Teaching Tip: Change
Keeping your class fresh by constantly making changes is a basic principle to teaching. Rearranging the chairs, using a new teaching technique, bring a live animal to class would be superficial changes and they encourage learning. Be prepared change will happen in your class. You can promote it, react to it, dread it, but you can’t stop it from happening. The Lord doesn’t change, everything else does. Why? One answer is stress. Stress causes change and the Lord is not influenced by stress. Earthquakes and climate changes prove the earth is under stress and the earth is changing.. Depression and suicide are big changes and show the people of this world are under stress . When a person’s spine is abused, pain results from the stress on the muscles, there is a change in way you feel. Some people are changing there lifestyle due to financial stress. Stress is everywhere in this world so, as teachers why would we expect are classes to be predictable? Change is coming and it is happening.
There are a lot of outside forces that influence your class. The physical, emotional, and spiritual state of everyone in the room has an effect. Candy, fall break, family arguments, peer pressure, lack of sleep, and being late for church are a few of the things that place stress on your class. Obviously, these are negative. A physical exercise program stresses the body the correct way and the change is for the better. There are positive stresses that can influence your class as well. Our continual consecration to the Lord has a HUGE effect and will change your class for the better. It puts stress to the positive side and the change will be positive. Jesus was consecrated. His class was the disciplines. He changed their lives by, “stressing them out.” He said “you feed the 5000”, “you pray for the sick and cast out devils”, and “you catch a fish, get the coin and pay the taxes.” The stress was on the learner to do not the teacher. Having a class focused on student producing rather than a focus on the teacher producing will shift the stress/change.
Don’t passively allow stress just to happen in your class. This will change it for the negative. Be proactive put stress in the right areas and positive changes will come. Change is coming and it is happening. The challenge is to lord over it and direct it by submitting to the Lord of lords and allow that stress to make the change positive. Pray, let God’s influence change your class. Your class will be pleasantly unpredictable.