Hi guys...
Meet again. Wish you well always...
In educating our children we sometimes, or we way say most of the time hahaha...., overlooked of how strong our personal hobby in influencing our children's learning process.
Take a hobby of keeping our car tidy. Usually people will say that the attitude of keeping the car nice, clean and tidy is a reflection of the person. But quite often though we forget to see how effective this attitude to education processes.
I have seen many times two situations - one is people who are really messy in keeping their car and the other one who are really particulars in their car. But interestingly they practiced quite similar behaviour - littering attitude!!!! We can easily seen how people prefer to throw away their rubbish out of their window, I mean generally for both. To me this is a reflection of the person.
In fact we can make use of this situation into our activities of educating our children. Cleanliness is something encouraged in Islam. The best way is to convey the message of cleanliness by utilising our attitude of keeping our car. What we normally do was separating the attitude of keeping our car tidy and the education activity. To me it is something interconnected. If we willing to spare some of our precious times in making sure our car looked nice, we should always remember that that particular positive attitude be transformed in guiding our children the attitude of cleanliness. We need to find ways how we keep our car nice and tidy into daily practices. The children will slowly understand and try imitate that particular behaviour.
Share our hobby by telling them about cleanliness, relationships to our religion, why in such a way it affect to the environment as well as people, and what most important is that guiding them by showing our example of keeping our car tidy. Share with them why we should practice that particular behaviour and attitude - observing cleanliness does not mean by keeping our car clean only but also by not throwing rubbish out of window, keeping rubbish in a bag or even in our pocket. This is I think what has been said in Islam about relationships - not just with Allah SWT, but also to other human, the environment.
If we looked back to what our Prophet (SAW) have shown it was really something about consistency. His behaviour is always congruence to what he is saying. The same way goes to us I supposed - if we can keep our car clean, nice and tidy so does to the other context.
Albert Bandura, psychologist who had proposed the Observational Learning, suggested that in order for observational learning to happened it should always consists of four stages - attention, retention, production and motivation. Attention stage is where the behaviour is being attended to. The retention stage is where the behaviour is started to be processed in the mind. Whereas the production stage is where the copied behaviour is started to be formulated and to be shown. While the final stage is the encouragement the children will get. If it is congruence with their parents or other example the chance of the behaviour to be copied is higher. Don't be surprised our attitude will be copied and materialised by our children at the later stage!!!!!!!!!
In a simple word - try to always be fair to our children. They need guidance, role model, and good examples so that the learning process can happen smoothly. Without this their learning process becomes problematic!
See you later.
