The way you interact with students in between the bells is just as important if not more important than the lessons you teach during class. Those moments before and after class when you get to speak with students on a personal level have the potential to be transformative experiences for them. When you deliberately talk…
Teaching Strategies
Lectio Divina Lesson Planning
This concept was so effective for religious educators who started using it in class, that I expanded it into an entire book on lesson planning: Christ in the Classroom: Lesson Planning for the Heart and Mind. How do we help our students know, love, and serve God? How do we teach both the head AND…
Help! My Students Are Bored in Class
Are your students bored in class? It is a common problem and as the students get older, they tend to be more and more bored. A 2015 Gallup poll of high school students showed that 40 percent of teenagers were “engaged” in school. “Bored” was the most commonly cited adjective to describe how they felt…
The Rule of Three: Find Focus in Your Lesson
You are probably trying to teach too much. It’s okay, we all fall into this trap. There are too many topics to teach in the textbook. There are too many vocabulary words to define. There are too many stories to share. There is just too much. The kids know it, too. They get overwhelmed trying…
How Parents Pass on the Faith (and What We Can Do To Help)
I’m preparing for the workshop I’m giving at the Los Angeles Religious Education Congress and I wanted to share one small piece of the message I plan to present. The workshop is focused on empowering parents as the primary religious educators of their children, or more specifically, as disciples and teachers. So this begs the…
From Lecturer to Leader (Part 2): 3 Ways to Keep Students Actively Engaged
If you watched the last video in this series, then you know some of the biggest mistakes we make as religious educators. We spend more time than we should lecturing in front of the class. We spend time reading the textbook out loud even though the kids aren’t following along. And we assign busy work…
From Lecturer to Leader (Part 1): 3 Big Mistakes to Avoid This Year
Like a lot of people who are first starting out in education, I made a lot of mistakes early on. I think you will find that these mistakes are quite similar to what you and a lot of people do today. And it’s not really our fault. For the most part, it is just the…
A Five-step Process for Evangelizing Parents
This post is a part of a series of teaching strategies that get beyond catechesis and into the realm of evangelization. To get a 10,000 foot view of where we are going, read this: A New Vision for Catholic Religious Education. This article and the others in this series are inspired by the book, To…
What is your vision for the future of religious education?
Last week I outlined a new vision for religious education that is inspired by the spirit of the New Evangelization and written about in my book, To Heal, Proclaim, and Teach. I was overwhelmed by the positive response I got from that 3,000-word manifesto. I was so pleased to see that so many catechetical leaders,…
A New Vision for Catholic Religious Education
If we were to evaluate the impact of our religious education programs in the Catholic Church today based solely on the number of students whose lives were transformed, do you think we would score well? What if our religious education programs and children’s ministries were measured by the number of disciples that we made in…
