I was given the freedom to explore and trial and error what was working for me and helping those kids, originated from my very supportive head of the department.

One key moment, one key moment in that class was I looked at the kids and I was like, OK, we're learning about enzymes and these kids aren't getting it. So I thought about their backgrounds, and saying, OK, what if I teach them in a way that they can relate to.

So if they have, you know, a piece of bread and a piece of like. Or in Arabic it's called kafta. If you if you know what that is, you're listening. And if you wrap it around what you've done is you've created the Lebanese sandwich, which has kind of changed. But you stayed the same, and that's what enzymes are. So you mix 2 molecules together, and then you've kind of remained unchanged.

When I gave them that very real example, the kids understood it and when they answered the question that in the in the exam they actually wrote that example, which is quite was not appropriate, but at least they wrote something as they understood it. These are kids who couldn't read and write properly, but in saying that that was a big moment in my head department kind of praised me so much and the roles of leaders in the school are very crucial in the way we think as teachers.

Second, my second big experience was, that head of department actually left our school and the school was going through a transition of new principals, and I was left with no head of department. This was my first full time job after university so I had no head of department. I had to be very resilient.

So what I did though is I started to problem solve. These are the things that we do at university. We learn how to problem solve and I started managing the assessments, the programs and just having chats with parents and getting to know them a bit better. It was very difficult, but it was probably the most meaningful part of my time at the school because it gave me that confidence to just get things done.

And my principle at the time was very supportive. But a big way of doing that is I kind of reconnected to my head of department, who was working at a Christian School, and I'm working at an Islamic school and we kind of programmed our new syllabus. The biologists, at the time in 2017, we programmed our sessions together and we organised our excursions together. So we got the Christian students and the Muslim students going together and the same experience and doing the same assessment. But, it's kind of different in a way where our students had different classes, but they're doing the same thing.

And that experience kind of made me think about our students in the school and the other students who come. Even though they were on the beach doing the same experiment. They were still very distant from each other. The whole purpose of this was them to mingle with each other, learn about each other, share the science. But I still noticed that they were almost trapped in the bubble from both sides, from both schools.

As the years went by, I started to like look at this and every single time I look at a student saying, OK, there's a big problem here because they're only used to what they see in the walls of the school, in the gates of the school, wherever what school that is. That gave me the inspiration to do my next thing, my next part of my school's journey. So I was actually rewarded as a stage 4 coordinate after that.

And as the years went by, I was offered a publishing role with Oxford University Press. Now this is a very reputable company. I mean this is my third or fourth year of full-time teaching and then all of a sudden, I'm asked to write some resources for this company. For me, this was humongous, like I still can't believe that it happened, but from this experience that I learned and the experiences that I’d had in the past, I started to create resources for our school.

Actually, I wrote the program. It's called the ‘Journey To Light’ program for the school, which kind of embeds the virtues and values of the faith and the ethos with the scenarios of Australian society. And I just want the kids to just practice their faith, which is probably universal to every religion out there, but. I want them just to apply it to just Australian society, where we've gotta be patient in times where when times are tough or you have to have respect for everyone, respect for the environment. But I just backed that up with the, with the ethos of the school and what the religious resources say.

And that was pretty big for me, because I did start to see a change in the behaviour of kids and they always used to refer back to the lessons that I created, but all this would have been possible with the timeline that had occurred in my 7 years at the school.

So yeah, that's my answer to that question.

JULIA:

It's amazing what an incredible journey, and there's some really complicated concepts and what I can hear from that journey is that you, with such heart and passion, synthesised it and made it possible to convey so your students could grow and learn no matter where they're at.

MOHAMMED:

Yeah, but also maintain their identity. So yeah, so we're trying to grow and maintain their identity, but also fit into society.

JULIA:

Yeah and provide those pockets to amplify you know the hope and understanding you know and building that sense of belonging.

MOHAMMED:

Yes, yes.

JULIA:

And then that feeds into all areas of learning. It's really tricky and it's such an amazing balance that you have created and it has been validated through all those experiences and examples you just gave. Thank you so much.

So from your experience as a teacher, what are the most effective approaches to build cohesive and inclusive classroom spaces?

MOHAMMED:

OK, so my first approach is to always remain objective. Our students, as I said before, there's no two students that are the same and they always have different stories. So their behaviours can be driven by many factors. These can and a lot of these are unseen, so some of these could be influenced by the communities that they live in. I'm not talking about religious communities, I'm talking about the actual areas that they live in, where, those areas could be filled with unethical behaviour or antisocial behaviour, and that could be driving some like a kid's mind. They could be from large families. They could have economic pressures, they could and hence if they do act.

If they do act up, you need to see like, what's going on here, because if you're objective and you're looking at every kid differently, you're probably seeing a change in behaviour as possibly a call for help instead of a student acting up or mucking up.

So kids already struggle with their development, in their growth. So when they're kids going from Year 7 to Year 10, they have different stages and you'll probably notice that when kids go to Year 7, they're like these little kids. But then in Year 8, they're very different. And then Year 9, they're even more different. That's because they are going through their physical and developmental and cognitive progressions and all these hormones affecting them and their brain kind of shifting as all the mental shifts, they're really doing the tough as is and when they have these extra pressures that I mentioned before you need to kind of guide the kids you need to see OK what's going on. How can I assist with these kids wellbeing and assist them?

