APPL 502 — Teaching the Bible
Teaching the Bible is a graduate craft course on moving a passage of Scripture into a lesson a learner actually learns. Three commitments hold it together: teaching as honest craft built on a stated aim, a design fitted to the learner, and a check that the learning happened; the teacher’s calling as stewardship rather than performance, the weight James named for those who teach; and every lesson aimed at the learner meeting the text, not the teacher performing. The course opens with the biblical mandate to teach and the four moves that structure every lesson: the aim, the learner, the design, and the check. It covers how people learn, including the honest limits of the learning-styles claim, before turning to method. A closing unit takes up the Old and New Testaments and learning from Jesus as teacher.
Learning outcomes
- Explain the teacher’s calling as stewardship and the biblical mandate to teach the Scriptures.
- Derive a measurable learning aim from a biblical passage.
- Account for how adults learn: prior knowledge, misconceptions, and the honest limits of the learning-styles claim.
- Select and sequence teaching methods to fit a given aim and group, and design a check for learning.
- Adapt teaching to the distinct demands of the Old and New Testaments, learning from Jesus as teacher.
- Facilitate a learning community through discussion and good questions.
The Teacher and the Task
Before any method is taught, this first module settles what teaching the Bible even is, and sets out the four moves that run under everything the course does afterward: the aim, the learner, the design, and the check. It reads James’s warning that those who teach will be judged more strictly as the weight the whole course carries, then traces the biblical mandate to teach: Moses charging Israel to teach the commandments diligently to their children, Ezra reading the law and giving the sense, Paul’s charge to Timothy to entrust what he had heard to faithful teachers, and Jesus’s own commission to teach all that he commanded. The module closes by hearing three historic voices on Christian education in their own words, Augustine on teaching the faith joyfully, Comenius on order and gradualness, and Bushnell on nurture and growth.
How People Learn
With the aim and the mandate in place, this module turns to the learner: what is actually known about how people learn. It works through adult learning theory, the andragogy Malcolm Knowles argued for, self-directed, experience-rich, and problem-centered rather than a repeat of the classroom a child sat in. It then addresses prior knowledge and misconceptions, drawing on Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development to explain why a learner connects the new to what is already known, or resists it when it conflicts with a settled misunderstanding. The module closes by handling the learning-styles claim with care: the popular idea that a learner has one fixed style to be matched has little research support, while the real principle behind it, that a concept taught through multiple representations sticks better, does.
Designing the Lesson
This module supplies the craft at the center of the course: turning an aim into a lesson a particular group can actually learn. It teaches how to derive a measurable aim from a passage, one real outcome a learner can be checked against rather than a vague hope that something lands, drawing on Bloom’s taxonomy to state that outcome at the right level. It then compares the major teaching methods, lecture, discussion, Socratic questioning, inductive study, and collaborative work, and asks how to fit a method to the aim and the room rather than to habit. The module closes with the check: how a teacher knows whether the learning happened, and what to do when it did not, and with a tool-agnostic look at what technology can and cannot do for learning, chosen by fit rather than novelty.
Teaching the Testaments
The four moves are tested here against the particular demands of the two Testaments. The module works through making Old Testament narrative, law, poetry, and prophecy live for a learner rather than reducing each to a moral, and through bridging the cultural distance a New Testament passage asks a learner to cross. It addresses the hard passages honestly, the ones a learner will ask about and a teacher is tempted to skip, and closes by studying Jesus himself as teacher: his use of pointed questions, his parables that make a hearer supply the ending, and the walk to Emmaus, where he opened the Scriptures before he was known.
The Learning Community and Capstone
The course closes by moving from the individual lesson to the room it happens in. This module teaches facilitating a discussion without losing the aim it serves, and the craft of the good question, one that opens a text rather than inviting a guess at what the teacher wants to hear. It considers the learning community itself, what makes a group a place where people actually learn from the text and from one another. The module ends with a capstone that designs a complete lesson on James 3:1–12 from the ground up, working through the aim, the learner, the design, and the check exactly as the course has taught them.