Best Teaching Practices
Categories: Léo’s Insights 2024-2025
We are fortunate to have a great example of teaching techniques we can follow, as the best teacher who ever lived was Jesus Himself. After all, He was addressing the men He created. When home educating, parents are also addressing the ones they created so they would do well to emulate how Jesus went about teaching his flock.
Jesus employed two main techniques when teaching. The first was His use of questions, whether he was disarming naysayers or leading people to think about a topic and come to the right conclusion. Note, Jesus was not interested in indoctrinating but rather intended His subjects or students to come to the knowledge of the truth of their own volition. Questioning was primarily used to bring people to understand their error in order to provide them with a new way of seeing and understanding the world around them.
The other technique Jesus employed was his ample use of stories and analogies to help people understand the topic at hand. He gave people something they could see, and this is a technique I used a lot in my teaching days.
One example was when we studied human immunity. Students would often confuse the antigen and the antibody and fail to grasp how they worked. To clarify, I would use a farm-related story they could all understand and then apply to the human body. I told them about how a donkey becomes somewhat attached to his “farm mates”.
When a donkey is first brought to a farm, care is taken to teach him who his friends are. Once this is established, the donkey sees all foreign critters as enemies. This is why donkeys are often used to protect stock from coyotes. Donkeys naturally attack coyotes, as they are not part of the farm family. Making the donkey the antibody and the coyotes the antigen, students were able to comprehend how the body (farm) is protected from antigens (coyotes) by donkeys (antibodies). This use of analogy really helped students to wrap their heads around concepts they struggled with.
Moral? There are many techniques that can be used in teaching, but using commonly understood things to bring clarity to a lesson really goes a long way to enabling understanding.
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