And then my second part of the answer is as a teacher, they're delivering content. I think the key to this is finding culturally responsive, real world examples. Every kid loves real-world examples. Don't get me wrong, but some kids still don't respond to the ones that you're familiar with, and sometimes you need to do a little bit more research and connect with the kids in a different way.

So you probably need to understand their backgrounds, the way that they think, what they're exposed to, even their music, their food, the cultural traditions and then try to apply the understanding of those factors to the content that you're teaching and by that I've had a lot of success doing that and like I said in the previous answer, where I kind of related the enzymes still sandwich, but that sandwich is specific to their culture and that made a big impact on students learning in my classes.

JULIA:

Absolutely. Thank you so much for sharing. Just keeping it relevant and real and providing also the opportunity to actually do and learn, and as we're saying before synthesising those very complicated concepts, to actually be accessible and real for your student cohort and communities. It's so important for learning outcomes and well-being outcomes and they are emmmeshed.

Ohh Mohammed, what impact does labelling students in a classroom have on classroom well-being and learning outcomes?

MOHAMMED:

So labeling students can actually have a very devastating impact on the way students learn and also the way they interact in the wider community. So if we label them, they can form their own perceptions of isolation, and unfortunately we could be influencing an us versus them type of mentality by doing that.

So in schools, I think it's very important for us to create environments that are welcoming. You know our classroom shouldn't be uncomfortable for them. We should create a very comfortable environment for them to express their ideas without any fear of judgment. And at the beginning, that might be hard because, like I said, some kids might be acting up. But like I said, we just need to remain objective as I said before.

But if we just create an environment that's welcoming, warm and you kind of ignite their inquiry, you could possibly break their insecurities and give them opportunities. And these opportunities could be life changing.

So to summarise, if we do label the kids they might shut down. And it could be unrepairable at certain parts of the schooling journey.

JULIA:

I love that idea of, you know, keeping and maintaining a a classroom of warmth and welcoming and providing those ongoing opportunities and it's something that's a process that we do together and it's an ongoing process as well.

I'm loving this idea about these opportunities, these pockets of opportunities for students. So they kind of talks to the next question. Want you to think about a time in in your wonderful classroom of an inspirational moment that you've had with a student or student participation.

MOHAMMED:

OK, so I did have one key moment which, for my own career progression, was very crucial. So I was teaching a nine class of mixed abilities. So there were there were a few kids who were very high ability, we had mainstream ability kids and we had also had some very low ability. It's so when I took that class it was quite challenging, but I was always trying my hardest to engage them in in learning. So the one lesson that kind of was very inspirational and kind of changed the way I teach forever was I was teaching a topic of the topic of electrical conductivity. And I kind of planned an activity where it was very student centered.

I asked the kids to go and observe things around the classroom where we could test in the circuit to seek the electricity passes through it. And one of the students who was low ability, like he was probably in the lowest part of the school's grading schools, he went and found the tub of playdough. And we connected this, we put the playdough between two alligator clips and we have a light to to kind of detect the to to observe the conductivity.

So a 12 Volt current it's quite bright but when we ran the playdough in that, the light was very dim. And for me, like I'm the scientist, I looked at that and I was very intrigued at that playdough reduced or restricted the current. So what I then did was I I connected the voltmeter to it and then I realized that it went from 12 volts down to 7 volts and the student was kind of very engaged in this like he was kind of like, ohh, what's going on. How did that happen? Look what I found. Even Mr Naanouh, he's freaking out. And then I just thought that that was a big moment cause he was so excited for the next few lessons where every single time we learn about it currently be like, Yep, resistors and ohh yeah. Currents and yeah, by vaults are constricted by things like Plato and like, that's pretty. That was pretty good. That student was doing very well.

But then then what happened was,I then went on to the next module disease and I have a very like strong interest in certain diseases and one of the diseases that I find a big, very interesting is multiple sclerosis. So when I was teaching nerve conductions and I related it to MS as a disease.

I got the circuit back and I told the student to come back and connect the circuit and then what he did was. We then demonstrated the circuit and we linked it to the disease of MS. and what we realised was the playdough slowed down the signal. This is what happens in MS with the plaques slow down the signal and limit the movement or the vision or whatever it is in the disease and the fact we related that physics to our biology topic and the student was like running even with the MS example, the discovery component of his learning allow them to really participate for the remainder of the of the year, so that was kind of big because the low ability student, he didn't really do like he didn't get 80 or 90% of the exam, but I guarantee you he will never forget that that lesson because he found something we built upon it and we and he kept on working towards a specific scientific goal, and he also learned that inquiry is important no matter what you're doing in life. And that was the breakthrough part of my teaching career, where I realised that that very key moment.

JULIA:

My gosh, that was just such a beautiful and profound moment. Thank you so much for sharing and providing those amazing, empowering moments for your students. It's just so incredible. And that was just such a beautiful example.

Thank you so much for sharing this journey as you, as this amazing teacher, you're amazing students. You really did demonstrate how positive well-being and learning outcomes for your students are really amplified when you provide those pockets of opportunity, for student voice when it's harnessed building that ongoing sense of belonging, involving students and their families, understanding that ecosystem in which we all live within and providing those spaces to recognise and build upon the strengths and attributes of your students. Thank you so much for sharing today.

MOHAMMED:

Today, yes. Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity. I really appreciate it.

JULIA:

All the best.

Thank you for listening to this episode. For further information on the AISNSW Community Cohesion Podcast series and project or any of our guests, please see our show notes.