Shortsighted Goals Yield Shortsighted Methodologies

Is our education focused on immediate results rather than long term results? While we may have lofty notions of impacting our students for a life-time of ministry, we most often focus our classroom attention only on immediate results that will be evident at the end of the course or workshop. If we don’t adjust our methodologies and assessments towards longer term learning and implementation, we may risk missing the intended life-time impact on our students.

If we really want to make an impact that lasts longer than our course, we need to focus on methodologies that assist students to integrate new concepts with their present structure of knowledge and experience and project into the future. There is no quick way to do this. Lectures won’t necessarily accomplish such integration. In order for students to integrate new material, they need time to process the new concepts or skills by some creative reflective activity or by means of a group activity that includes analysis or synthesis.

For example, after introducing students to biblical concepts for peacemaking, I can invite them to make a rough evaluation of how well their team or church applies those concepts and then share in their group their evaluation and supporting evidence. This activity facilitates both personal reflection time as well as dialogue within a group. Such integration of new input with previous experience helps to cement the teaching into their thinking for future reference. You can believe that they will not easily participate with their team in the future without recalling their discussion of peacemaking adages.

Our testing at the end of the course or workshop is meant to provide proof that students effectively learned knowledge, skills, or attitudes. This testing is focused solidly on the short term goal for this class. You may already be thinking, “Of course, what do you expect?” But I’d like to challenge us as teachers to actually imagine assessing for long term knowledge and implementation. What would you expect of your students in one year or two or three? What can you imagine them doing with what they learned? How would you assess whether or not they have achieved what you hoped for?

Envision being able to call your class back for a long-term test of what they learned. Imagine that you had the ability in two years to ask each student to write a paper about how they have applied what they learned in your workshop? What if the grades for the test and the paper were to go into the evaluation of your workshop to be read by your supervisor? Now, go back and rethink how you would teach the class if that was really how your students would be assessed. My guess is that you would seriously rethink your methodology and your final assessment.

I’m asking these questions because as Christian teachers we really are called to equip our students for a life-time of ministry. I’ve also seen that it really is possible to teach for long-term results. Not only did Jesus do it through his ministry, but I’ve observed similar results from the use of creative methodologies in teaching. For the sake of the Kingdom, let’s reassess our goals, our methodologies and our assessments for a longer reach into the future.

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