Competencies of a teacher in Islam; Metasynthesis method (Al-Mofid)

Islamic thinkers and philosophers, emphasize the pivotal role of teachers as the most important factor in realization of success or failure of an Islamic education system. Therefore, any attempt to explore the dynamic and complex nature of teachers’ qualifications would be considered critical.  This paper is an attempt to introduce a descriptive model for “Quality criteria” of Muslim teachers reflected in the rich hadith and Islamic educational archaic manuscripts. To this end, adopting a qualitative meta-synthesis approach, all possible dimensions of teachers’ quality criteria were explored. For the application of metasynthesis, grounded coding and thematic analysis were carried out by the two researchers. The output of meta-synthesis resulted in emergence of overall 2313 grounded codes derived from 30 hadith and Fiqh resource books (including verses, narrations and scholar opinions and verdicts). Based on the results, an integrated model of teacher's qualities (named as Al-Mofid Model) in the four major areas of Teacher's etiquette in: knowledge (Al-elm); Instruction (Ta’lim); Pupil (Mota’lem); and Self (Nafs) is presented. The findings indicate that the proposed model, which is the first in kind, provides a comprehensive synthesis of Muslim teachers’ qualities at the extent of Islamic education system, and provides considerable implications for enhancement of teachers’ professional development based on the insights derived from Islamic traditions and values.