For Christian teachers – in any setting – there are few more helpful and wise books than On Christian Teaching.

Christian Teaching?

First, David Smith asks the central question of the book:

Is there such a thing as teaching Christianly, teaching in such a way that faith somehow informs the processes, the moves, the practices, the pedagogy, and not just the ideas that are conveyed or the spirit in which they are offered?

He argues persuasively that the answer is yes, and then shows what some of those moves and practices. Answering those who think of Christian teaching as either (1) having Christian content, or (2) modeling Christian character, or some combination of the two, Smith provides examples that show that even in the presence of these two conditions, teaching can fail to achieve its ends.  “What is doing the work here is not character or quality of the relationship, but the design of the task, the structure of the learning resources, and the patterns of practice” (6). For this reason, Smith focuses on pedagogy – the moves, practices, and design that arise from Christian commitments and foster deep learning and human formation.

Show, Don’t Tell

In good form, Smith demonstrates good pedagogy in a chapter that describes the learning design of the first 9 minutes of his first session of a second-year German class at a Christian undergraduate liberal arts college in the United States. 

Specifically, Smith details the moves he has planned. Two of his “primary resources as a teacher are time and space, and a key pedagogical task is designing what will happen with them” to establish the ethos of the class – such that it both challenges and welcomes students, finding “a pace that sustains engagement without creating an undue sense of pressure” (18).

Here are a few examples:

Space: He arranges the chairs in groups of four before class, and thereby “minimized the amount of attention devoted to negotiating the fraught terrain of who is friends with whom, making it easier for students to focus on language learning” (19).

Time: Smith begins by taking only 30 seconds to introduce himself before giving the students a learning task. “I tell them that each person will have two minutes to share as much as they can about themselves in German to their partner” (15) and he uses a timer to keep them – and himself – to time. He explains, “After four minutes [two minutes for each partner to speak], I step in with fresh instructions. I ask the pairs to combine back into groups of four [the designed use of space] and tell them that they now have one minute each to introduce their partner to the group, again in German, based on what they learned in their first conversation” (16).

All of this is intentional. He has required every student to speak and to listen and summarize within the first 9 minutes of class – a time that teachers often wast with hemming and hawing about rules, materials, and themselves. Smith’s students were required to use first-person past tense in recounting their own summer, and third-person past tense in introducing their partner to their group of four. In all of it, he has forced them to draw on latent vocabulary to describe the real actions of life – not something contrived from a textbook. And he has done it in a low-threat environment, where their audience is first one person, and then three (not the entire class). 

Importantly, he has surprised them after 4 minutes with the announcement that they will need to introduce their partner to two other people. Smith reflects, “I want the implicit message to be that listening to others matters all the time, and so they might at any moment find themselves held accountable for having listened” (23). Yet he does it in a way that is neither browbeating lecture nor public shaming.

Isn’t this just good teaching?

After detailing the use of time and space, and the intentional moves he planned to teach German, Smith asks the central question: “Is any of this Christian? Not exclusively so, yet these choices are rooted in a mess of assumptions and beliefs that, for me, include explicitly Christian sources. I have wondered for many years what it might mean to view students not as minds, achievers, customers, or challenges, but as images of God called to faithful living and to love of God and neighbor. I have also long been interested in how classrooms might embody the Christian virtue of hospitality . . . These impulses come from interaction with the Bible and with ideas gleaned for Christian theologians and Christians scholars in other disciplines. They play an active role in shaping the specific choices described [in the first 9 minutes of class]” (36-37).

Lest you think Smith is making too strong a claim here, he clarifies: “There is no straight path from Bible verses to pedagogical choices, as if my choices in the nine-minute activity were somehow the biblically mandated ones. There is also no biblical copyright in play – it would be entirely possible for another teacher to make choices like the ones I made, but based on values rooted in a different set of sources. However, I do not need to believe that no other human has my eye color in order to assert that I have it from my parents. Christians are not the only ones who value community or seek to honor students. Yet Christians do so for Christian reasons, and Christian reasoning was involved in my choices to focus on listening, respect, name learning, safety, community, and the like. I could quite possibly be mistaken – wrong in my understanding of what Christian faith demands, wrong in my beliefs about how that should be applied in the classroom, wrong in my beliefs about how classrooms work, or wrong about how students are receiving and interpreting my choices. Letting faith into the picture does not guarantee that I am right or that my teaching will go well. Yet I still have to confess that in this case, despite the lack of any overt reference to faith, the pedagogical choices that I made were swayed by my Christian faith. . . The teaching process itself carries in its patterns a faith-inflected vision of how we should live and learn together. I have simply tried to find practices that embody my beliefs” (37).

Building a repertoire of practice

Smith’s nine-minute teaching segment is just a glimpse of a whole pattern of teaching. “The story told by pedagogy is most eloquent in the patterns of practice that emerge, in the stable repertoire of a class more than in the occasional flourish . . . Pedagogical choices thus become part of student formation. They induct students into ways of relating to one another, to the subject matter, to the teacher, to their own selves, and to the implied wider world in which learning is embedded. This induction is sustained and reinforced through everyday patterns of practice. Formation is not something exotic or archaic added to teaching as an optional extra. For teaching that continues over any significant length of time, formation is part of how teaching works” (39).

And this is why I commend this book to any person who is committed to teaching and learning. For Christians teaching any subject in any setting, it prompts the right pedagogical questions about the use of space, time, and materials – and the Christian commitments that prompt those moves. [As an aside, his treatment of the instructional design of homework is brilliant in challenging the patterns of practice into which most of us have been formed with something better suited to learning and formation.] For those who are not Christians, Smith’s acute insight into how beliefs shape the practices and moves of a classroom – and how these in turn are deeply formative for learners – will be time well spent. As the author explicitly states, he is not claiming that great teaching is the exclusive domain of Christians. (He might actually contend that we are often less pedagogically expert because of Christians who have maintained that Christian teaching has to do merely with including Biblical content or demonstrating Biblical character, thereby actively handicapping our pedagogical development.)

I have encountered no better book on this subject. If you need further encouragement, listen to this Mars Hill Audio interview.