The Big Question—How Do You Know?

By Philip M. Renicks, Associate, Graybeal and Associates, LLC

As a former Christian high school principal and head of school I pondered more than once the question that I am confident you are asking, “How do I Know?” During my years in administrative leadership the answer continued to elude me.

Since you are taking time to read this you are likely struggling with the same age old question, “how do I know if our school is effective in the spiritual formation of our students?” The typical Christian school recruiting brochure, parent and student handbooks, and all manner of advertising lauds the excellence of the school in preparing students for life who are intellectually developed and spiritually formed.

It is quite probable that the mission and/or vision statement of your school speaks of a Christ-centered education, a distinctive that sets the school apart from the public and private school sectors that are not Christian in your community. But the question remains, “how do you validate whether or not spiritual formation is actually taking place in the lives of your students?”

As a Christian educator for more than 40 years I know how to measure the intellectual development and academic progress of students. All of us who are trained educators have been well schooled in the metrics of school effectiveness through all manner of testing instruments. Some standardized tests even offer a Bible knowledge subtest. But are we really measuring a student’s spiritual formation or just the student’s cognitive understanding of God?

Daniel Egeler, Ed.D. Vice President of International Ministries for the Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI) writes that some would argue that the spiritual formation of an individual is clouded in a mystery and one should seek to preserve that mystery. Along with Dr. Egeler, I question this approach and wonder if rather than “preserving the mystery,” we are hiding behind a cloke of misunderstanding and uncertainty?

We all recognize that it is difficult to quantify matters of the heart, to identify and verify those virtues that comprise spiritual formation. II Peter 1:5-9 seems to suggest that there are certain virtues of spiritual development that can be measured. Peter states: “For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith, goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness, love. For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. But if anyone does not have them, he is nearsighted and blind, and has forgotten that he has been cleansed from his past sins.”

While the process of how the spiritual formation of your student’s takes place may be difficult to define (a mystery) since it is a product of the work of the Holy Spirit, Peter suggests that in some ways, “if you possess these qualities in increasing measure” they will create in an individual a spiritual effectiveness that is observable. I propose that the spiritual formation of your students can and should be measured if the core distinctive that sets the Christian school apart is truly its core distinctive. When we engage in a process of assessment and evaluation of the things we consider important in the lives of our students or in the culture and climate of the school, then we have a starting point for identifying and preserving those things we do well and targeting those areas that need improvement. It has been said that we need to engage in measuring what matters.

Graybeal and Associates, LLC (www.graybeal.org), has developed and tested a process known as the Spiritual Formation Audit with the aid of leading Christian educators and researchers. The end product of this research focuses on three domains of spiritual formation; the head, the heart, and the hands. If you would like more information (cost of the service, process details, etc.) about the Spiritual Formation Audit, please contact: Philip M. Renicks, Ed.D, 219 Wisteria Dr., Franklin, TN 37064, Phone: 615.599.2059, philrenicks@graybeal.org.

Technorati Tags: Intellectual development,Worldview,Survey,Assess,Spiritual Formation

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Do You Drink Too Much Coffee?

 
Just for fun!

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Doing A Great Job on the Wrong Things?

By: Scott Mayo

I had the distinct pleasure of reading Dr. Donovan Graham’s Teaching Redemptively: Bringing Grace and Truth Into Your Classroom in manuscript form during my Master’s program at Covenant College. It was subsequently published by Purposeful Design and is now a required reading for ACSI teacher certification. By definition, then, it is getting a wide reading in Christian school circles. That being said, I am having a hard time believing that there hasn’t been a great outcry, in that I found it to be a very troubling book on several fronts. His central premise is that the Gospel, the central element of the Christian Faith, does not permeate our schools in a manner commensurate with our profession of its importance. Sadly, our Christian schools seem to rival our secular counterparts in the area of focusing on the temporal, superficial, and measurable. In fact, because we have great kids and wonderful teachers, we tend to produce even better results, albeit results measured on the same secular yardstick.

What to do then? Well, I asked Dr. Graham that very question over lunch one day in the cafeteria. His good-natured response was that the working out of his thesis was “our job” as Christian school administrators and teachers. That answer was more profound than I originally understood. The outworking of the Gospel into daily life, including school life, does not lend itself to a recipe-like approach. The seasoning of grace will produce as many flavors as it finds sinful, hurting, difficult situations. Once I began to grasp that I didn’t have to figure out how to bring grace and truth into every classroom in every school, that freed me up to start to discern how to bring the Gospel to bear on our little school with our unique set of dreams and aspirations hindered and clouded by the site specific effects of the Fall.

