I’m out of town. Sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you.

(1) Books for Christian Educators. I have not found any information about how to be an effective secondary Bible teacher that I found was worthwhile. If you do, let me know. Recently, our entire school read Piety and Philosophy by Dr. Richard Riesen. This was a good text for big-picture thinking (e.g., what exactly is “Christian” education?).

(2) I have a few thoughts on the “advice” end which are based largely on my first year of full-time high school teaching:

(a) Beware of the “Gotcha.” Several new teachers I know (including me), have fallen pray to what I call “gotcha mode.” This is where your attitude toward your students deteriorates and you start looking for mistakes. That’s not good. Negativity just isn’t good. So, don’t go there.

(b) Know your audience. Realize that these are high school students. Know what your grade level is capable of. Their abilities change so much from freshman through senior year.

(c) Accentuate the positive. Don’t allow others to give you negative information about them. If a teacher wants to tell you about how awesome a student is, then great. I had a teacher tell me what a great Chemistry student a certain kid was; I was extremely surprised because this kid was failing my class. It was good to know that he had talents and abilities in other areas. But, if a teacher comes to you to complain about a student — get out of the situation.

(d) Get some actually teacher training. I went through a program for secondary teacher certification for Texas. I actually learned quite a bit about being a teacher.

That’s all I got. I’m no master…pretty new at this too…

thank you.

I mentioned this briefly above, but this fall will begin my first year as a Bible Teacher. My preparation time is severely shortened by a 7 week missions trip I am leading from June-July, so I have been reading veraciously on education (as my degree is biblical studies) and took some a lot of substitute teaching jobs (for practical experience–I viewed it as my ‘student teaching’).
–What advice would you have for me?
–Also, I have had trouble finding any texts on how to be an effective Bible teacher in secondary classroom setting (most are soft “how-to’s” written for sunday school teachers). Are there any articles/books you would consider “a must read” for Christian educators?

(1) “Discovery.” In the above post I mention discovery twice: (a) self-discovery, and (b) “discovering FOR themselves.” In both cases, I mean the essentially the same thing. The will to learn comes from the student and my job is to guide them to discover things for themselves without overpowering them and giving them every piece of information. When students learn things on their own through problem solving, deep thought, discussion, or myriad other ways, they tend to retain that information longer and know it better. So, by “discover for themselves,” I mean that a student needs to work for the answers.

On that same note, however, high school is a time of identity formation/realization. My students are discovering who they are vis-a-vis the rest of the world and vis-a-vis God. So, there is some of that going on too.

(2) Atrocious Ideas and Epistemology. No doubt, some ideas are just wrong, baseless, factually incorrect, etc. However, with most things, especially in the Humanities, there is some play. A thing may be mostly right, or may have some good evidence, etc.

Let’s look at your two analogies: baseball and history, because I think these are both good here.

Baseball. True, a player may think that a coach’s method is wrong or dumb, but that does not necessarily mean that that student will not become a better hitter. Look at Major League Baseball and compare a bunch of swings. You’ll find that a lot of players have many of the same things going on as well as many unique elements.

Let’s transmute this into a real world situation, only in golf. Tiger Woods was the greatest golfer in the world. His coach was Butch Harmon. However, Tiger found some things about Hank Haney’s methodology that he liked; Tiger thought he could make his swing better. He fired Butch and brought Hank on. In the end, Tiger Woods is still the best golfer in the world — only now with a different swing.

History. Read modern historiography and you learn that the idea of pinpointing historical events and their meaning is extremely problematic. This gets to your epistemological issue. How do we know what happened? How can we be sure of anything? How can we be so trenchant in our understanding of these events? Is there any wiggle room? Is it possible that the eyewitness was wrong? Is it possible that the eyewitness is biased? Is it possible that the eyewitness wasn’t there at all? I think these are questions that need to be asked (though, perhaps they don’t need to be asked about everything…we can reasonably assume that the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776 without too much argument).

So, I think a student can disagree with a teacher and not necessarily be wrong. As a teacher I don’t need to hold on to the notion that my ideas are the only write ideas. Instead, I think learning should be a conversation — I may not always see eye-to-eye with a student, but if he/she can back it up with some good evidence, I’m OK with that.

When we don’t let go of that, when we as teachers aren’t willing to take part in the learning process, we run the risk of becoming ideologues.

The teacher should be teachable too.

I hope this helps you to understand what I was getting at.

I recently discovered your blog. The first of your blogs which I read was “Bible Curriculum”–loved it. I found your writing and bloggers’ feedback on it both informative and very reassuring–to me, a first year teacher this upcoming fall–as I will be writing most of my curriculum.

If I may, here is some thoughts on the your current post:
–I love that your teaching is “student-focused” and socratic. My favorite courses in college were socratic and catered to the student more so than the teacher’s lecture (monologue is the enemy, I typically say).
–you want to help “students discover themselves?” I find this language confusing to me because it assumes that there is an immaterial “identity” inherent within each student that merely needs “discovered”. I find this curious because I do not believe personality, skills, and knowledge are merely “discovered” (as if knowledge eternally exists within a person)–such a stance is reductionistic (sorry, if I’m taking your blog too far as trying to be exhaustive if you are not).
I believe such immaterial qualities are formed and developed (“nurtured” is the phycological term). Take for instance the athletic realm. Yes, a person may have DNA that is genetically predisposed to perform at a high level (a professional baseball player typically gives birth to an above average baseball player as a son), but it in order to produce an excellent player, that depends even more on the level of ‘coaching’ the player receives. Inherent DNA isn’t everything, is my point.
In the same way, a highly competent student is developed by the teacher and his methods (over long amounts of time and exposure to credible educational experiences), not by “self-discovery.”
do you agree, disagree?
–Also, I appreciate your mentioning of a student’s atrocious ideology and perspective. However, I may take a more “absolute” stance on epistemology than what you may favor. Take again, the athletic analogy. If I’m coaching a student’s baseball swing and he disagrees with my methodology–however, to use your word “atrocious” his opinion may be–if I don’t convince him of my approach, he will remain a lousy hitter at the plate. In a similar way, a student in the academic realm may disagree with me about a historical event, regardless of however “challenging” his ideology may be, he is wrong because the eye witness accounts (passed down via scholars) tell me I’m right.
—Agree? Disagree? Maybe history is a poor example, maybe the existence of God is more fit. Either way, does that makes sense?