10 Marks of Great Teaching, #1
Published: Fri, 03/18/16
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According to Plato, an unexamined life is not worth living. Unexamined teaching isn’t all that great either. If you want to improve your teaching, begin by evaluating ii l What do you do well? l What comes naturally for you? l With what do you struggle? Evaluation is the beginning point of any improvement process. I use ten characteristics to evaluate whether or not a lesson is good. Every one of these does not have to be in every lesson. Build on your strengths. The quickest way to improve your teaching is not to focus on making your weaknesses better. Rather, the fastest way to improve your teaching is to make your strengths stronger. Work on overcoming your weaknesses as well, but concentrate on maximizing your strengths. Here are ten benchmarks of great teaching. Use them as plumb lines to evaluate your teaching. 1. PassionDid you present the truth with some fire? If the truth does not matter to you, it will not matter to them. Howard Hendricks is fond of saying, “If you are going to bore people, don’t bore them with the gospel. Bore them with calculus, bore them with earth science, bore them with world history. But it is a sin to bore people with the gospel.” Someone once asked Charles Spurgeon, “What is the secret of great preaching?” He replied, “Get on fire with the gospel, and people will come to watch you burn.” This was also the experience of the writer of Psalm 39:3: “My heart grew hot within me, and as I meditated, the fire burned; then I spoke with my tongue.” This ought to be the goal of every teacher: to cultivate a hot heart before you speak. I have seen teachers with mediocre content who spoke with such conviction that you just had to listen. But it is not a matter of either-or. You can have good content and communicate it with passion. That is teaching at its best. Apollos was an example of accuracy and fervor. According to Acts 18:25, Apollos “had been instructed in the way of the Lord, and he spoke with great fervor and taught about Jesus accurately, though he knew only the baptism of John” (emphasis added). It is possible, of course, to have a passionate heart and not show it. More often than not, gestures and voice inflection need to be overdone in order to come across at all. Animation in teaching is like stage makeup. The point is not to look like you have makeup on—it is to look normal. But if you are not wearing makeup when you are on stage, you will look flat. In a similar way, the point of animation in teaching is not so much to appear animated but to appear normal. If you use a normal voice in teaching, you will probably sound flat (read: boring). Very few teachers are too animated, so err on the side of overdoing it. Ultimately, the point is not how fired-up you appear, but how fired-up you really are. How excited are you about the grace of God? I close with my favorite verse in Romans. Note that this is a command: “Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord” (Romans 12:11). Rate yourself on a scale of one to ten. How passionate are you in your teaching of the greatest news ever?
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