Teaching & Learning

What does learning look like? When you walk past a Bible study classroom on Sunday morning can you tell by the activity of the students that learning is taking place? If you have a well-versed teacher and the classroom appears to be calm – is this an indication that knowledge is being shared and lives are being transformed? Unfortunately not. Teaching and learning are not so simple. However, we do know that engaging learners in specific activities results in a higher level of retention. Consider these strategies and how you can implement one or more of them in your lesson each week to enhance learning.

Lecture: While this may be the preferred teaching technique, especially for adult teachers of adult learners, only 10% of the lesson content is retained by the learner in a lecture-driven lesson. While some amount of lecture may be necessary in every lesson, the teacher must also learn other techniques for sharing the content of the study.

Reading: Those students who are asked to read or read-along will retain up to 20% of the content of the lesson. While this may be better than lecture, it still falls far short of complete retention!

Audio-Visual: We live in a society of sight and sound. The use of pictures, graphics, overheads, computer-generated visuals, and music can increase retention to 30%. If you don’t have the latest in technology, don’t be hesitant to pull out the flannel-board. Even the use of a marker-board or chalk-board can add a necessary visual dimension to the lesson.

Demonstration: Seeing a lesson demonstrated can increase retention up to 50%. Don’t be surprised if students remember the demonstration far longer than the teaching aim of the lesson.

Discussion: Allowing students to talk about the topic will increase retention of content up to 75%. While we do not want the entire lesson to be group-talk, it certainly has its place in the teaching process, especially as the teacher comes to the application of the teaching aim.

Guided Practice: As students practice doing something as a result of the lesson, their retention of content will increase to 90%. Unfortunately, we often run out of time by the time we get to the practice portion of the lesson. Plan for practice, it will make an incredible impact on learning.

Teaching Others: If you really want students to retain what you have instructed, give them opportunity to teach someone else. Over 90% of content will be retained when the teacher utilizes this teaching strategy.

Though time will greatly limit your ability to use all of these teaching strategies in every lesson, make an effort to move further down the list. As you do, you will find that your learners will be more engaged and better able to demonstrate that they have retained what you had planned for them to learn.