Effective Christian Ministry

by Ronald W. Leigh, Ph.D.

Chapter 23 – Learner Oriented Teaching

Do We Teach Lessons Or Learners?

Teaching involves three basic ingredients:  the learner, the teacher, and the curriculum or content of the lesson to be learned.  Thus the teaching-learning experience can be described as teaching learners lessons.

However, some modern theorists have claimed that only two of these ingredients are important.  They view teaching as merely teaching learners, and thus they neglect the importance of the content.  The modern philosophy from which this viewpoint stems overemphasizes the importance of the process or the experience and discards the content and the goal.  This philosophy values the journey but has nowhere to go.  Any approach to teaching which neglects the importance of the content is just as meaningless.

But the opposite error is just as bad.  Some teachers, instead of discarding the content, actually discard the learner.  They think of teaching as merely teaching lessons.  Or course, they are aware of the presence of the learner, but they feel that the content and its orderly presentation are the important things and thus give little or no consideration to the vocabulary, age, needs, and background of the learner.  The result?  Even though they have meaningful content to share, it may never become meaningful to the learner.

Obviously, we need to have a balanced view of teaching which recognizes the importance of both the learner and the lesson.  We need to think of teaching as teaching learners lessons.

We have already stressed the importance of content by pointing out that the Bible's teachings are an essential part of a truly Christian ministry, and by thoroughly discussing the content of the gospel message.  The error that creeps into evangelical churches most often is the error of glorifying the content and neglecting the learner.  So, in this chapter we will focus our attention on the learner and the various ways we should gear our teaching and our communication to him so that we will be genuinely teaching learners lessons.

Graded Instruction and Readiness

A child's abilities and needs are different from an adults.  Paul reminded us of this fact when he described his own development.

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.  (1 Corinthians 13:11)

So instruction must be geared according to the unique characteristics of each age.  Below is a list of a few of the characteristics and needs that apply to particular ages.  The ages are approximate and would vary widely from person to person.

Also, Jesus, the Master Teacher, was sensitive to the readiness of his disciples.  At one point he was not able to teach them what he wanted to teach.

I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear.  (John 16:12)

Some lessons had to wait.  We too must be sensitive to our learners' readiness.

Here are a few examples of common mistakes that illustrate the importance of graded instruction and readiness.  Suppose we are studying some of the stories in the life of Jesus with first graders.  We would like to show them a map of Jesus' travels, but they do not yet know how maps work.  All those lines and dots mean nothing to the young child.

Suppose we are studying the trials of Jesus with some third graders.  We would like them to understand the interplay between the Jewish authorities and the Roman authorities.  But government is still largely a mystery to third graders, and the concept of local rule under foreign occupation is even more difficult.

Suppose we are talking with a three-year-old boy, trying to explain the reasons why he should not steal.  But at this age he has difficulty understanding anything other than the immediate punishments or rewards he gets for his actions.  A genuine concept of right and wrong usually does not develop until a few years later.

Suppose we would like a preschooler to understand God's goodness.  We speak in terms of "historical" examples of God's "providence" and "faithfulness."  We describe how God "sustains" his people with so many "provisions" for our "benefit" and "welfare."  All of this is very meaningful and inspiring to us, but the preschooler hardly understands a word we say.

We are teaching fourth graders about the church.  We describe it as a bride, a building, and a body.  But the use of such symbolism is not easily understood by them until several years later.

We are faithfully teaching a junior high or high school class about heroes of the Bible or the outstanding figures of church history, but they are more interested in finding out about dating and sex.

Perhaps we would like our young adults to become more active in leadership positions in the church, so we teach them about the stewardship of talents and the importance of the local church.  But they are struggling to raise young children and would like some help with child psychology and family discipline.

We may plan to survey the dispensations or the covenants with our middle adult class, but they need some insights on communicating with their independent-minded teenagers.

We set up a program in which teens will be responsible for doing a variety of things for the senior citizens in the church.  This is fine as long as we don't forget that older folks need to have responsibilities.  They need to feel needed and useful.

In each of these cases a lesson was planned that was worthwhile in itself.  In some cases the lesson came too early, before the child was able to understand.  In other cases the lesson was not the one that was most needed by the learners.  These two issues, readiness and needs, are the keys to graded instruction.  All of our teaching must be graded according to the level of readiness and the pressing needs of our learners.

Communicating with the Listener in Mind

Communication can be defined simply as one person conveying meaning to another person.  We tend to equate talking with communicating.  But if there is no transfer of meaning, there is no communication.

The eight steps in communication are illustrated in the following diagram.

