I never thought of myself as a teacher until an associate called me “professor” one day as he asked some questions. I began to realize that a large part of every executive’s work is to teach. I already knew, of course, that because I was the boss, I could dictate. I could use my power to change behavior. But it made a lot more sense to teach, to persuade the people who worked for me to behave in a productive way. The same holds true in the church and even the home. Teaching is far more than the private specialty of Sunday school workers. It is a much wider gift than we have ever noticed.
Preaching is something different; it’s the proclamation of concepts—and it’s a very limited gift. Only a few have been given that gift, and it would be wonderful if they were the only ones preaching. But the teaching gift is much broader.
Seven Marks of a Good Teacher
Whether we teach formally or informally, in a classroom on Sunday morning or alongside a co-worker’s desk on Thursday afternoon, we want to be effective.
What are the signs of success?
1. Good teachers personify their message. They not only say the truth; they model it. For example, a good teacher demonstrates that knowledge is meant to be used, not just stored. He or she gives usable material, things that force the listeners to apply. A person can spout interesting things and be very entertaining and still not teach. The material must be usable, and this happens most directly when it is personified.
2. Good teachers make learning exciting. Plato talked about two kinds of teachers: those who simply transfer knowledge from one head to another, and those who awaken “the student within the student,” making him or her a perpetual learner. Good teachers woo their listeners to keep on learning, because learning makes life better.
3. Good teachers draw people rather than corral them. The constant attendance contests that some Sunday schools run are a danger signal to me. The pleas to break records and come hear such-and-such a teacher tell me that the teacher really is not saying much. Great teachers will draw people. I almost think there is an inverse ratio between the need for attendance promotions and the quality of teaching.
One of the ways I judge my own teaching is by whether people bring their friends to hear me. If I were going to a strange church, I wouldn’t walk in and ask, “Where do the people my age meet?” I don’t go to church to “peer,” I go to hear! So I would say, “Where is the biggest class in the church?” Why? Because, all other things being equal, the big classes have the good teachers.
There’s no sense taking a big class and dividing it up just to fit somebody’s theory of education. I would rather see one large class with one good teacher than ten small classes with nine mediocre ones. In that case, 90 percent of the people have to put up with what I call “Saturday night specials”—teachers who dread all week to prepare the lesson and finally drag themselves on Saturday evening to scratch something together out of a quarterly or somebody else’s old notes.
It is a simple fact: good teachers draw a crowd.
4. Good teachers know their style; they know whether they are lecturers or discussion leaders. Some people can lead a great discussion but can’t lecture well at all, while others are exactly the opposite. One of the early things a teacher needs to do is to decide what his style is and then stick to it.
If, however, someone lectures simply out of fear of not being able to answer questions, this will be obvious. A lecturer has to anticipate the questions in people’s minds and actually voice them. “Now, I know that if you and I were talking individually,” the lecturer will say, “you’d probably ask me how this applies. Well, let me tell you. …” The person in the audience then relaxes and says to himself, “That’s right—that’s just what I was wondering.” What you’ve done is carry on a controlled discussion. If you cut across someone’s prejudice, or you depart from a standard interpretation or assumption, you have to recognize that and give people a chance to rethink the matter. If you close the door and go on lecturing, people will stop listening to you while they worry about what you said. But if you deal with the surprise or controversy, you can tell by the look on their faces and the general body language that they are saying, “Okay, I’m ready to move on with you again.” Even though you are a lecturer, you have the responsibility to carry on a discussion with your audience, voicing their positions as well as your own.
On the other hand, if you’re a discussion leader, you have to control the questions in order to keep the few talkers in the group from taking it away from you. Who needs meaningless tirades by those who wish they had been asked to teach but were not (for obvious reasons)? Discussion leaders control the discussion so that it accomplishes something.
5. Good teachers deal in reality, not theory; they change behavior. One of their key words is applicable. Does this material actually apply to these people? Is it right for them? Does it fit with where they are in their daily lives? All of us have areas of unreality. Sometimes teachers will stand up and air their doubts, for example. I resent that; they should not impose these on other people. If they don’t have knowledge and faith to share, then they should not be teaching. This is one of the problems of small groups; they can wallow in their collective misery and never get to answers. It may be good for friendship, but it is not what teaching is about. Unless behavior changes, I have not taught. I must do more than entertain people; I must do more than store up information—even Bible information—in their heads. What is the difference between sitting around talking about the Bible and sitting around talking about Shakespeare if we don’t do anything about what we’ve discussed? James 1 says we are to be doers of the Word and not hearers only. If teaching doesn’t result in doing, then it isn’t teaching.
