Yah know the weird thing is that ALL these techniques have been floating around for decades. I've picked them up from various lessons and "creative Bible teaching" books. Phyllis Wezeman has written a ton about techniques in our email newsletters.
What's different is that I'm applying them at EVERY STEP of the lesson plan, whereas the traditional Sunday School approach was to use creativity as the "thing we did after we exhausted talking".
We're talking about a "discipline" really, a rubric to save us from the easiest thing for a teacher to do: talk our kids into a stupor.
HOW TO CURE THIS TYPE OF LESSON PLAN
If your lesson plan in ANY workshop looks like this:
1. talk
2. talk some more
3. activity to revive the troops
4. talk even more
5. close (a talking prayer, hahaha)
Then you need to CHANGE HOW YOU GO ABOUT WRITING YOUR LESSON PLAN.
-->> And the solution is actually pretty simple. For every step in the lesson plan, create two columns:
___________________________________________________________________
Left Column.................|............Right Columm
Step 1 in the Lesson Plan...|....Step 1's Creative Method to teach it!
Step 2 in the Lesson Plan...|....Step 2's Creative Method to teach it!
Step 3 in the Lesson Plan...|....Step 3's Creative Method to teach it
etc
____________________________________________________________________
By simply using the discipline of that "Right Hand Column", and using the workshop's designated method to inform the right hand column's techniques, you can transform your lesson plan, your teaching, and your kids.
Not every creative method/technique has to be a full blown 'game' in the workshop, just 'game-y' as I've described above. In Art, it could be something artistic, such as a quick sketch, or looking at art. Etc etc.
Is "talk" evil?
Does every step 'need' a creative technique?
No, but a simple thing like "creating two columns" challenges our reliance on talking too much, and forces us to think about our lesson steps differently. "TWO COLUMNS" gives us a simple tool to make us think about applying the Workshop's designated learning approach to each lesson step. The kids enjoy "two column" lessons, and creative teachers do too.
It also takes seriously the Model's belief in the power of creative, multiple-intelligence learning.
-----------------------------------------------
If you think about it... the entire Rotation Model itself is based on implementing structural discipline on our teaching habits. We begin by creating "boxes" called workshops into which we place a "creative media" and the creative teacher who likes that media. This simple structural idea tells us HOW TO TEACH in each workshop. We just need to extend this "how to" into the individual steps WITHIN each workshop. A right hand column rubric would hold us to that need.
----------------------------------------
Another great example of how the habit of having a "Right Hand Column" could transform a lesson is in the Storytelling Workshop
Having read dozens of Storytelling lessons up here, I have described most of them as "a teacher in costume delivering a boring monolog".
Now imagine if there were a right hand column for every key point in the story. In that right hand column we would create a demonstration or some form of "interaction" by the students for each key point to enliven the presentation and "hang the point" in the student memory.
I'm sure there are some great storytellers out there in some churches. But simply writing better monologs is not the answer for "the others" who struggle to make this workshop interesting.
-----------------------
Next question:
Is typing too much, evil?
Hmmmmmm.....
<>< Neil