When I grow up, I want to be an adventor!

Last week in our Education class, we spent most of the time participating in 20-minute presentations by each one of four small groups. Each group had been assigned a season of the church year (Advent, Epiphany, Lent or Easter; Christmas & Pentecost were set aside) to research and the goal of the presentations were three-fold. First to share faith-forming ideas around these seasons. Next, to gain further insight into small-group dynamics. And lastly, to experience teaching and learning first-hand in four of seven ways of learning. These ways (based on Dr. Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences) include: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal and intrapersonal.

My small group was assigned the season of Advent and our intelligence was logical-mathematical. As our group went first (only fitting as Advent is the first season of the church year), I'd like to reflect a bit on my experience in the small group and as a teacher/presenter. I must begin by saying that I have had more than my share of small group dynamics study and practice over the years and this group proved to be no different in both its predictability of characteristics and its expected uniqueness.

The ultimate take-away from this experience is that I wish we had been able to dedicate more time into the project. Our group was pretty interested in discovering that which was unique to Advent. Our conversations were rich when trying to get at the heart of this season's meanings surrounding the preparation for the coming of Christ into the world, both the newborn Christ and the returning Messiah. The conversations were so rich that we struggled to quickly develop a thematic structure within which to build the presentation. Once the theme statement of "Advent: a time for preparing..." was developed, we were able to start producing the work for the the teaching/learning task. Fortunately, the group was equally invested in a positive outcome and I'm fairly pleased with the results.

As for the presentation itself, I question how much learning actually occurred. While I'm confident that the material was presented in a logical-mathematical way, I think the volume of information presented was far too great for a 20 minute presentation. Much of this was the result of feeling the need for each member of the group to demonstrate (for the purposes of the class) that they had indeed prepared a breadth of content that was pertinent to the topic at hand. In their book Teaching the Bible in Church, authors John Bracke & Karen Tye express the need of teachers to possess a "knowledge of space" and that includes recognizing more than just the physical constraints placed in the teaching moment. The space created and constrained by time is of critical importance in any teaching-learning paradigm. Quite honestly, you can expect to cover only so much material in 20 minutes, regardless of how well prepared you are. We might have been better served to have just focused on our key theme statement, explored its basis and then briefly introduced all of the supporting materials available.

With respect to our audience of supposed logical-mathematical learners, I think we offered up one approach to engaging this particular learning intelligence and there certainly are many more to be considered. I do think we missed out a little by not having prepared a concise agenda for the presentation. The agenda could have had bullet points addressing the key takeaways that were revealed over the course of the presentation. In addition (excuse the pun), we were fundamentally lacking in any sort of mathematical challenge to the presentation. I would like to give this some more thought in the future but I'm not sure the topic lent itself to much in this context.

Overall this was an enjoyable and beneficial exercise and although I groaned a bit (see post from 9/14/08) when initially engaging in the small group nature of the project, there were more than enough take aways for me to value greatly my and my group mate's efforts.