Ziff, thanks for sharing that scripture. You’re right–it does fit well with my ideas.

Lynnette, I think you raise an important point about defining pedagogical goals. When I develop lesson plans for my students at school, I usually write down some thoughts about what I want to accomplish (i.e. what I want to the students to learn that day). I think that’s trickier in a church setting, but I still think it’s important (though as Eve mentions, at times you need to be willing to let the classes’ interests take precedence over your own pedagogical goals). I also like what you say about including the personal. I also value that about teaching at church (one of the main reasons I love teaching women’s studies at school is because I get to include the personal there too).

Eve, thanks for your thoughts. I’ve found myself falling into the same kinds of patterns that you discuss in my teaching as well (providing form rather than content and doing my best to not allow my preconceived notions to dictate the direction of class discussions). I definitely think there’s a tendency for the teacher to want to talk too much, and to combat that, I probably err too much on the side of not talking. It doesn’t really make me nervous anymore to sit for a minute or two in silence before someone in class decides that they want to jump in and say something.

I also really like your point about the problems with the model of church teacher as dispenser of knowledge, and I agree that it creates apprehension among potential teachers and other problems. I’ve seen Sunday school teachers, in particular, feel that they have to scrounge up something new and amazing to present to the class every week and so dispense with the scriptures for bizarre speculation. I agree that the facilitator model is better because a teacher of adults in the church is _not_ called for any extra knowledge she has.

For what it’s worth, when I used to teach Sunday school or Relief Society, I gradually came to this teaching model for myself: the class supplies the content, I supply the form. I saw my job, more and more, as simply to ask questions and link the answers together, and I tried to be very cautious about supplying too much content myself. I think that a teacher should actually say less than a student about her ideas and opinions.

One of the great temptations of teaching is to fall in love with one’s own preparation and impose it on the class at the expense of where the discussion needs to go (that’s where I see the spirit coming in). (How many good discussions have you seen cut short so tht the teacher can race through the rest of the material while the class zones out?) A teacher should be prepared for a number of possible discussions but also willing to jettison them all if that’s not what the class needs to talk about. Teaching provides the seductive experience of a captive audience, and I think the most common mistake of church teaching (to adults, anyway) is to talk way too much.

For those of us who can’t stop our love affair with our own ideas, the Bloggernacle provides a nice alternative :>

Having spent several years studying religion in an academic context, I’ve often thought about the question of how teaching about religion in church is different than teaching about it in a university setting. Sometimes I think that Sunday School in particular can end up as the worst of both worlds; it in some ways strives to be academic-ish, but it doesn’t really allow for the kind of critical and open inquiry that (ideally) takes place in academic settings. The result is something often rather dry, removed both from the actual lived experience of faith and the possibility of thought-provoking discussion about real issues. (Though I should mention that the Sunday School teachers in my current ward are very good at encouraging relevant and interesting discussion.) I wonder whether it would be helpful to more clearly define what we’re attempting to accomplish. Are we in Sunday School to learn more about the scriptures in an intellectual way? To apply them to our lives? I’m not saying the two have to be mutually exclusive, but I do think it’s something worth thinking about, because it shapes the way we teach.

The thing I like about church classrooms that isn’t often the case in academic discussion of religion is that there’s explicitly room to include the personal. I find church lessons far more engaging when people not only talk in the abstract about principles of the gospel, but make connections with their lives. That’s maybe where I’d see the role of testimony coming in–not even necessarily explicitly saying, “I testify that x is true,” but saying, “this is my experience with x, and this is how it’s affected my relationship with God.”

I also find that I enjoy church the most when people talk about what’s really going on with them: their questions, doubts, challenges. So I’m thinking that creating a space where people can raise the questions they’re actually thinking about at church (instead of feeling like they have to censor anything that might not be faith-promoting) could be another important pedagogical goal for church contexts.

Thanks for the post. I’m currently an RS teacher, and I’m not sure I have any idea what I’m doing, so it’s helpful to think about this stuff!

“Appoint among yourselves a teacher, and let not all be spokesmen at once; but let one speak at a time and let all listen unto his sayings, that when all have spoken that all may be edified of all, and that every man may have an equal privilege.”

This verse makes it sound very much like a teacher is supposed to make sure the discussion is orderly and that everyone gets her chance to speak, which sounds like what you were saying as well.

Then read a good book on facilitation.

When I taught last Sunday, one of the guys in a doctoral program realized what I was doing now that he has learned about facilitaiton initiatives.