Teachers Matter.
And what matters most about teachers is whether they are learners.
I’ve been unable to track the original source of this quote, but it’s one that I used to present to my pre-service teachers on the opening day of PSY 351 Psychology Applied to Teaching. I wanted them to grab onto the fact that no matter the length of their teaching career, there would always be room to learn and grow. In fact, I want to happily say, I’m learning something new. It’s enjoyable, but it’s hard. And it turns out you can teach an old dog new tricks.
Last month, Perry Glanzer wrote a four-part series highlighting Four Necessary Skills for Christ-Animated Learning. The series dropped right at the time I was preparing to deliver some professional development for faculty at The Association for Biblical Higher Education. These were all sessions I had delivered many times before, but while I was polishing slides and updating notes, Glanzer’s blog series made me pause to consider what I thought I knew about teaching and my ability to educate from and for a biblical worldview.
Those blog posts included a challenge, and while I have much more work to do, at least in part, I tried to tackle a few academic terms and place them in the Christian story. Here’s what my efforts yielded, at least so far.
Designing in the Christian Story
I think there’s a good bit of overlap between the work of an educator and the work of a theologian. Not just because we are educators in faith-related institutions, but because the beginning work of teachers often involves something a lot like exegesis. If I’m charged with teaching something, a course or a lesson, I have to break down the description and outcomes of that course into their component parts and examine what each word or phrase means, and then bring my expertise to bear on thousands of decisions about how I’ll teach that content.
In this case, I was preparing a workshop called Designing Lessons for Active Learning. The title itself assumes several things, the first of which is that educators are designers. So, as I started considering the description and outcomes of this session, I asked myself, what does it mean to be a designer if I look through a biblical lens? What does it mean to design well?
Scripture presents God as the original creator and designer. From the opening chapters of Genesis, we see a God who brings order out of chaos, who creates with intention, structure, and purpose. Creation is not accidental, and it is not random. Each part is named, ordered, and declared good in relation to the whole.
That matters for how we think about teaching. If we are made in the image of a God who designs with purpose, then design is not an optional or secondary part of our work as educators, it is intrinsic to it. To teach is not simply to deliver content, but to participate, in a small way, in purposeful creation. We are creating learners and preparing them to participate in society or a career, and in many cases those careers are in ministry.
God’s design is always oriented toward an end. Creation moves toward flourishing. Formation moves toward maturity. Redemption moves toward restoration. And that same pattern shows up in faithful teaching. Good design begins with clarity about purpose and then orders its parts toward that end.
So, when we talk about designing lessons for active learning, we are not just talking about randomly selecting a technique, even if that technique creates active or engaged learning. We are asking how our teaching reflects a God who designs intentionally, who works toward formation, and who brings order, meaning, and coherence to what he creates.
From a biblical perspective, design is never neutral. It always serves something. The question is whether our lesson design merely serves efficiency or fosters distraction or whether it instead serves formation, deep learning, and transfer of that learning to applicable settings. When I coach faculty who are deeply entrenched in the “lecture only” camp, I often try to temper their beliefs by presenting research-based learning theories and encouraging them to take small steps in the direction of expanding their teaching repertoire. I realize now, I need to change my approach and begin with a discussion of what designing learning means if we place it in the Christian story.
The Purpose of the Design
The next bit of the title I had to examine carefully is the idea that I’m designing lessons. What does that mean? How does it differentiate from other things I might design, even things that seem close to the work of a teacher in a bible college?
Lessons are not sermons.
That distinction matters – not because sermons are less valuable, but because they are designed for a different purpose. A sermon is primarily oriented toward proclamation. Its goal is faithfulness to the text, theological clarity, and often exhortation or encouragement for the listener. Often, the primary activity of the hearer is reception. But does reception equal learning?
There’s a segment from a favorite TV show of mine in which a character is trying to learn to speak French. The friend who is teaching him will say words in French, but what the learner says back is complete nonsense. They go through several phases of this attempted instruction, and at one point, the character even claims to have learned French, despite the fact that he cannot actually speak any words, string together any sentences, or communicate meaningfully in French in any capacity.
I think this is a helpful illustration as we consider our role as teachers. It invites us to define what learning really is. What would it mean to say, “My students learned this?” Whether we are talking about a skill, knowledge, or a change in values or attitudes, what would it actually mean for someone to have learned something?
For us, that question must begin with an examination of how scripture talks about learning. Scripture does not describe learning as simply acquiring information. In fact, James tells us that hearing and not doing is the opposite of being a learner, and it’s deception. Instead, learning is coming to know truth in a way that shapes who we are and how we live before God.
Throughout the Bible, knowing is relational and formational. To learn is to grow in understanding that leads to faithfulness, obedience, and transformed living. Jesus himself makes this clear when he teaches that learning is demonstrated not only by what we can say, but by how we live.
So, when we say, “My students learned this,” what do we actually mean? Are we talking about gaining a skill, knowing a body of knowledge, or a shift in values or character? Biblically, learning involves all of these. It includes the renewal of the mind, the shaping of the heart, and the formation of habits that reflect God’s purposes.
In educational settings, learning is often described as the ability to retrieve information and use it appropriately. From a biblical perspective, that application matters deeply but not simply for functional reasons. Application is evidence that something has taken root internally, and that understanding has begun to shape action. As educators, then, we are not only concerned with what students know, but what they will do with what they know, and with who they are becoming.
This approach challenges some traditional assumptions in higher education, especially the idea that lecture should be our default method, regardless of the intended outcome. If our definition of learning includes formation, practice, and faithful application, then our teaching methods must reflect that. The way we deliver content and invite students to engage with it must be shaped by what we believe learning truly is.
The key idea is this: our methods should always flow from our understanding of learning and in particular what learning we expect students to take away from a particular program, course, or lesson. From a biblical perspective, learning is ultimately about transformation: learning that takes root, bears fruit, and shapes lives lived faithfully before God.
So having considered some big broad questions about what it means for educators to DESIGN And what LEARNING IS, my workshop underwent some transformation. Again, I have much work still to do and am thankful to be challenged to think about the work in my discipline from a more scholarly and biblically informed stance.
Signed,
A Learner