Initial implementation began in the conventional way; we read the book as a faculty and then discussed sections of it throughout the year during in-services. The content of those discussions varied widely, but the structure stayed very consistent. We were always finding ourselves at “Yes, but…” moments. The “yes” was in reference to the claims of the Gospel and the necessity for all our actions to be guided and covered by grace. The “but” was the pragmatic, mundane reason why we couldn’t accommodate the Gospel in a particular school situation. Instead of acting as a conjunction, we had turned the “but” into an eraser, effectively eviscerating our “yes” to the Gospel of any real meaning. It was evident that we had good intentions, a great desire to make positive changes, and a long way to go!

We are now completing our second year of school-wide attempts to move from a place where our students derive their worth from their performance and instead find it in Christ. This has involved changes in content and process. We still teach, test, discipline, perform service projects, and field athletic teams. It’s just that we are striving to have God’s grace make a difference in each of those elements of school life. Those efforts have not always been understood, especially by the parents. We’ve been accused of giving our students a license to sin (behaviorally) and fail (academically). While not claiming to be infallible in our efforts, it is noteworthy that we had never been accused of granting license before. As Paul made clear in Romans 6:1, grace will always be misunderstood by those who measure ultimate worth and merit by performance (especially outwardly visible performance). Interestingly enough, most of the consternation was not voiced by parents concerning their own students, but was centered on how our actions with other students was somehow not “fair” to their students. During those conversations, Christ’s parable of the workers in the vineyard from Matthew 20 always echoed in my mind. It’s easy to want grace for ourselves. It’s also easy to resent grace when other receive it.

We truly believe that the image of God in our students coupled with the power of God’s grace can be used to roll back the effects of the Fall in a way unattainable by behavioristic, manipulative methods, methods that often seem to produce desirable results in the short term. In the face of all the difficulties, we are still convinced of and committed to the ideas delineated in Teaching Redemptively. To continue to make this the reality at our school, several things working together are needed. First, we must model this as well as teach it. So many times schools try to plant something at the classroom level that is choked out by the overall school atmosphere. For instance, as an administrator it makes no sense for me to expect the faculty to discipline in a relational way while I treat the teachers bureaucratically. Next, we need to continue to research, instruct, and experiment. While grace-based instruction should be situational and should never be enacted mechanically from a checklist, that certainly doesn’t mean we can’t learn great things from other schools. For instance, in Dr. Gene Frost’s Learning from the Best: Growing Greatness in the Christian School, his chapter describing the approach to discipline enacted by Lutheran High School North in Macomb, Michigan was both inspiring and useful. So much of what they are attempting to do in moving from Law to Grace is transferable in essence to any school.

Finally, as leaders we must constantly paint the big picture for those on the front lines. Sometimes that takes the form of visionary speeches. At other times, we just need to take the small, teachable moments to show how a philosophy can inform practice. Recently, I began our morning meeting by reading Luke 14:12-14 aloud. This passage is where Jesus instructs those giving a feast to invite the poor, the crippled, and the blind, i.e. those who couldn’t pay them back. I then distributed an assignment. The teachers were to reread the passage. Then, to drive home the point, I required a few written paragraphs within a week reflecting on how this story applied to their classrooms. The twist was that they had to name names in the reflection. I wanted them to realize how easy it is to reward those who are rewarding but to only tolerate those who aren’t. It’s an even greater leap to love those students who are needy in an academic or behavioral sense. It’s easy to admit that in general. It can be painful to admit that when there is a face attached.

The results were wonderful. In their written responses, the teachers were very honest about how theory and practice diverge on a daily basis. When they would mention Little Johnny by name, describe how they normally reacted to him, and then record how he should be the object of their love especially because he had less to “offer” them compared to his peers, it was evident that the desire to be gracious was making a tangible difference. For closure, I read aloud excerpts of the reflections in our morning meeting the following week. That was helpful in that various teachers identified varying ways in which teaching particular students exhibited that lack of inherent reward along with heartfelt regret for not pursuing more diligently those same students in love. If nothing else, we intentionally took time to examine our practice in light of the Gospel. While no one-shot panacea, I do believe exercises like this can aid in the process of changing the culture of a school.

Technorati Tags: Worldview,Christian Education,Assessment

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THE GLOBAL SCHOOLHOUSE:Cultivating Inquiry Across the Curriculum

By David Balik: Dean of Faculty and Academic Affairs, Briarwood Christian School

The voices of religious minority groups in America are getting louder. The needs of impoverished and war-torn people in many countries are increasing, not decreasing. Also pressing in are the morals involved in conducting business globally, the ethics of medical research and eradication of disease, and the need for relevance in effective communication across cultures. Worldwide, and in our own communities, as some boundaries and walls are coming down, others are going up.

How do we prepare our students to understand and engage people, cultures, and contexts? How do we address the diverse voices of the interfaith world? What do we mean when we tell our students that Christianity is unique and true? To authentically teach and learn as Christians in today’s world, we must not fear the hard questions that lead to critical inquiry, but persistently ask them and seek answers.

