The teaching and learning continues

Today I finished teaching day # 3 in class. We have been studying a summary of research on teaching and learning by Jere Brophy, a professor at MSU who passed away a few years back. One of the key ideas he covers in teaching is that input, processing, and output all matter. Unfortunately, we very often give greatest emphasis to input. That is, we think most about telling people the content we want them to learn. But Brophy points to the research that says students learn more when we help them engage in meaningful dialogue with other people about what we teach. And they also learn more when they engage in meaningful practice and application of what we taught. If we spend all of our time telling them what they should know, and we don’t take the time to help them process it or practice it, they are less likely to learn as much or to use it later on.

So we talked a bit today on how we, in the church, can do a better job of fostering meaningful conversation among people about what they learn in church, and how we can help them practice what they learn in realistic ways. It means that we can’t “cover as much content.” But it also means that what we cover will likely be remember and used again, instead of yet more content that we can vaguely recollect and not use.

I hope that these conversations are valuable for my students here. (And yes, I have had them in meaningful conversations with each other about the content, and I am giving them a chance to practice this next week when they get to teach in class.) It challenges me to think about how I, in my own settings, can do a better job of engaging people in meaningful conversations about a sermon or lesson in church.

On another note, I had the chance to walk about the city a little bit this morning. I encountered a market that had lots of fresh meat and fish. And lots of color!

Myanmar has a high power distance. That is, those in authority are to be shown great respect. It was interesting to think about good aspects of this way of thinking (such as obeying the fourth commandment to honor your parents as well as the call to submit completely to God as God) as well as the bad aspects of this way of thinking (such as people in church who are passive because they just let the pastor do the thinking and working as their superior). We in the US have the opposite problem in some ways … having to figure out how to have people see God as God and not just their friend. Meaningful conversations for me as well!