God's "Teaching Method"

Consider how God taught Job. The book of Job could have simply begun and ended with chapters 38-41. As Bible School professors, that's how we may have written the book. Our heart is to get people right into the meat and potatoes. Instead, God allows Job to wrestle with difficult experiences in his life and God allows Job to receive conflicting, incorrect information and advice from his friends and relatives. Finally, at the end of the book, God speaks. But God does not deliver a complete book of basic Theology. Instead, God asks a series of questions designed to get Job to come to the right conclusion on his own. 

To begin the fall off right, let's consider some basic learning theory and how it might apply to our courses. First of all, what is knowledge? Most people agree that knowledge is not a single entity. Instead, it is a connected web of experiences that relate to each other in some way, as determined by the individual. According to this model of knowledge, experiences must be reflected upon and actively correlated and compared to each other. If this is true, then there is no "text book" definition of any term that exists in someone's head in isolation from other terms or from any body of knowledge. People are not computers that can be programmed with information that is spit out later.

If we think about this from a worldview approach to teaching tribal people in an E3 context, this will make perfect sense. In order to "paint a picture" in the tribal person's mind, we are forced to move from shaping worldview to explaining biblical truth. For example, if tribal people do not understand the permanence and importance of writing they will not understand the value of the written word and their need for it. They will not value the Bible in their language if they do you not understand that what is written down is preserved for thousands of years while oral myths and legends change over generations and through the years.

In order to aid tribal people as they begin to construct knowledge about God, good missionaries will use methods such as acting the story out, graphic illustrations, connecting new information back to previous stories, and clearly showing how every aspect of life changes based on principles like God's ownership, God's love for his people, and God's omnipotence. In their case (as in ours), existing myths and superstitions are not harmless at all. Instead, previous understandings about things like the nature and character of the world must be consciously rejected by the people themselves because they interfere with a biblical understanding in the first place.

God recognized that human knowledge is constructed from learning experiences. Based on the fact that all knowledge is constructed, we can clearly see that the foundations are crucial in "constructivist" approaches to teaching and learning. In other words, when we acknowledge that all learning is constructive, we take care as teaching professionals to understand learner characteristics and to craft learning experiences that change hearts and minds. I would challenge you to consider that modern educational learning theories have given some insights into how to teach that are based on Biblical principles. 

In constructivist learning theory, students are actively involved in the process of meaning making. The role of the instructor shifts in the cognitive constructivist approach from primarily being a purveyor of information to helping students learn how to learn. This is the crucial crucial distinction that defines the constructivist approach. 

When constructivism is done right, teaching and learning strategies are student-centered and often student-led. The emphasis switches from organizing a class around the creative efforts of the teacher to emphasizing creative efforts (read: struggle, pain, wrestling, hardship) of the students, allowing students to work on social skills, communication skills, organizational skills, goal setting, and long-term planning in the process. Although there will always be a set knowledge component of every course, students in constructivist classrooms are more likely to work on real life problems in class and are more likely to be able to explore areas of personal interest than in traditional classrooms. Like Job, in order to be successful in their learning students will need to evidence grit, determination and loads of struggle.

Here is a simple summary:

The Traditional Classroom

• Emphasizes basic skills like sitting in chairs and listening
• Strict adherence to a fixed curriculum (teacher's notes)
• Textbooks and workbooks summarize and synthesize knowledge
• Instructor gives/students receive
• Instructor assumes directive, authoritative role
• Assessment via testing / correct answers
• Knowledge is inert (it doesn't react to anything)
• Students work individually

The Constructivist Classroom

• Begin with asking good questions – expanding to answers
• Pursuit of student questions / interests
• Primary Sources (like field trips) / hands-on materials
• Learning is interaction – building on what students already know
• Instructor interacts / negotiates with students
• Assessment via student works, observations, points of view, tests. 
• Process is as important as the product
• Knowledge is dynamic / it changes with experiences and contexts
• Students work in groups 

Adapted from:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivist_teaching_methods

I would encourage you to try the constructivist approach for just one course and see how it goes. 

