Inadvertent Outcomes
Our starting point in this series was “how does our faith inform our everyday practices in schools and classrooms?”
All teaching includes some kind of student formation, but sometimes our attempts at formation are not what we intended.
David Smith provides us with an example:
“He relates how when his son was 16, he came home from his Christian High school one day and said, that he had homework from his religion class. His son asked if his dad could help.
I said, “Sure.” So, we sat down and he had a worksheet with twelve words down the left side and twelve definitions on the right. The words were all theological words — “justification,” “sanctification,” “kingdom of God,” “Trinity,” “ascension.”
He said, “I’ve got a test on Friday. I’ve got to know this stuff.”
So, I started asking him hard questions — “What’s the difference between justification and sanctification, and how would you recognize either one if you found it in your lunch?” “Can you think of a story that illustrates any of these?” “Can you think of a Bible story that goes with any of these?”
His response was, “I don’t need to understand it that well, because on the test, they’re only going to make me match the words with the definitions.”
He concluded that since the material was presented as simply matching words to meanings, then the assessment would simply require the same thing.
“Therefore, I don’t need to understand the material. I only need to remember which word goes with which paragraph.”
The teacher in my son’s class is one of the best in his school. I know that the teacher didn’t come into class that morning with a lesson plan that said, “Today I want to teach my students that theology is not important.” Yet the learning outcome was that my son had a list of the twelve most important theological words in the New Testament and he’s saying, “I don’t need to understand this well.”
The teacher did not stand up and say, “Hey guys, this is just theology. It’s not that important so don’t put too much time into this.” That learning came out of the correlation between the structure of the worksheet and the patterns of teachers’ behaviours and their testing strategies.
Sadly, my son’s relationship to theology is being shaped by this set of teaching strategies.
The problem is not content. You couldn’t get more Christian content onto that sheet of paper without using a smaller font. The problem is with the way the process relates to the content. What choices do we make in how to teach? And how does that affect how students receive what we teach?”
Blessings
Brian
Reference:
- I&K Neuwsbrief. (2019, March 5). What being Christian has to do with how we teach: Interview with David Smith. https://www.ienknetwerk.nl/V2X/verdieping/interview-met-david-smith/