Someone once said: “Education is making life more pleasant for others.” The classes for adults become tedious because, trying to make the classes more enjoyable, the content has been sacrificed. We have not understood that the issue is in the form and not in the content to be taught. A class in any of the DIC or DAC discipleships is characterized by bringing deep and defining content to the church, but always in a way that the adult enjoys.
It is no less true that many of them are frustrated as a consequence of the influence on them of the secular educational system. That is why teaching for adults must focus in two directions that influence different results:
(1) Break with the frustration and malformation with which adults arrive at church.
(2) Get them to enjoy what they are learning so that the assimilation and application of the content is better.
Something important is that the learning process must be characterized by a dialogue between teachers and students, where everyone is learning and teaching at the same time. The teacher must not only bring content to students that they do not know or master but must be a catalyst that improves everyone’s understanding. The good teacher, in this sense, is not the one who knows everything, but the one who is aware of what he knows and what he does not know. And although his students do not have to know what he does not know, although sometimes it can happen, the good teacher must be willing to say: I do not know, and I am willing to look for it! It is true that there are people who have specialized knowledge, but they are not good teachers. For this we must practice the art of teaching, it is to learn what to do and what not to do in a classroom so that disciples are better “disciples”.
The classroom from this perspective is a complex adaptive system, that is, it is composed of multiple elements. To begin with, it is composed of people who are complex beings with diverse backgrounds and interests. And, of topics to learn that are also complex because they come from the mind of God. This results in countless points of interaction among themselves with specific actions each day. The teacher must be open to creativity and innovation in collaboration with other teachers and with their students. You must be willing to remove everything that is counterproductive to the benefit of discipleship while incorporating everything that can develop it. By increasingly involving the disciples in the structuring of their class strategy.
The challenge is to imagine what their classroom might look like to be better for their disciples, and for themselves as teachers. Where the appetite for learning can be cultivated and adequately satiated.
Tips for Adult Tutors and Supervisors:
- Remember to give the disciples the texts to read in the week that will prepare you for the next class (there are six texts for each day and the seventh day is left for the community worship service).
- For classes, create space in the room so that anyone who did not arrive in time to pray has the opportunity to do so undisturbed before joining. Also give the freedom to do so if someone feels the need to pray during class.
- Do not try to focus on delving into all the points that appear in each portion, but rather the ones that are most important to you. By returning to this topic in three years, it will be possible to expand on the one that could not be deepened.
- Try to make your class schedule flexible, for more than an hour, for those who want to be on time, and those who cannot, so that everyone has the same chance.
- Create small groups so they can discuss and share how their week went with the topics at hand.
- Use the questions in each portion to enrich or stimulate discussion, to project group research, or to be used in methods such as those presented in Book VI of DAC: STAD, TGT, or Pitpul.