Check this out for more info:

http://www.thirteen.org/edonline/concept2class/constructivism/ 

A Few Populi Reminders

Most of us are now using Populi to manage our homeworks, provide feedback to students and assign grades.

This week on the education blog let's think about how we introduce learning technology to new students and remind returning students of our expectations. Although many students will be familiar with the idea of a learning management system already, we cannot assume that everyone is on the same page about how it is to be used and what the expectations are. Let's deal with a few common excuses that students give when something goes wrong in educational technology:

• I did not know when it was due. This common excuse is primarily a consequence of poor planning combined with poor communication on our part. I have noticed several classes missing due dates in Populi. Let's do our best this week to introduce students to our learning management system by getting all of our dates and times correct in the system so that students can see on their calendar at a glance when something is due. I'll be working on this on my end too.
  
• Populi ate my homework. This excuse is very rare once students learn the system, but in the early days of learning a new system students may unintentionally click a button twice or think they have submitted something when they haven't. The best thing we can do here is to show students how to turn in their work by pulling up Populi ourselves and going through the motions a few times. Even though I did that in the intro to Populi yesterday, students still forget or get confused. Thanks for your help in this regard.
  
• It is too hard to learn. Certainly learning a new way of doing something can be difficult. However, if we as teachers take the attitude that students can do it and if we express that optimism, anything is possible. We're coaches of learning; we're masters of our craft that patiently explain things again and again if necessary. 

Are Textbooks A Foregone Conclusion?

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This week I'd like to challenge us to consider the digital revolution as it relates to a very specific aspect of our courses: textbooks.

Are textbooks absolutely necessary in all cases? Or is there a plethora of free information on the web that allows us to forgo their use in certain cases?

61 professors at Lansing Community College have decided to eliminate textbooks in 27 courses, saving LCC students at total of one million dollars since 2015. Check it out:

http://www.lansingstatejournal.com/story/news/local/2017/08/15/lansing-community-college-cutting-costly-textbooks/551936001/

I would challenge you to consider that textbooks are not a foregone conclusion in the broader education world, nor are they universally recommended or embraced by all education experts. Most education professionals instead rely on the principles of systematic instructional design to determine the "building blocks" of content. Similarly, don't forget that educational fair use allows you to copy and hand out a chapter of a book or 10%, whichever is smaller.

Try to eliminate a textbook from a course you teach and watch the results. We might save our students a bundle of cash AND enhance student learning by delivering more targeted, specific content that says what we want to communicate more concisely and effectively than assigning an entire book could.

Thanks, feel free to comment below or shoot us all an email.

Technology use in the Classroom

First, we must address the issue of whether or not Internet use makes us "stupid," as Nicholas Carr infamously asked in The Atlantic back in 2008. Regardless of whether or not you think students are less intelligent now than they were before the advent of the internet, virtually all experts agree that some changes are inevitable in an age of instant information access.

Writing using an alphabet revolutionized learning partly because people didn't have to remember as much. Then again, writing allowed the world's knowledge to be preserved and passed on from generation to generation.

Gutenberg's printing press revolutionized learning by allowing faster long-form copying and distribution of written materials, further eroding the amount that people needed to recall from memory. And yet... where would we be without the printing press?

Most experts argue that the digital revolution has transformed communication on the same scale as these other technologies. Teachers the world over are identifying disturbing trends in the attention span of students in the information age as students are increasingly wondering why they should store discrete facts in their minds when they can simply Google them later.

Where does that leave us at our school? We can probably all admit that the internet and the digital revolution isn't going anywhere any time soon. Is using learning technology in the classroom simply pandering to the desires of millennials? If not, what learning technologies would be appropriate to integrate into the classroom? Is missions becoming more digital? In what ways? Would it benefit our students to consider some of these issues before heading to the field?