Today is the feast day of St. Cyril of Jerusalem (315-386) who has one of the best quotes on respecting parents: “For however much we may repay them, yet we can never be to them what they as parents have been to us.”

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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?

FICTION: The only plausible theory for the extinction of dinosaurs offered by scientists is that a giant comet struck the earth and caused the cataclysmic ice age, which killed them off 65 million years ago.

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How do you help students to get the point you’re trying to teach? More often than not most of us try the direct approach: “Just tell them!” But a paradox in learning is that often students do not learn what they are told as well as when they discover it for themselves. The issue at heart here is that to by-pass the process of how one acquires learning is to inhibit learning. As I’ve said elsewhere, “Teaching-by-telling doesn’t work because it does other people’s thinking for them.”*

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Recently, my friend Margaret wrote an interesting post about reading (see “How fast do you read?” ). As intended, it gave me pause to think about my own reading habits.

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Stacy T. Rinehart’s small volume Upside Down: The Paradox of Servant Leadership (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1998. 170 pages) focuses on the leadership model that Jesus gave the church. The author details briefly the transformation of his own leadership philosophy from that of a “hard-nosed, aggressive” style leader to one with Jesus as its model. He describes how dangerous the CEO models are for the church, where “failing to submit is to rebel against God. . !” (p. 36).

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As more heuristic approaches to teaching and learning have become popular older, more traditional, ways of teaching have become discounted. Drill-repetition and memorization, for example, seem to have all but disappeared from most classrooms. One notion is that models of teaching based on the Stimulus-Response theory may work well with dogs and other organisms of lower intelligence (like TV evangelists and used car salesmen), but offer little in effective teaching of children, teens, or adults.

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GRACE member Mike Harton as a featured piece in the denominational newspaper The Religious Herald. Check it out here. Mike currently is Interim Dean of the Faculty at the Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond.

I find that clergy and educational staff continue to struggle to define the nature and scope (as well as the methods and techniques) of what constitutes Christian education. In some instances people choose one camp over the other, like “formation” over “instruction.” Some have dropped any reference to “education” believing that concept is antithetical to discipleship or to their idea of “Christian formation.”

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