During World War II we had TWI (Training Within Industry) courses, which were a total departure from standard pedagogy. Many women were coming into industry for the first time, and we had to train them very quickly. Our slogan was “If the student doesn’t learn, the teacher hasn’t taught.” People learned to operate machines in a matter of days, weeks, and months, whereas before an apprenticeship had lasted four years. Many who were not instructors learned how to impart their knowledge to others, because we were under pressure to do so.
If the people in my Sunday class do not change behavior because of my teaching, I simply have not taught. But when they do change, they like to talk about it. They come up and say, “Fred, that idea you talked about—I tried it, and it worked.” Following a discussion on family life, an executive vice president told me one day over lunch, “You know, in Sunday school I realized that I listen to my employees a whole lot better than I do my wife. And that isn’t right. I’ve started listening to my wife at least as well as I do my employees.”
When this happens, I ask the person for permission to quote him to the rest of the class in order to promote this kind of change. I say, “Would you mind my telling the class this, because I constantly want to drive home the idea of changing behavior.” The person usually is quite willing to go along with my request.
This brings several side benefits. It tells people that I like to hear about these things. It makes the class review ideas. It also puts the person on record to continue the change of behavior. It gives him a reputation to keep living up to. People start asking the fellow’s wife if this is true, and so a fortress of change is being built. A lot of human interest is sparked as well.
6. Good teachers teach people, not material. A professor was once too busy to get to a certain class, so he prepared a videotape to be shown. When he dropped in about—halfway through the class period, the tape was playing, but all the students had vanished.
The next day he chewed them out. “When the TV screen is here, I’m here,” he announced.
The next time he tried to use a videotape, he again dropped in to see what was happening. On every desk he found a tape recorder, and on the chalkboard a message: “When our tape recorders are here, we’re here!”
It is not enough to call a meeting or hand out a quarterly that gives a Sunday school teacher the main points of the lesson. Leaders of Christian education must realize that they should send out teachers, not messenger boys, because personal rapport is as important as content in teaching.
I listened to a man the other day who might as well have been talking to vacant chairs. He had worked so hard on his preparation and was so perfectly organized that he was teaching the lesson, not the class. He had no feel for people who were hearing it for the first time, who might differ with him on some points, who might need an added explanation here or there.
A good teacher is always thinking more about the class than about the lesson. He is sensitive to when their minds are open and when they are closed. To teach five minutes beyond closing time is foolish, because 90 percent of the people have already shut down. Sometimes I have stopped right in the middle of a sentence when closing time came, because I wanted to impress the audience with the fact that I quit on time. For the same reason I believe in starting on time as a way of saying, “This is important.” If you don’t start on time, you’re saying to people, “This doesn’t really matter so much,” and you’re cutting down the amount of time you have to teach.
7. Good teachers are used by the Holy Spirit. He is the teacher’s Teacher, and the student’s as well. One of the things I pray for is that moment of holy hush, when suddenly, without my manipulating or even realizing it’s happening, we are all in tune and God is using me to say something that they are hearing in the Spirit. I call them pregnancy moments, because I know something is being born in someone’s heart at that time.
I cannot develop these moments; I can’t control them. I can only recognize that this is when true teaching happens, when the Holy Spirit is the real Teacher. These have been some of the greatest moments of my Christian life.
The enjoyment of being used by God is the greatest joy that can come to a teacher. The greatest pain is the feeling that instead of being used by God, I have used God. I have used his hour to propagandize, to impress people with my knowledge, or to hint at what a good Christian I am. This brings on depression.
I’m never depressed, no matter how insignificant the results, if I feel at the end that God used me. But if I sense in my heart that I used God, the magnificent crowd and the loud applause mean nothing.
How Good Teaching Happens
A long-time friend surprised me one day by saying, “When you go to look something up in a book, and you open to a page that isn’t on the subject, you go ahead and read the page you opened to, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“Well, you’re a generalist,” he announced. “You accumulate information. You get so intrigued by reading whatever comes along that you even forget whatever you were headed toward. Learning, in itself, is fun for you.”
He was right.
“Other people,” he continued, “aren’t tempted in the least by something they’re not looking for. They’re very specifically targeted in their learning.”
Both kinds of people can be good teachers, provided they know themselves and how to proceed. We generalists have to discipline our naturally curious minds to focus. If I’m going to teach thirty minutes, I invariably wind up with three or four hours’ worth of material. And I have to get up at five o’clock on Sunday morning to fight it down to thirty minutes. Focusing is my problem.