With these convictions in mind, I attended Lexington Christian Academy’s “The Global Schoolhouse Conference” for its third biennial Cultivating Inquiry Across the Curriculum on April 10 & 11, 2008.

I found this forum to be immensely interesting and challenging at the same time. Like a good workout, there was an intensity in the presentations (and subsequent discussions) that stretched me in my own thinking: How do we prepare our students for the world they’ll live in?

In his key note address on Friday morning, Michael Evans (Assistant Director of Urban School Services of ACSI) spoke on “Equipping Leaders.” Evans’ fascinating and engaging lecture focused on the importance of the following statement:

Christian Schools must become more than safe havens in which children learn and relate to one another. They must become places of preparation to launch leaders into the world, prepared to advance the Kingdom of God in multiple arenas.

In other words, Evans contends that someone will be the next Oprah Winfrey 20 years from now, and someone will be the next President 40 years from now. The larger question then is: WHO will lead in the future and with WHAT agenda?

In order that our students stand a fighting chance in an ever-darkening world, Evans goes on to suggest four key areas where serious questions must be asked and answered.

1. Academic Questions:

Are we training the minds of our students (and teachers for that matter!) to think deeply, widely, openly, and with great strength? Thinking is not for wimps! My own children will complain from time to time that the teaching they are exposed to is designed to “program” them rather than to challenge their minds. (“Programmed idiots” is the actual term my eldest son will use.) How revealing! Are our students mere passive recipients of a dearth of content and information that we ask them to recite back to us, or are we engaging them in such a way that creates a Bloom-like environment of genuine analysis, careful evaluation, systematic verification, and critical thought?

When Paul wrote, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Luke 10:27) he had to have in mind growth and development that went way beyond the “mile wide and an inch deep” approach so many Christian Schools are guilty of today!

2. Biblical Questions:

As we train the mind to think deeply, widely, openly, and with great strength are we creating an environment in our schools where really hard questions can be asked? Are we cultivating spiritual inquiry in their lives that leads our students to ask: “God, what is your heart?” What is your plan for your heart to be realized in our world?”

Oh, that we as Christian school educators would emphasize more the fact that our Lord is looking for a life of faith and faithfulness not just facts and figures. What does the Lord require of us? To act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with Him. (Micah 6:8)

In his lecture entitled, “Science and Faith”, Dr. Gordon Hugenberger, (Ph.D., College of St. Paul and St. Mary and the Oxford Centre for Post-Graduate Hebrew Study) focused our attention on seven common misunderstandings which have caused unnecessary conflicts with science. A few examples are: the Bible does not require a small universe or a young earth. In addition, Hugenberger went into great detail in support of his belief that the Bible does not prohibit plant or animal death before the Fall, as well as the fact that it is likely that the 7-day framework of creation does not refer to a literal earthly week composed of seven 24-hour solar days, but refers instead to a heavenly week.

The fact that there are 9 major views of creation held by evangelicals today begs the question, “Are we truly engaging our students to consider other thoughtful (and largely respected) views as they relate to faith and learning?”

3. Cultural Questions:

As we look to instill in our students a sense of “other-centeredness”, how do we do that in such a way as to illicit authentic compassion and mercy rather than pity or an “I feel good because I did something” result. This call to consider God’s perspective on social justice and His world should cause our students to ask: What do I really know about the world around me? What are God’s concerns in the world as it relates to “the least of these?” (Matthew 25:40) What are the opportunities He created and how can I play a meaningful role in them? We must recognize and espouse a Christian world view that promotes active engagement in our culture, not isolationism. May we celebrate the diversity as well as the inter-connectedness that we share in this flat world in which we live, while at the same time encouraging and modeling for our students compassion and thoughtful action that leads to a long term, life-changing impact.

4. Leadership Questions:

Rather than majoring in “pre-wealth” like many young people heading to college these days, how can we challenge our students to understand what they will need to value once they go off to University? What will they need to be prepared to defend? Explain? Will we truly and adequately have prepared them to lead in positions of influence where Godly leadership is most needed? To do so requires a Christian education that produces intelligent young people with a moral compass who are strategic and intentional in their Kingdom activities! Tall order? You betcha! Can we do it? Of course. But it will require breaking away from the traditional, sage -on-the-stage-I-talk-you-listen-and-take-notes scenario that characterizes so many of our classrooms today.

In conclusion, I find it somewhat ironic that I left Boston last week with more questions than when I arrived! Perhaps that was the point of this intellectual exercise. However, as I continue to study and consider what it means to teach and think “Christianly”, I am incredibly thankful for the privilege of being able to be a part of the conversation as together we as Christian leaders move our schools towards greater depths of inquiry and as a result, meaningful change to the glory of God that will produce the next generation of leaders equipped and able to stand on their own ready to carry out the mission God has called them to!

Technorati Tags: Reform,Global Education,Ethics,Poverty,Community,Worldview

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