CDM Archive

Discipleship Ministries of the PCA

Dennis

Books of the Future

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Editor’s note: This month’s Equip Tip will break from the series on Learning Styles so it fits better with the book theme.

Nighttime will many times find my wife and me lying in bed reading. Cindy will alternate between novels, WIC books, and studies, plus other interesting works. I, on the other hand, enjoy curling up with a good systematic theology or a dictionary of some kind (no snide comment please!). There was one night recently when there was a real struggle. It was a thousand page hardback book that sat heavy on my chest. Harder still was the difficulty of holding it steady while trying to underline some sentences and highlighting others. I lay there wishing there was a better way.

Click here to read entire publication in PDF (Acrobat Reader required)

Thoughts kept running through my mind of how nice it would be to have the ability to make a thousand page book much thinner and lighter and more user friendly. The next day I found the same problem simply resting the book on my lap while sitting in my favorite chair. What is a reading man to do? What might the future bring to help with this problem?

In the distant future I see a “book” that will allow me to underline with straight lines that later doesn’t hinder my reading because the line blotted out the words. There will also be the ability to highlight entire paragraphs and be able to use as many different colors as desired, using each color to represent whatever I want it to emphasize. This new book will allow me to add my own notes, not only in the margins, but between lines that I can separate. It will also allow me to erase all my mistakes without putting holes in the page. Perhaps the best thing about this book of the future is that it will come with its own lighting, so I am not dependent on the kind of lighting in the room, nor the time of day. It will not even be affected by the sun if I choose to read while at the beach.

Oh, how i long for that future!
Needless to say, the future is here, but most of us are just too stubborn to take the future out for a test drive.
One of these future “books” is put out by Amazon – it is called the Kindle. It is small and very light. It holds hundreds of books without extra weight. It comes with what is called electronic paper and ink, making it readable in any light without the light glaring back at you (like a computer does) making you too tired to read. You can change the size of the font, and mark it up in more ways than I have yet to discover. However, I don’t recommend the Kindle only for the reason once you buy it you are a slave to buying everything from Amazon, and the price for me is still not justifiable.

There are other devises already out there, but again the price is not appealing – yet! I have pleaded with a number of Christian publishers to ban together to approach a company like Dell to get them to come up with a devise that will do all I want it to – and more. If they have done this, they have kept it a secret from me.

Having said all that, I still await the day when I can curl up with a thousand page book that will not crush my chest while lying in bed. I am almost 60 and willing to change to a new devise. Let’s face it, all of us will have to give up some of our future books. Why not grasp the future and learn to enjoy it? Until then I will enjoy my thousand page book at night – but it will be on my Kindle!

TrueU: Does God Exist?

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If you have already shown the Truth Project to the people in your church you know what a great service Dale Tackett (PCA elder from Village seven) has done for us with this worldview series.

Dale, who works for Focus on the Family, now has a follow-up series that is aimed at high school and college age specifically. If you go to the website (www.trueu.org) there are helpful promos of the series.

There is a second series coming next spring. This series is on helping prepare young folk for the onslaughts of college by helping them defend themselves in the area of the existence of God. The second series will be Is the Bible Reliable?

Click here to read entire publication in PDF (Acrobat Reader required)

This first series is brilliantly taught by Dr. Stephen Meyer, who is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute near seattle. He has spent 20 years researching cosmology, biology and metaphysics in order to be able to explain the existence of a creator God. He is a Ph.D. from Cambridge and an expert on the subject of Intelligent Design.

The website has a downloadable 40 minute presentation which serves as an introduction showing why you need to use this series with your teenagers. It is also well worth showing to the entire church. The series will be available in November.

The Christian Life Profile Assessment Tool: Discovering the Quality of Your Relationship with God and Others in 30 Key Areas

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If you read the report issued by Willow Creek Church a couple of years ago you know how a lot of people feel about their lack of spiritual growth. In fact, let me ask you a question: over this last year how much have you grown spiritually? This is not a minor question. I have been looking for a long time for a tool to use to help me, and the church overall, to be able to start measuring spiritual growth.

Too many times we think we are measuring spiritual growth, but we are only measuring one component – academic knowledge of the Bible. There is another area that is just as important – your personal life and growth, as well as your relational life and growth, such as with your mate and others in the church and the world.

