Dr. Mrs. Birgen: September Generations of Faith

Reflections:

This year, we have new people in charge of both Youth Ministry and Religious Education. Since I have spent the last few years holding my tongue with regards to Religious Education, I am excited about this going in a new direction. However, since this is brand new for everyone, I wanted to put some ideas down.

I love that we begin and end the Generations of Faith sessions with songs. It takes time to move everyone into the worship space, the ability to use song to help everyone center and create a space of calm and reflection.
I have been participating in GoF since approximately 2003. When we began this process, the idea was that we would have four major themes that would rotate yearly. The children would be able to re-visit these themes three times as they grew older: Once as elementary children, once in middle school, and last in high school. Unfortunately, just about the time we were going to start the rotation we lost our original Religious Education professional and that particular information seemed not to have been passed on. It was my hope that the new professional would be able to look at the earlier materials for inspiration and not feel as if she had to invent everything from scratch.
Last year my children were very disappointed since most of their GoF time was taken up watching videos. This pedagogy has been proven over and over to be ineffective and I was hopeful that there would be more interactive education going on and less passive time-wasting.

The best way to learn is to do; the worst way to teach is to talk.-Paul Halmos

The previous Religious Education professional seemed to have an obsession with minutia. I was hopeful that the new professional would focus more on the foundation of the faith and less memorization of tiny details.

Lessons from one experience:

So, after the first experience which was with the elementary age children, I have some ideas for thought:

One of the major differences between GoF and Sunday School is the inclusion of at least one parent with the elementary children. It is essential that this be taken advantage of. Unfortunately, most religious education materials for children this age assume that you have one leader working with multiple small children.

The material needs to engage the parents as much, or more than, the children. If you get the parents excited about what is happening, that excitement will naturally be passed on to their children.
The parent will be able to manipulate the information to an appropriate level for their child if the parent understands what the goal of the material is. For example: if the material requires studying a Bible passage, the parent will know whether to read the passage to their child or to have the child read to herself.

It is important to have "student learning objectives" for the monthly lesson. These answer the question: At the end of the evening, the child will be able to . . .

These will help decide what it is important to spend quality time on each evening. If it isn't worth spending 20-30 minutes helping the child be able to do this, it isn't worth listing.
Given time constraint, you should not have more than three student learning objectives per evening.
The leaders should be able to explain how all the student learning objectives work together to meet the overall goal. They should mesh together as a cohesive whole lesson.
Lesson materials that do not help the students meet the student learning objectives should not be included. This will help the organizers create a cohesive lesson.

Give the students and their parents time to learn and reinforce the lesson. Doing something once and then never re-visiting that activity is not conducive to long-term learning.
Having four leaders, none of whom have any education training or wanted to be "head leader" was really confusing. I understand that this was done to minimize the possibility of having zero leaders. One suggestion would be to have four tables and assign one leader to each table. It might even work to have the different tables start with different activities. If you do this, however, be sure to have a "last, more advanced, activity" for the table to do if they finish everything before the other tables. That way if you have a table of a bunch of 4th graders who will naturally work more quickly, they will get a taste of deeper thinking.

Example:

The Five Finger Prayer

Student Learning Objective: At the end of the lesson, children will be able to pray the Five Finger Prayer.

In order to meet this objective the lesson may include:

Introducing the Five Finger Prayer
Giving children passages from the Bible and/or other religious texts that address where and how we are instructed to pray for each "finger". This could be done using matching, jigsaw, or other pedagogical tools.
Having children compare and contrast the Five Finger Prayer with another prayer they know.
Having students trace out their hand and write a specific Five Finger Prayer they would pray this evening. Explain that the people prayed for may change based on the child's feelings and experiences.
Have students write pledges to pray the Five Finger Prayer at a particular time during the next month.