God’s Word provides Bible teachers with much help regarding the teaching-learning process. We’ll look at one passage, Deuteronomy 6:1-9, where we can learn some foundational truths about the process, the topic of this post.
To be covered in other posts:
- The Role of the Teacher in the Teaching-Learning Process
- Methodology in the Teaching-Learning Process
Foundations Laid in Deuteronomy 6 about the Teaching-Learning Process
From these verses we must glean that parents have the primary responsibility for nurturing or teaching about God in a child’s life. The verses specifically addressed parents of the children of Israel, parents who had first-hand knowledge of God’s working to deliver them from Egypt, the wilderness adventure, and the crossing into the Promised Land. While the opportunities aren’t as many and as natural for Bible teachers, the principles, or lessons, we can learn about the teaching-learning process from these verse certainly apply to them as well.
1) What is the teaching-learning process?
If you read through Deuteronomy 6:1-9 you find people being taken from knowledge about God to application. We teach what God says and what He expects (“the commands, decrees and laws the LORD your God directed me to teach”) but with the purpose of people coming to not only know about God but also to know Him, to “fear the LORD your God” which means being in awe of Him. That then leads to “keeping all his decrees and commands” not merely knowing what God’s Word says.
The teaching-learning process, then, would be all that’s involved in taking people from a head knowledge about God and His Word to heart knowledge that leads to trusting and obeying Him.
2) What’s at the root of the teaching-learning process?
At the core of the process isn’t a plan or procedure but a Person — “the LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deut. 6:4) and a personal relationship with that Person — “Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” (Deut. 6:5). Everything centers around and points to the one, supreme God.
He is the Person who promised that they should “be careful to obey so that it may go well with you and that you may increase greatly in a land flowing with milk and honey” (Deut. 6:3-4). When we help students see how this Person, the LORD our God, has purpose for them applying His truth, beyond mere duty, that He has their best interests at heart, they should want to not only know about Him but truly know Him and follow Him.
3) Where does the teaching-learning process begin?
The teaching-learning process starts long before class begins, in the heart of the teacher. — “These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts.” (Deut. 6:6) If these realities haven’t taken root in the teacher’s own heart, it will be difficult to authentically transmit this foundation into students’ lives. It’s hard to take people beyond where we are, beyond what we ourselves possess.