How do good teachers become good?

I was able to make the last meeting of the GRACE group monthly meeting for the year (we’re on hiatus for the summer). Schedule conflicts have prevented me from attending this year. It’s ironic that now living in Richmond I’m having trouble making the meetings. When I lived two hours away in Northern Virginia I hardly ever missed a meeting over the course of six years. The friendship and rich discussion served only to remind me how much I’ve missed this monthly gathering with peers.

This month’s discussion centered on teaching in the church. We discussed the perennial challenges of training church teachers. Those challenges include getting teachers to participate in training events, getting them to see the value and necessity of continuing education and training, and the challenge of moving staid and recalcitrant teachers to move beyond their comfort zones and learn more effective teaching methods. Church staff educators are prone to coming close to ranting when this topic of discussion comes up. The members of this group were above that, however, and they handled the discussion rather responsibly.

At one point a group member asked, “From what you observe in your congregations, how do your good teachers become good teachers?” The question stumped the group for a moment. One clear consensus insight was that in many instances good teachers came that way. That is, they tended to have already been good teachers before they took up their teaching ministry in the church.

In a way that answer is not too surprising. But, it can be disheartening as it leaves us wondering if the case is that there really isn’t much we are doing to help create good teachers in the congregation.

I’m still of the opinion that a church’s Christian education enterprise is only as good as its teachers and educators. That means the matter of developing and training teachers remains a critical task of church leaders. One major dilemma is that most congregational leaders lack sufficient knowledge about educational processes and practices to provide much leadership in this area. The declining emphasis in seminaries on attention to rigorous study from the field of education and the growing focus toward softer courses on “formation” has all but ensured that graduates landing a staff education program position in a church have little expertise or capacity for leading educational programs. I don’t think the choice is one over the other, but it appears that we’ve swung so far in one direction as to be doing ourselves, and our congregations, a disservice.

From my observation, much of what passes for “Christian education” in many churches is hardly educational. The sad part is that most congregations don’t seem able to recognize that. And when they do, they find it a challenge to find the expertise to help them move toward a more rigorous and effective educational enterprise.