The other folks have to work hard to expand. They must drive themselves to keep collecting ancillary material in order to fill out the points, or they will fall into monotonous repetition.
None of us can afford to plunge into our preparing at the beginning of a week without first naming the major point we want to send home. When I start to put together a lesson, I work backwards; first I settle “How do I want people to feel when I quit? What do I want them to do once they leave the class?” Then I know how to organize all that should come before.
Once the teaching begins, whether in a classroom, a staff meeting, or a training seminar, we must always hold to the search for truth. The greatest scholars are those who search for truth rather than display their knowledge like a showman.
If someone asks a question that contradicts our theory, we ought to be honest enough to say, “You know, I never thought about that. Tell me some more; I’m interested in what’s behind what you just said. I want to think about that.” This creates the reality atmosphere; this tells people, “Here is someone who really wants to know what the truth is.”
If you’re a propagandist—not a teacher—you will always contend for your viewpoint, whether it’s right, wrong, or indifferent. You want to get your man elected. So you propagandize. Teachers, on the other hand, love finding truth no matter where it comes from: children, subordinates, spouses, anyone.
I can hardly think of a more miserable position than to say, “I already have the truth; what is there to learn?” I may have a foothold on truth, I may be into its fringe, but I’m still flying in the clouds, not in the open sky. Every so often I get a little glimpse of the brightness above, and that excites me, but my visibility is still far from clear.
This is not to say that Scripture is not the source of truth. I hold the truth in my hands, and I must always uphold this textbook to my students as reliable. The difference is that I honestly admit, “Here is the way I interpret Scripture, but if that is not what Scripture really says, then I’m wrong. Let the Holy Spirit teach you as he will, because he is the interpreter of truth, not me. In the final analysis, we are all students of his.”
This tentativeness, however, does not keep me from being boldly specific in my teaching. As the Spirit guides, I teach principles to act upon. A lot of people teach Bible stories without teaching principles. For example, they will teach about Daniel and deduce that if you do right as he did, you won’t get in trouble.
That’s not the principle of Daniel at all. If it were, what happened to Stephen? He did right, but the rocks still crushed him. Why did God protect Daniel but not Stephen?
The principle in both stories is that you must make up your mind to do right whether they put you in the lions’ den, in the fiery furnace, or in front of the rock throwers. And the way life works out, sometimes you get killed, sometimes you get a miracle. Either way, you take your stand for right and leave the results to God.
I’ve isolated at least twenty major principles for living from Genesis 16, the story of Abram, Sarai, and Hagar. An obvious one is the danger of doing God’s work with a human plan. Sarai had decided that God wasn’t going to get around to giving her a child, so she made up her own strategy using her servant woman. The result was disastrous. Today as well, we too often devise human plans to do what only God can do.
Having taught a principle, I follow with a handle, a quick phrase to carry around the principle. One of my principles has the handle “wait to worry.” In other words, don’t start worrying before you have the facts. People have come back to me twenty or twenty-five years later and are still using that handle; they say, “You know, over the years I’ve really learned to wait to worry.”
Last comes an illustration. Until I tell a story that demonstrates the principle and its handle, I never assume that it is clear in their minds.
Afterward, in discussion, I like to ask people to tell me what I’ve told them, feeding it back to me, because even after these three steps, I find that people have a great tendency to augment what they have heard. Once I gave a speech on ten principles of supervision, one of them being that you must maintain discipline among those you supervise. A tough fellow walked up afterward and said,” agree with you 100 percent; we must maintain discipline!” Apparently he missed the other nine points altogether.
The Rewards of Good Teaching
We know we are teaching well when people want to be taught by us. A class that is giving its members what they need will be a growing class. Classes don’t grow through organization; they grow through meeting needs. When we see more and more people wanting to receive our teaching, we know it is speaking to their problems.
When we really touch somebody, they want to talk to us. The more we reach their immediate needs, the more we see their eyes light up, and their questions and responses begin to flow. The longer we teach, the more chance we have to see long-term fruit from the seeds we have planted.
The excitement of teaching is in seeing people change. In a way, teaching is like fishing. Why does a fisherman go out there and put in his time? Because he loves the experience—even though it’s rare—of catching a fish. I have this same feeling every time I step in front of a crowd. Today, something is going to happen to somebody. Not everybody will change today, but somebody is going to hear something that will make a difference. Somebody is going to change an attitude. Somebody is going to discover the thrill of learning. Somebody is going to turn on to the practicality of the Bible.
And it’s my special privilege to be on the other end of the line when that happens.
Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
