Despite the fact that Afghan school teachers frequently use questioning as a teaching strategy to lead to development of productive and critical thinking among students, they spend little time on asking and answering questions compared to other societies.

Research indicates that school teachers in Afghanistan typically ask questions that require low-level thinking and which rarely entail critical thinking whereby the students are more likely to draw inferences and synthesize ideas. It is also very uncommon that teachers provide formative feedback to students in order to help them recognize their previous achievements as well as the future steps.

A great number of questions generally do not follow a logical pattern for developing understanding of students and are mainly asked to waste time or keep the students busy during the class. In the meantime, the frequency of providing information about how to improve students’ responses is rather low.

A great majority of teachers often ask closed questions and questions that require a yes/no response or answers that relay completely on memory, which measure the lowest level of students’ knowledge, and the expected answer in Afghan classrooms is usually a “yes”. When a student answers “yes”, the teacher is likely to say “excellent”. It seldom happens that a student says “no” to teacher and ask him/her for further explanation.

In addition, when a student gives a wrong answer it happens quite often that the teacher leaves the student in ignorance and uncertainty without providing any feedback at all. A lot of teachers just address the question to other students if one student responds incorrectly.

Questions that start with why and how and questions that encourage students to explain something or urge them to argue in favor of or against a viewpoint, which will contribute to deeper understanding and making the lesson much more exciting,are largely lacking in Afghan schools.

Many teachers do not have necessary skills to apply questioning for improved learning outcomes while, at the same time, the students are fearful of teachers’ questions because if they do not respond to the questions in an expected way, they will be punished or at least get low scores at exam. Due to increased number of students per each class, only few students get an opportunity to receive little information about how to improve their answers.

Even though, a large portion of teachers address questions to a broad range of students, specific students who are understandably waiting to answer teachers’ questions get more attention compared to others who are left out in the class discussion, if it happens at all. In spite of assigning sufficient wait-time for students to think, teachers do not actively listen to student’s response. It happens most of the times that the teacher realize a student’s response is completed only after the student stops speaking.

Classroom interactions mainly evolve around topics that expect students to recall facts, rules and procedures while it rarely happens that classroom discussions focus on issues that require studentsto indulge themselves in high-level thinking.

Despite relatively tangible improvements and millions of dollars of international community financing, education in Afghanistan is still facing major shortcomings in access, quality and equity.

The current education system is largely lacking comprehension both in theory and reality. The policies and strategies developed after the fall of Taliban with the support of international experts need to be significantly adjusted to the Afghan context. The policies also should be more gender friendly and should critically consider condition of all students, especially girl students.

The school curriculum and the textbooks are believed to be alien to the students and way more difficult than a lot of teachers can properly teach.

Only around 20 percent of the teachers are qualified while there are still many girls’ schools which don’t have female teachers.

A large number of secondary and high school graduates cannot do basic reading and writing despite the fact that the students are expected to learn reading, writing and basic numeracy during primary school. A recent survey by Ministry of Education shows that around 45% of grade six students cannot properly read the textbook.

According to Ministry of Education, overall nine million students are taught by 200,000 teachers in 16,000 schools across Afghanistan.

View expressed in this article are of the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Pajhwok’s editorial policy.

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