We hear from Rabih Farah, Senior Educational Consultant, about what it is like teaching in Lebanon, Oman and UAE.
How did you get into teaching?
I am originally from the Lebanon. Whilst I don’t teach in a school now, I always enjoyed being a teacher – but it wasn’t really my plan to be a teacher – it just kind of happened.
I was working in Lebanon for three months and had an opportunity to work in a Lebanese School – it was part of a chain of 43 schools around the world. After this, I enjoyed teaching so much that I started working in Oman. Between Lebanon and Muscat, I worked for about seven years.
In 2007, I stopped teaching, moved into an education advisor role and moved to the United Arab Emirates. I train principals, heads, staff in schools, and so I am still working in the education sector, just helping to improve the learnings of teachers, which will impact students in the short and long term.
What did you enjoy about teaching?
It really was the students – which I know sounds obvious, but I was teaching students aged 8-16 yrs and I particularly liked connecting with these diverse age ranges. In my first job, I was lucky to have a group of teachers who were extremely positive and it was their enthusiasm that gave me my love for teaching.
When I moved to Oman, this positivity was a driver for me to really understand the needs of the Omani students I was teaching. Whilst I was teaching in an international school, most of the students were actually local Omani students who had come from public government schools where they were taught in a very traditional way – to sit and listen – and they struggled to move away from this to what we were trying to achieve: a more student-centred way of working, with much more interaction between the students and the teachers. It was a big change for them and I had to really work out how I was going to connect with them. But I had the pleasure of working with some amazing teachers who were willing and open-minded, and together we gave the students the confidence to work and learn in this way.
It was a fantastic time for me and I am still in touch with several of my students from those days today – seeing them go on to study engineering and medicine is amazing. Some are even now training to be teachers, which I take as a big compliment.
How were you able to make these changes with your students?
I was taught in a very traditional way and when I started teaching in Lebanon I did what I thought I knew best – which was to teach as I was taught – in a traditional way. But I found there was no connection with my students.
In those days I taught the Arabic language. When I moved to Muscat in Oman, which is in fact where I met my wife – she is Irish, we always talked about teaching and learning and different strategies. We started exchanging ideas and I started trying them out when teaching Arabic. Some worked and some didn’t, but mostly, they worked, and this is how and why I started to see that teaching in a way that has a connection with the students could really make a difference to how they learnt. This desire to make a difference and share my knowledge and learning is actually what ultimately led me to leaving teaching students to becoming a facilitator. So in reality I am actually still in teaching… Just to a different, older audience.
During your career as a teacher, where have you worked, and if you could choose just one place where would you go back to?
OK, so I have worked in Lebanon, Muscat in Oman and now the United Emirates. If I had to choose just one… Wow, that’s a hard one. I have to give you two answers: one from my head and one from my heart.
UAE is where I work now. So this is definitely where my head is, and if I were to go back into an international school, this is where my head would tell me to go. The UAE is definitely the most advanced in terms of having the teaching and learning strategies on paper, in place and ready to go, so there are some exciting developments and times ahead.
But I know there is a need for this too in Lebanon – my own country. The government schools need a reform project, so my heart would like to go and try these new strategies and ways of learning and teach these in Lebanon. Oman is improving but is not yet at the stage that the UAE is at, so I would not currently choose Oman, because if I went there, I would have to face the same issues I faced 15 years ago.
So if I had to choose, my head says it would be the UAE, but my heart is always in Lebanon.
If you were the leader of the UAE – what one big change would you make.
I love this question because this is the same question I asked in a recent interview and often ask while working with school principals.
I am sorry, but I would have to make three changes.
Firstly, I would change the mindset of teachers – very generally, the local teachers in UAE think that by teaching five hours a day they are overworked and the mentality is that ‘give me everything in terms of planning and resources and then I have done my job and go home’. This mentality needs to change.
The second thing I would change in the UAE – and I think they are working on this, but not enough – is to change the way teachers are taught. All the universities teach in a traditional way and this is therefore imprinted into the mentality of the teachers they produce. Although new teachers have the latest teaching and learning strategies, they need more than this to become great teachers – they need to know how to connect with their students.
In the UAE, you see a big difference between local teachers and international ones. When I came to UAE in 2007 and started working with local teachers, many were trying to change because that what the authorities wanted, but they had the wrong mindset because of the way they were being taught themselves. As a consequence, they were resisting change and whenever they had an opportunity not to change, they took it. So the changes were not happening at the speed the authorities wanted.
In the UAE, we have approximately 2k teachers coming from places like Europe, America, Canada, and New Zealand. Most of these teachers have been trained properly and are trying to put all their training into practice. They are ahead of local teachers in this way, but there is a problem here too, because a lot of them are unable to adapt to the local culture, so they too are struggling. It is only the very strong who are willing to adapt – so using all their expertise – that are the most successful.
The third thing I would change is the way expat teachers from the Arab countries like Egypt, Jordan, Sudan and Syria are treated. The problem for these teachers is that they don’t get the same benefits as expat teachers from places like Europe, America, New Zealand. So they are not as motivated and get even more de-motivated when they see people doing the same job as them getting treated in a much better way – better pay, better health insurance and more.
If you were a trainee teacher again, what would you do differently?
When I first started out in teaching I thought what the professors had taught me was enough. I hadn’t realised that my training was just the start of my own personal learning curve. I would advise any trainee teacher reading this to keep reading, keep researching and keep trying to do things better. Connect with and learn from good and bad teachers, and learn from your mistakes. Don’t just look at your own country for experience, look internationally at how they teach in Singapore, in Finland, in other countries, and adapt your learnings to suit you and your students.
What has made you laugh or be proud in your teaching career?
When in Oman we organised a basketball tournament – it was the teachers versus students and I was terrible at basketball. I love to watch it every day but I really was a terrible player. During the game I had a bet with one of the students that I could score a basket. So, we were playing and she managed to block me, steal the ball and score against me and she was only 14 years old. I remember everyone laughing at me because a 14-year-old girl had blocked me and beaten me.
This may not seem very memorable to most reading this, but you have to remember what kind of world and culture we faced in Oman. We were one of first schools to have mixed classrooms – before it used to be just boys’ schools and girls’ schools. Male teachers were not even allowed to teach in female schools. In our school, we were one of the first to put them together and to be part of a basketball tournament with boys and girls and teachers all playing and laughing together was a first – I felt very proud.
What do you imagine teaching will look like in 2030?
I can see we will all be moving towards smart learning where technology and learning is integrated. I find many people struggle with this idea and often, in my opinion, get it wrong. Technology will become more important, but the one thing it can never do is have that personal connection with a student that makes things happen. I see technology used even today where teachers forget that they are still needed. Technology is not the replacement – it is the enabler that allows teachers to make better connections with their students.
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