At a recent conference the dialogue got sidetracked on the question about when the “new middle age” begins (I’ll confess that it was my fault, I begged the question). The participants had fun guessing and throwing out ages from 45 to 65. I ended that rabbit-chasing and got us back on tract by saying that our problem isn’t so much that the midlife chronological point has move up, but rather the issue is that we’re dealing with a widespread case of societal protracted adolescence.

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The following is from the book Myths: Fact and Fiction about Teaching and Learning by Israel Galindo. How well do you know fact from fiction?

MYTH: Albert Einstein was one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics, and one of the chief proponents of the theory.

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We have all experienced effective and non-effective learning groups. Why is it that some are effective and others are not? I would argue that learning experiences that provide more time for critical reflection and dialogue result in more effective learning. Peruse the Christian bookstores and take note of how many resources are now encouraging at least a ninety-minute time frame for group study. There’s a reason for that—learning takes time!

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I do faculty development workshops and seminars for many schools (but not my own. John 4:44 and all that), public, private, theological schools, and congregations. Many of the leaders in those schools, principals, administrators, and deans, invite me to come do “faculty development.” But most of the time what they actually ask for is a seminar or workshop on an instructional issue to help the faculty be more effective in their classroom. So I usually wind up offering an in-service training on instructional methods and approaches, classroom discipline, curriculum and lessons design, etc.

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Here are some ideas about teaching and learning that I’ve heard on and off over the past few months. See if you can discern what they all have in common:

• Students learn best from listening to a teacher
• Students need to learn for the future
• Students have individual ways of learning and we need to teach to their learning style
• We must make teaching interesting for students to learn
• Students must be provided learning “activities” in order to learn.

What do these all have in common? To one extent or the other, they are all wrong. If you are one of the people that believes what’s on that list, then everything you know about teaching and learning is probably wrong.

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A friend of mine led a workshop on the dialogical learning method that I presented in my latest book How To Be the Best Christian Study Group Leader.* He shared how difficult it was for some of the participants to understand the difference between dialogue and discussion. I suspect that most of the participants, who were teachers, were probably defending their personal attention to using “discussion” in their classroom. They were rightly proud to point out that they’ve moved from an exclusively didactic lecture approach toward increased class participation, and we should celebrate their effort. But the fact remains that there is a difference between dialogue and discussion.

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One of those “Aha!” moments came to me twenty-some years ago while staring at the blank computer screen where Sunday’s sermon should have been making its appearance.  Unfortunately, my thoughts were elsewhere; I had been dealing with the parent of one of our confirmands-to-be, who was convinced that I was not doing enough to impress on his son the significance of the rite he would soon undergo.  Sometimes his critique seemed to be that I didn’t make these 6th and 7th graders suffer enough (they thought they suffered plenty) and sometimes it was clear that the father was actually expecting the confirmation process to fill all the spiritual gaps left in the child’s life by church and home.

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A perpetual challenge for teachers is overcoming the temptation of trying to teach too much material and content. Many lesson plans and courses I examine attempt way too much content coverage to be effective. The fact is that learning is not an efficient process, and we can only absorb so much information at one time without needing to “make connections” or use it in order for it to be meaningful. When it comes to meaningful learning, the issue is depth, not coverage. And, when it comes to effective teaching, “less is more.”

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I had an interesting discussion with a lay person who has just accepted the call to lead her congregation’s Christian education ministries. She was feeling a bit overwhelmed (close to panic, actually) as she started to get a grasp of the scope of the job she’s taken on. She called me to help her get a handle on what it is she was supposed to do as the leader of the Christian education enterprise of her church. At one point she asked, “What does a Christian educator do, anyway?”

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I’ve had several conversations with people about “how to write” lately. That topic seems to come in waves and in seasons. Over the course of several weeks all of a sudden it seems people get interested in the matter of writing, becoming a writer, or beginning a writing project. I’m never sure about how to help people who come for advice on writing. While I’ve published a few books and write a lot, I don’t identify myself as “a writer.” For me writing is more about having an opportunity to think than it is about getting my name in print, or feeling like I “have something to say.” More often that not, writing for me is a cathartic mind dump. Or, as I kid, “It helps stop the voices in my head.”

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