A few days ago, I was watching the fascinating sport of curling during the Winter Olympics. I’ve never really watched curling before, and it is still a strange sport for me to try to understand. One person takes the stone and throws it across the ice, and then others use brooms (?) to sweep the ice, altering the speed and direction of the stone. Teams work together to try to get their stone as close to the center of the target. Whichever team gets their stone closest to the center of the target wins the point…right?
Just like how curling and many other sports have a target, the teaching and learning process also has specific targets or goals that teachers want their students to learn. While writing learning objectives for a course may not be the most exciting part of teaching, learning objectives are a central and vital part of the teaching and learning process.
This past week, I learned how different personalities receive information in different ways. As I was writing learning objectives for a course, I realized that it was much easier for me to write the cognitive (knowledge) and affective (feeling) objectives. Interestingly, I had a much harder time writing the behavioral (doing) objectives. As a more contemplative person, it makes sense that the cognitive and affective objectives come more easily to me. Yet, when I was talking with my husband, Stan, who is much more of a cognitive-behavioral person, he found it much easier to write the thinking and doing objectives. In this way, I can see how teachers often teach in the way that comes more naturally to them. Yet, many times, learners learn in a different way than the teacher, so there can be a breakdown or disconnect in the teaching and learning process. As teachers, we have to stretch ourselves out of our comfort zones to help students who come from a variety of backgrounds learn effectively. In this way, we need to vary the methods we use when we teach, so as to give learners multiple ways to access the material.
While people learn in different ways, our churches still often teach people through a one-way lecture format during Sunday worship. I wonder what it would be like if church leaders utilized the different ways of learning in their teaching, and how this would affect people’s spiritual growth. While our aim as leaders is to help others to grow more like Christ, I wonder if learning objectives could help us be more intentional in accomplishing this goal.
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