Frazee has done a great job with this tool to help us do the measuring and planning for future growth. In the first part of the tool we assess ourselves in 10 competencies in three categories: beliefs, practices, and virtues. These answers assess how fully you have developed a Christlike profile. But you don’t stop there.

The Christian Life Profile is most effective when used in the context of biblical community, such as a small group where the members of the group provide support, encouragement, accountability, and prayer for each other, as you, individually and corporately, seek to grow in Christ’s likeness. The assessment tool even strongly suggests you allow three other people who know you well and care
about you to answer a set of questions about you to help you to develop a fuller assessment. I see this as one of the most beneficial aspects of this tool.

The last step is identifying two or maybe three areas where you want to concentrate your growth over this next year, and making a plan that is workable and attainable. To do this you need not only a mentor or small group, but most of all prayer that the Holy spirit will be the one to actually bring about the change

How We Teach and How They Learn, Part 3

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Part 1 of this article introduced the subject of learning styles and described the four basic ways we process new information. Part 2 described the way we perceive new information, concrete or abstract, and the different ways we order that new information, sequential or random. Part 3 will explain the three basic ways we take in new information.

Simply understood, learning modalities are the sensory channels through which we give, receive, or store information. These include visual learners who prefer to take in information by seeing it. Auditory learners must hear the information, and tactile/kinesthetic (T/K) learners need to feel and touch in order to understand.

In any given group of learners, 25-30% will be strongly visual, 25-30% strongly auditory, 15% T/K, and 25-30% mixed. However, young children are almost all T/K, with many changing to visual by school age. Some will again change later to auditory. Keep this in mind depending on what age you teach. Girls more commonly learn by hearing; and boys have a higher tendency to learn through movement, which might explain why boys tend to drop out of Sunday school more often than girls. But, it must also be said that if a student is very interested in a subject, desire will often override their modality or learning deficiency. These same preferences are evident in adult learners. Personally, I am equal in my auditory and visual ability, with almost no T/K.

Auditory Learners: It is commonly understood that people remember only 10% of what they hear once. (Pastors take note.) This percentage is higher for auditory learners, depending on how long they have to listen. Historically it was said that the average adult can pay close attention for a maximum of 20 minutes. Unfortunately, today that time has dropped to 12 minutes. (Are you still listening pastors?) Attention span is improved by using other aids like printed notes, overheads, PowerPoint, etc. These learners learn best in group settings where they can listen and enter into the discussion. If you have ever observed a person moving his lips while reading, it is because he has to hear the words in order to understand them.

Visual Learners: The more visual images given to these learners the more they will remember.

“Albert Einstein was a visual learner. He had a marked disability with auditory learning and the use of language. Yet he had an extraordinary ability to construct complex card houses, use building blocks, and manipulate geometrical diagrams. These skills suggest that he had a specialized mental ability for visual-spatial (space) perception, visual reasoning, and visual memory. If he were evaluated in the traditional way, he would be labeled learning disabled.”[1]

Making great use of visual aids will even help poor readers. In fact, after 55 studies, students always did better on tests when visuals were given.[2]

Click here to read entire publication in PDF (Acrobat Reader required)

Tactile/Kinesthetic: These are the students who suffer the most in a class setting or while trying to listen to a sermon. Tactile means that the student needs to physically touch something to understand it; kinesthetic students need to be physically moving in some way in order to stay with the information being shared. I had a student who used to sit in the back of the class and knit. She never looked up or participated in the discussion, but she did very well on the test. She told me that unless her hands were in motion she could not listen.

There is more and more information becoming available on the internet on learning styles and modalities, and I would encourage you to become as learned as possible about the subject if you want to become a better teacher or preacher. I would also again refer you to Marlene LeFever’s book, Learning Styles, for more help.

On our website, I will post a modality test for you to take here. It is free and will help you understand what are your strengths and weaknesses. This should help you understand how to better work with your students, or even your children, who have a preference different from yours. Do all you can to move out of your comfort zone and use methods that will reach all the learners God has entrusted to your care.

If you are interested in having someone come to your church and do a seminar on learning styles and modalities, see our website, www.pcacep.org, under training/regional trainers.