1. The speaker, or sender, becomes aware of something (recalls something, learns something, senses something in the environment, etc.).
2. He thinks about his experience.  This thought, or idea, is what he would like to communicate to another person.
3. Since he has not yet learned how to do direct mind transfer, he must encode his idea in symbolic form (spoken words, written words, gestures, postures).  Encoding is the internal process of selecting these words, gestures, postures, etc.  Encoding usually goes on without much conscious attention.
4. Then he expresses the symbols.
5. The symbols are transmitted (with sound and light if he and the receiver are in primary contact, but with additional mechanical or electronic means if they are not in primary contact).
6. The receiver senses the symbols.
7. He decodes them.
8. Finally, he thinks about the meaning of the symbols.  If the meaning that the receiver gets from the symbols is the same idea that the sender wanted him to think about, then the communication has been a success.

The problem is that there can be a breakdown at any one of the steps between the sender's thought and the receiver's thought.  The sender may encode his thought poorly.  He may misspeak himself.  The transmission, especially if mechanical or electronic means are involved, could become garbled.  The receiver may sense only part of what is transmitted.  He may then decode the symbols improperly.  Even if only one of these problems arises, the communication will not be as effective as it could be.  But if several of these problems occur, the receiver is sure to end up with an idea that is quite different from the sender's original idea.

We will examine encoding and decoding, since these are the areas where serious breakdowns in communication often occur.  A person normally encodes and decodes thoughts according to his own field of experience.  His field of experience (see diagram) includes everything in his background that has any effect on how he thinks, such as his childhood rearing, his circle of friends, his education, his values, or his vocation.  When two people have the same field of experience, their encoding and decoding have the same basis and their communication can be quite efficient.  But finding two people with the same field of experience is as unlikely as finding Siamese twins.  Usually the sender and receiver have quite different fields of experience.  Thus, the sender must be careful to encode his thoughts with the receiver's field of experience in mind.  Or, the receiver must decode the sender's expressions with the sender's field of experience in mind.

The teacher's only safe assumption is that the learner will decode according to the learner's field of experience.  This is obviously true when the learners are children, and almost always true when they are adults.  Thus, it is the teacher's responsibility to encode his thoughts according to the learner 's field of experience so that when the learner decodes them, he will get the intended idea.  The teacher must develop the ability to pretend that he has the same field of experience as his learner and then gear his statements so that they will make immediate sense to the learner.

Feedback and Listening

Feedback, as indicated in the diagram, is the response of the receiver to the message he has just decoded.  He becomes the sender and the original sender becomes the receiver.  The same sequence of encoding, expressing, transmitting, sensing, and decoding takes place whichever direction the flow of communication is moving.

Feedback is vital to effective communication, but some types of feedback are more helpful than others.  For example, suppose that A says something to B and then asks, "Did you understand that?"  Whether or not B understood, he will want to say that he did for various psychological reasons.  Even if B ended up with a totally different idea than A started with, as long as B received some idea he will probably assume that it was the idea A sent.  Asking someone if he understood the message that has just been sent will uncover a communication breakdown only if the other person decoded something that was meaningless to him and then only if he is willing to admit it.  When the receiver is asked if he understood a message, and he says "Yes," the sender needs to find some other way to discover whether he really understood or not.

Suppose again that A says something to B.  But this time he asks him to tell him what he just said.  So B repeats the same thing that A said, in the same words.  This may sound like good communication to A, but it doesn't guarantee a thing.  Perhaps B has a good memory and was able to repeat A's words, but didn't understand them at all.  Or, perhaps B understood something different than A meant, but by using the same words A used, he conceals his misunderstanding from A.

Obviously, the safest way to get feedback is to encourage the receiver to respond in his own words.  If the idea that comes back is the same idea that was sent, even though the words are different, the communication has probably been successful.  Thus we should always encourage our learners to give us plenty of feedback in their own words.  Of course, there is also the possibility that B understands A accurately, but by putting his response in his own words gives A the impression that he does not understand.  But such a problem is usually quickly discovered in further exchanges.

It is easy to see that a very important part of teaching is listening to our learners.  And when we are decoding what our learners say, we must do the same things we do when we are encoding – we must keep the learner's field of experience in mind.  Only by empathizing with the learner will we get an accurate idea of what he has in mind.

Unfortunately, we often think that talking is active, while listening is passive.  We feel that the speaker is expending effort, but the listener will not expend any effort until it is his turn to talk.  But good listening is active.  It takes a great deal of mental effort to identify with the other person and to interpret his expressions on the basis of his field of experience.  It requires effort to listen for the underlying feelings as well as the explicit statements.  It requires effort to listen "between the lines."  But it is not wasted effort.  Careful listening brings significant rewards.  It increases our understanding of others.  Also, as we adjust our encoding according to what we learn while we are listening, it increases others' understanding of us.

In both of the aspects we have discussed in this chapter, graded instruction and communication, the key is to think in terms of the learner.

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Copyright © 1984, 2002, Ronald W. Leigh