Engaging Lessons and Why They Matter

“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”

– Dorothy Parker

It’s the dreaded groan from the backseat on a long car ride,

  the apathetic limp moan from a hot summer day without a friend in sight,

      and the tired teacher who has taught the same lesson five times in a row,

         “I’m bored.”

People who are bored are boring people, I have been told. Let’s not be fooled, entertainment is not the cure for boredom. Curiosity is. Soren Kierkegaard said that “Boredom is the root of all evil – the despairing refusal to be oneself.”[1] This is a startling statement. What are we refusing? To be ourselves – image bearers of God, called to be stewards, ambassadors, co-creators, truth bearers, and ultimately heirs of his Kingdom. There is nothing remotely boring about that! As teachers, our role is to promote this curiosity, the engagement with knowledge because we want our students’ minds, actions, and affections to be awakened by the Truth of God so they can be capable and engaged in the world around them.

Cautions
In my early days of teaching, I thought creating engaging lessons meant creating energetic, memorable activities in every class. I was asking “What can I do to make this fun?” and often, “What technology can I use to make this cool?” Though not 100% terrible motivations, I wrestled with the horror that while I was trying to avoid mind-numbingly boring lessons, I could be fueling fun without critical thinking, and that felt a lot like entertainment. While enjoyable, were those fancy lessons actually engaging the mind, body and heart of my students? Also, I was exhausted!

So what does an engaging lesson look like and why does it even matter?

The longer I teach, the more I realize that planning and executing engaging lessons first means that I, the teacher, am engaged in continually learning the material, valuing its place in God’s world, and using that knowledge to love and serve others more. Then it means asking the question, “What can the students do to understand, use, or demonstrate this knowledge?”

I asked TeachBeyond Sparrow Project facilitators, often working in settings where technology is limited, for some of their favorite ways to engage the mind, the body, and the heart, and much of the following comes from that discussion.

Awakening Our Minds
The first step to creating an engaging lesson is to consider the mind of the learner. Using learning hooks stimulates thinking and activates students’ prior knowledge right from the start of the lesson. Asking big questions requires students to interact with the lesson content. If we ask higher level questions, we nearly always get higher level responses.[2] Using charts and visuals aids help students to visualize abstract ideas. Giving choices (even in assessment) reveals students’ preferences and giftings, and can unleash creativity. Discussing real world problems in class helps students see how what they are studying can inform their life choices or public policy. Debates and discussions give them practice in a trusted space to think critically about information and values.

Teachers must remember that students’ minds are not just to be filled up with facts, but rather learning is the process of integrating new information into their own knowledge and experiences. We must provide opportunities to use and explore, setting students up to be capable problem-solvers and life-long learners.

Using Our Bodies
When we think of engaging lessons, we are not just targeting the learners’ minds, but their whole person, including their body. Consider a way to get your learners out of their seats regularly–a Gallery Walk, acting something out, showing their opinion by walking to one side of the room or the other, or making an expression on their face. Sure, a good, fun lesson will keep them awake, allowing them to use their energy for a good purpose, but more than that, when we do something, we remember it! One engaging lesson I gleaned from another resource involved turning my classroom seating arrangement into the periodic table. Each student was given an element and had to correctly find their seat for the day. This was mental and physical problem-solving, and I enjoyed seeing the students work together to get in the correct position.

Further, as Christians we believe that the body is not less important than the spirit. The Apostle John refutes this gnostic belief in 1 John where he writes, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life” (1 John 1:1[3]). Jesus took on flesh and John declares that the disciples heard, saw, examined and touched him. When our students use their senses to learn something, they believe it.

Aiming for the Heart
Lastly, engaging lessons target not just the mind and body, but they also engage our affections. Collaborative learning activities like Think-Pair-Share and Gallery Walks get at what students actually believe and feel. A little competition is sure to awaken many if not most students. Games have a way of exposing what we value and can be a great motivator to succeed. Finding opportunities for students to share responsibility for classroom duties or learning, asks them to put into practice what we value. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding” Proverbs 9:10 tells us. So if we are hoping to impart some wisdom, knowledge, or understanding to our students, we must recognize that it will likely only begin when we hold the Lord in the correct place of honor in our hearts as teachers. In the end, we pray that the knowledge that our students gain will allow them to love God and others more.

Ultimately, we create engaging lessons because we are teaching people—not robots, people—who are made in the image of God, all with the ability to learn, create, contribute and transform our world. When I think back to my younger self, I wish I encourage myself to simplify. Classroom engagement is not about entertaining but rather about creating portals for students to grapple with new and existing information. Engaging lessons are less about what we do and more about what our students do. We can exhaust ourselves by trying to stand on our heads, but they will learn a lot more if they learn to stand on theirs!

Christy joined TeachBeyond in 2013, after 13 years of teaching science, with hopes of doing teacher training in Africa. After a year of language school in France and a year learning alongside another organization in Rwanda, God rerouted her to the States for a season, as she got married and had her two girls. While still connected with TeachBeyond’s Sparrow Project, Christy serves as Associate Director of Global Mobilization from her home in Germany, where she and her family now live. She loves Asian cuisine, German bread, French patisseries, and her mom’s apple pie.