[1]Marlene LeFever, Learning Styles (Colorado Springs: D.C. Cook, 1995), p.103.

[2]Ibid.

Job: Lessons in Comfort

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Over the years I have read and taught many Bible studies, but never have I come across a study as well written and thought out as Job: Lessons in Comfort. In fact, this is the best study in general that I have ever come across. Job is a long book that on the surface seems to have only one major theme, suffering. Yet, as Frankie shows us, there is so much more.

I found the manuscript for this work sitting on Jane Patete’s desk, CEP’s women’s Ministries Coordinator. I asked if I could look it over since I knew Frankie and went to seminary with her husband, Chris. Frankie asked CEP to consider publishing the study, and it is my pleasure to announce that Frankie has allowed us to be the exclusive publisher of this work.

Frankie approaches the book of Job from the angle of comfort in suffering. All thirteen lessons constantly point us not to Job or his situation but to our covenant-keeping God who has perfect, loving control of every aspect of our lives, even when it seems He is clueless to our needs.

One more thing. I not only read through this study, I had the pleasure of teaching this work to the women in the PCA office building each Tuesday. Every week there seemed to be a very special quote that we would find and share together. Each person in the group would also share their times of suffering. It was a special time watching these women minister to each other through each lesson.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. If you cannot find a group to go through this with, then use it for your personal study. If you haven’t gone through serious suffering you probably will, or at least someone will to whom you can minister. This study will give you help to either go through suffering personally or walk alongside someone who is suffering.

How We Teach and How They Learn, Part 2

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In order to understand how to teach, learn, or even preach effectively, we must understand how people process information. This is the subject of learning styles. Most teaching and preaching are done according to one’s own learning style. By doing this we miss reaching those who do not learn the same way we do. Did you ever wonder why you were drawn by certain teachers and preachers and not others? It was because they communicated by the same learning style you have.

There are four basic elements to learning that need to be understood. The first two elements deal with perception; the way we take in new information. This is done in either a concrete or abstract way. Concrete learners perceive things by what their senses take in; and if they are heavily concrete, they see little more than what their senses take in. The opposite is true for the abstract learner. This type of learner takes in new information and conceives new ideas from the concrete. For example, I have two sons. The first sees only what is in front of him; he does not understand jokes or puns. When he drives, he sees the sign that says the speed limit is 35; and he will drive 35 mph, no more, no less. The other son sees the same sign and perceives this to mean 35 is the suggested limit. He has the tickets to prove it.

The next part of the process shows how we order new information. Do we put things in sequential order or random order? Most of us know that when we study history we do so from beginning to the present, and we work accordingly. We also know that what happens in history depends on what went before. This is how the sequential learner lines things up. The random learner sees not the sequence as important but the event itself. To this learner, the order is not important, just the event – in any order.

The individual elements are the easiest to understand. Now we put these together and get their combinations. If you get a learner who is abstract random, sometimes called an Imaginative Learner, you get someone who is prone to be very people-oriented, idealistic, learns by talking things through (teachers love that!), dislikes lectures and working alone, and works better in a colorful environment.

Click here to read entire publication in PDF (Acrobat Reader required)

The concrete sequential (analytics) is a detailed person who loves facts. (Just give me a new dictionary and I’m happy.) It doesn’t mean they want to do anything with the facts; they just love to collect them, such as Cliff Claven from Cheers. These are the great debaters who will use these facts to prove you wrong. This is the ONLY category that learns well by lecture! (Preachers take note.) They also love competition and working alone.

Abstract sequentials are common sense people who like to take the facts gathered by the analytics and figure out what they can do with them to put things to work in some useful way. These too do not learn much from lectures. They are goal-oriented, well structured, resent being given answers, and excel in problem solving.

The last category is concrete random. These are the dynamic people who teachers “hate” the most because they want to run the classroom, think outside the box, and are innovators who use a lot of instinct. They demand flexibility. If you give them an assignment, they will ask if there is a way to do it other than the one you required. They might get the assignment done on time but don’t expect it. These people are natural born leaders and great visionaries, but they are not detailed people.

In Part 3, we will begin to develop each of these four learning styles and put together ways to help them learn.