It doesn’t matter how great your Bible lessons are if students don’t remember them. We spend a lot of time at Teach One Reach One Ministries researching memory. Are there minor tweaks we can make that will help young people better remember our Bible lessons? More importantly, are there things we can do that will help them easily remember how God wants them to live their lives?
Recently, we found an interesting bit of information that could prove helpful in Bible classes – especially for older kids and teens. Studies have shown our brains are susceptible to the bizarreness effect. We tend to remember material that is bizarre better than we remember more common material. It’s why we can remember some bizarre fact we may have only heard once, while we struggle to remember passwords for websites.
How does this help Bible class teachers? The Bible uses stories to teach God’s commands and principles. Often young people hear the same twenty or thirty stories over and over. Not enough to really remember them well, but enough where they seem common and thus not particularly memorable to the brains of our students.
The good news is that there are plenty of truly bizarre stories in the Bible. They are rarely taught and therefore, will kick the bizarreness effect on in the brains of your students. Even better, many of these more bizarre stories have some of the same underlying lessons as more common Bible stories.
The next time you have a biblical concept you really want your Bible students to remember and use, see if there is a more obscure Bible story that teaches the concept. Even better if it’s one of the more bizarre stories in the Bible. Fair warning, the story may intrigue your students so much, they could have lots of questions. That’s a good thing. Doing a little extra study before you teach the lesson can help. If they ask a question that stumps you, don’t fake an answer. Tell them the question is so good, you want to do a little research to make sure you are giving them the best answer. Then follow through.
As with any tool we share, this may not work every time or with every student. For some students though, it can make a critical difference in being able to remember important biblical concepts and live the life God wants them to live.