Encouraging Spiritual Growth from a Teacher ?s Perspective
Spiritual growth is tough to measure. Parents worry whether the words they speak to their children are getting through, especially when bad behavior continues. Bible school teachers worry in the same way, but it may be tougher to deal with than from a parent ?s perspective.
Even though parents have the ultimate responsibility for training their children in righteousness, Bible teachers have the burden of higher accountability for their role, as James 3:1 shows: “we who teach will be judged more strictly.” While we cannot discount the fact that individuals are responsible for their own growth and for their own sin, teachers are certainly accountable for teaching the truth.
It ?s easy to determine whether a teacher is teaching the truth; we have the Bible as the ultimate resource. However, teaching is more than simply passing out information. If that ?s all we had to do, then we could be free and clear by simply distributing Bibles. Professional teachers and adequately trained volunteer teachers know that information isn ?t learned until it is internalized. That is, information must be added to an individual ?s repertoire of decision making skills and processes.
The Bible shows that using that information is an indication of internalization (Matthew 12:33 (( ?A tree is recognized by its fruit ? (Matthew 12:33, NIV).)); Colossians 1:4-6 (( ?We have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love you have for all the saints ? the faith and love that spring from the hope that is stored up for you in heaven and that you have already heard about in the word of truth, the gospel that has come to you. All over the world this gospel is bearing fruit and growing, just as it has been doing among you since the day you heard it and understood God’s grace in all its truth ? (Colossians 1:4-6, NIV).))). However, as Bible teachers, we do not always have the ability to see that information being applied, since our interaction with our students is typically only an hour each week. We could base our assessment of how well the lesson has been applied by surveying parents of child students and spouses, friends, children, and/or coworkers of adult students, but that seems impractical.
So how can we know whether our lessons stick? In all honesty, unless we are resolved to develop fairly deep relationships with each of our students, we probably will not know for sure. However, we can increase the likelihood of making them stick by making our lessons “sticky.” Here are some suggestions to consider when writing and teaching your lessons.
- Link it. Consider the relationships between cognitive development, spiritual development, and teaching and learning styles. Use what you know about the infrastructure of learning and teaching and use it as effectively as you can. Turn the science of teaching into your art. Check out the chart I developed to line up various educational theories with spiritual development theories.
- Apply it. Application, application, application. Be as specific as possible when making application statements to your students. That means you need to know who they are, what they do, and why they do it. Don ?t accept the general applications found in published curriculum, use specific examples from your kids ? school experiences, from your small group ?s work experiences, from your support group ?s marriage, divorce, parenting, addiction ?whatever ?experiences.
- Explore it. Try to consider different perspectives. Identify your own experiences and learning/teaching styles and try to develop activities, points of application, discussion questions, etc., from a different perspective. Approaching a topic from the varied perspectives of the multiple intelligences theory is another way to explore a topic more fully. (Do a search for it and Howard Gardner if you ?re not familiar with this theory.)
- Beat it. The old preaching outline “tell them what you ?re going to tell them, tell them, tell them what you told them” isn ?t necessarily a bad concept. Sometimes we try to cover too much information quickly rather than spending more in-depth time on fewer concepts.
- Share it. Get together with other teachers who are in your team or who may have taught the same concept. Even if you aren ?t teaching the same topics, getting together with a group of teachers to talk about all of your topics may be helpful. It is amazing what happens when we realize that “all of us are smarter than any one of us.”