While learning is a natural innate human ability, becoming a good learner is not. In whatever context of learning, whether in a graduate studies classroom, university, or Sunday school class effective teachers understand that part of their job is to help students become good learners. Researcher William Perry has identified nine stages of a student’s development. He grouped these stages into four substages.

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I finally got around to watching a DVD from Netflix that’s been sitting on the coffee table for about a month (thank goodness for that “no late fees” policy!). The movie was House of D. In the movie a thirteen-year-old comes of age through loss, grief, and escape. As an adult, and a father, he returns to the place of his childhood in order to reconnect and move on.

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An advantageous reminder is that while we are blessed with the power of cognition, we remain biological creatures often at the mercy of our phylogeny. This is advantageous when we recognize it, and, when the instinctual, non-rational part of our brain does its job in ensuring the survival of our little puddle of the gene pool. The problem comes in that our instinctual brain lacks discernment and will veto our rational cortex when it perceives a threat.

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Once a month I try to take a reading day at the library, either at my local neighborhood library or the seminary library across campus. Most of my reading on that day consists of pulling journals and periodicals off the shelf to catch up on the most current writing and thinking on areas of interest.

Here are periodicals I’ve found worth consulting to keep up in the field of education:

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One of the things my wife asked for Christmas was the missing volumes to her series of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, that outrageously (and refreshingly) “dark” children’s books. While many adults enjoy the wry humor in Snicket’s prose, the more significant aspect is children’s response to a cycle of stories that have no happy ending and exploits children’s worst fears (the children in the story are orphaned in the first book, and then it gets worse from there). Kids are eating up this series of stories.

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What’s the difference between religious thinking and “religiosity”? Or, what’s the difference between faith and magical thinking? When I worked at a state mental hospital during my CPE it seemed rather easy to tell the difference in the “closed ward” where patients spent the first stage of their admittance. When a patient claimed to be Jesus Christ it was easy to identify that as delusional thinking. When a patient used religious language disconnected from the reality of their circumstance it seemed easy to diagnose “religiosity.” But what about for most of use church-going religiously committed (no pun intended) run-of-the mill believers? How do we distinguish authentic belief from magical thinking? What distinguishes prayer from wishful thinking?

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One of the most chilling areas of psychology, for me (whether clinical, developmental, educational, or those associated with faith development), is child psychology. I’m not sure what it is, exactly. Perhaps it’s a result of my stint at the children’s ward at a state mental hospital during my CPE experience. Or perhaps it’s because a too-close examination of the inner workings of the childhood psyche explodes any naiveté we may want to hold onto related to children’s innocence. Or perhaps it’s the horrifying prospect of witnessing unleashed raw psychic emotional energy from the id without the restraining correctives of the accumulated layers of social constraints adults enjoy which keep them from killing each other—or themselves—at any given moment.

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In his controversial classic, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), B.F. Skinner proposes a scientific model for the study of human behavior and challenges the traditional theory of man as a purposeful, autonomous being with personality traits, will, and emotions. He dismisses the metaphysical construct of “mind” as a motivator of behavior, limiting his analysis to what can be observed, and presents behavior as the product of the genetic endowment an individual has received from evolutionary processes and of his encounters with the external environment.

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The central thesis of Marjorie J Thompson’s Family: The Forming Center. A vision of the role of family in spiritual formation (Nashville: Upper Room Books, 1996), is that, for good or evil, the home is the primary context in which spiritual formation takes place. Spiritual formation can take place through intentional teaching and practices, or it can take place through modeling and unconscious attitudes, but it will take place. Spiritual formation is likely the most foundational formation that takes place in a child’s early life, overlapping with mental, physical and ethical formation. The question for parents is what kind of formation is taking place? The answer for Christian families is that they should be formed to the image of Christ and not the world.

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