Are Your Bible Lessons Focused Enough?

We have all been there. You are in the middle of teaching a Bible lesson to a class of children or teens. Suddenly a hand is raised. The speaker has a question about something in the lesson. A really interesting question. One that has all of the other students looking in anticipation to see how you will respond. They may even throw in a few added questions. These questions, however legitimate, will take your lesson in a direction you hadn’t really anticipated. What do you do?

Before we can answer that question, I have another question for you. How many times do you start teaching a Bible lesson knowing exactly the one or two most important things you want your students to learn from it? Not just the details of the story, which are important to learn and remember, but the lessons God wants His people to learn from the story. Do you have one to three firm learning objectives in mind or do you just sort of assume the written lesson provided with your curriculum covers anything that is important?

Not every Bible lesson with which you are provided as a teacher includes learning objectives. Often when they are provided, people skim past them thinking they are merely given to look more professional. The truth is that learning objectives are crucial. They are a map for your lesson. If you don’t know where you are headed, you are very likely to never reach there. Oh, you may get the details of the Bible story right, but children and teens often need help figuring out what they are supposed to learn from a passage and how to apply it to their lives. They need your help in naming, understanding and practicing those things.

To complicate things even further, some passages have multiple lessons in them. Your students can probably only remember one to three important lessons from each passage. Which one will you choose on which to focus? Or are you hoping the curriculum you were provided gets to a point in some way and that’s enough? Or that your students will figure it out on their own? I’ve taught for decades with curriculum from a variety of sources. Most do a decent job of retelling the Bible story, but don’t go much beyond that.

So what’s the answer? Focus your lesson on one or two key learning objectives. You can use the ones we have on our website for over two hundred Bible stories to help you or write your own (www.teachonereachone.org). Then look at your lesson. Do the things you say, the questions you ask and the activities you have planned help you accomplish that goal? Or does everything seem disconnected when you look at it through the lens of learning objectives? Worse yet, does everything meander all over the place, not really making any point at all?

Back to our original scenario. If I have learning objectives, I can make an informed decision. Perhaps those questions help me meet my objectives even better than what I originally planned. Or perhaps it meets an entirely different learning objective I might have for another class. I can choose to switch objectives in the middle of class, but now I know exactly what wasn’t covered in my objectives and can make plans to teach that information to my students at a later date.

Considering learning objectives takes a little extra time, but it makes it much more likely your lessons will be focused. More importantly, your students will finally be able to clearly articulate what they learned in class.

Categories Bible, Elementary, Faith Based Academic Program, Preschool, Special Needs, Teens
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