In preparing your lessons you must determine what you want your audience to know, feel and do as a result of your lesson. Try some of the following methods before and after teaching to find out what the audience learned.
- Observe their behavior and listen to their talk.
- Ask them questions and allow them to answer.
- Show pictures and have the students tell the story.
- Have the students arrange charts with names, events or books of the Bible in chronological order.
- Play games like those found at (http://doinggood.org/Games/intro_to_games.htm).
- Use “Bee” Format quizzes where the students stand in a line. If a student answers correctly, he or she remains standing. If not, they sit down. The last one standing is the winner. This can be played with teams if you use two lines.
- Audience Response – a multiple-choice question is shown with five choices. Students answer by raising the number of fingers correlating with the choice number.
- Give written tests. The main purpose of tests is to determine the effectiveness of the instruction. True-false questions are probably the easiest to create but a student who knows practically nothing can score 50% or better. Completion questions require the student to write the correct answer in a blank. Guessing is reduced because the choices are infinite. In multiple-choice questions, the student is usually given a choice of five answers. In matching quizzes, the questions are listed in a column on the left side with a blank in front of the question to put the letter of the answer. The possible answers (choices) are listed alphabetically in the right column with a letter in front of each choice. To reduce guessing have more choices than questions and allow choices to be used more than once or not at all. The last choice can be none of the above. Essay tests allow for the expression of thoughts and attitudes, which cannot be done with more objective tests.
Don’t just assume your class learned the lesson you were presenting – find out by testing.
Arlo and Jane Moehlenpah taught Teacher Training at several Bible Colleges and many seminars. Contact them at Moehlenpah@aol.com or 619-852-4979 to order their book Teaching with Variety, which has more details on this topic or invite them to do a seminar.