The modern teaching methods of Christian Curricula
The Christian education differs significantly from a common academic education. That goes without saying. It is easy to stuff a student with factual information and basic knowledge; it is considerably more difficult to turn a student into a religious person using a lot of additional approaches of convincing, illustrative, spiritual, rhetorical and communicative character. Besides, it is necessary to keep in mind that the key element of the successful Christian education is the figure of the teacher, who is supposed to be a deeply religious person who found God in his or her soul and made a firm choice to follow the Saint Commandments and to lead the others in their quest for God.
What modern teaching methods of Christian Curricula belong to the most effective?
The systematic educational approach. The teacher should follow the more or less standard paradigm of education while setting the clear educational objectives and achieving them through diligent reading, memorizing, training and discussing all texts taken from Bible and other religious sources. The program should go from simple to more complex material in all stages of work. After that, the student's knowledge should be evaluated and estimated in a proper way. The well-thought evaluation structure gives the key to the steady perfection of religious training through the development of better educational systems. As a result of it, the student's comprehension could be improved, sharpened and augmented. Such approach is clear and logical. Besides, any system is good. They say that if you want to get the spiritual force of one day, you should practice some prayer for one day. If you would like to get the spiritual force of one year, you should practice this prayer for the whole year. The same relates any other activity.
The Individual approach emphasizes the inner curiosity of any student in their restless search of God. The curriculum of education could be very democratic and individually shaped regarding their backgrounds, abilities, styles of learning and behavior. The teacher is supposed to be very flexible and to promote the religious searches of his or her students in those spheres and material where they prefer to do it. Every student could get a special program developed, streamlined and checked periodically by their spiritual instructor. Within the frames of this approach, the Christian teacher should socialize a lot with every student in his or her group. Like a spiritual tutor, he or she should be familiar with all their ideas, doubts and inspirations. Students could be different, among them there could be taciturn and sociable, funny and serious, smart and not very much.
In spite of it, all of them are to be treated in an equal way. All of them are to be in the focus of the teachers' attention. All of them are to be supported in their individual spiritual searches. The Social reconstruction approach with numerous question and answer session is a controversial and at the same time quite an effective method of religious teaching. On the one hand, it demonstrates an open-heartedness of a teacher, as well as his or her high erudition. On the other hand, it prepares the students for the real life with big and small problems, life challenges and thorny questions. If the students are given the opportunity to raise any questions and to get comprehensive answers to them, it increases the level of trust between a teacher and his or her student's group.
Besides, such approach sharpens their rhetorical skills and resilience. Surely, these three approaches or methods of Christian teaching are not comprehensive. Nevertheless, I think that they belong to the most effective ones. And I am not alone, a number of other educators have the same opinion.