The Last Thing Your Should Do is Buy Curriculum!

There is one thing you can be sure of as a primary educator in a local church: inevitably (just as certain as death and taxes), Sunday School teachers will begin to ask for “new curriculum.” This is regardless of the size of the church, the quality of teachers, or even the quality of the curriculum resources teachers currently are using when this mysterious angst strikes!

We won’t delve into the deeper mysteries of this phenomenon, however, one reason is the unspoken truth that curriculum resources are produced to be sold and are written for the masses. Your teachers are special, and your students are unique–they don’t write curriculum for you in particular. This puts a heavy responsibility on teachers for the spiritual education of their students in your church. No wonder they occasionally get anxious!

Suffice it to say that for that reason or another, you will at some point be faced with the task of evaluating and choosing curriculum materials for your Sunday School. If you have ever had to do that in the past, you know what a confusing and time-consuming task that can be. Well, here’s the best advice you’ll ever get when faced with looking for “new” curriculum for your Sunday School: “The last thing you should do is buy Sunday School curriculum!”

The first thing you’ll want to do is involve those teachers and workers who will be using the curriculum in the decision-making process. Form a task force team, and help them understand that the “curriculum” is not the support literature they use. Curriculum is the totality of all learning experiences, planned and unplanned, to which the learners are exposed in the life of the church. That includes teacher attitudes and preparedness, room arrangement and decor, quality of teaching time, quality of teacher-student relationships, and other intangibles that don’t come printed in teacher manuals or in kits. Lead them to give curriculum literature its due importance as a small component of the whole Christian education program.

Second, help teachers understand what curriculum material and literature will not do for you:

• Guarantee effective learning experiences
• Make weak teachers into strong teachers
• Solve all your Christian education needs
• Solve al your classroom discipline problems
• Teach your learners all there is to know about the Christian life
• Ensure that your teachers and learners will be committed disciples of Christ.

Third, understand what good curriculum material can do for you:

• Provide a systematic framework for Bible study
• Serve as an idea starter for good teachers
• Serve as a sound teaching guide for new or weak teachers
• Provide ready-made visuals and materials for students (a real time-saver for teachers!)
• Provide a framework upon which to build your Sunday School educational program(s).

The next thing you may want to do in choosing curriculum materials is to lead teachers and workers to articulate what YOUR church needs from curriculum support materials for: (1) the learners, (2) the church at large, and (3) the teachers and workers. Ask questions like: What is our goal for our learners in the Sunday School? If a group of children were to grow up in our Sunday School from Nursery through high school, what will they know? What will they believe? How will they be able to live out their faith? Given that we have, at best, 40 minutes of teaching on a good Sunday, what things are the most important for our learners to learn? Dr. Allen Jackson, professor of Christian education at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, says, “If the learners do not know what they should do on Monday as a result of having handled a passage of Scripture, the curriculum has stopped short.”*

Lead your team of teachers to ask about the teaching-learning approach you will use: traditional classroom approaches? Experiential approaches? Intergenerational approaches?
Next, hold a curriculum workshop for all teachers. Provide a meal and child care if needed. Provide samples of the best curriculum your team has found. Use an evaluation tool to review the materials.

Help teachers and workers reach a consensus as to which curriculum resources they prefer. And then, the last thing you want to do is to buy the curriculum material that best fits your church’s educational needs!

*Interview, Dr. Allen Jackson, professor of education, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, April 18, 1995.
Some of the above is adapted from Israel Galindo, The Craft of Christian Teaching (Judson Press).

You can download a hard copy article of this entry galindo-curriculum.pdf“>here.