What does it mean to understand something? Is there a difference between knowledge and understanding? How can you as a teacher help someone else gain understanding? What strategies can you use? These are big questions that have lengthy and complicated answers. This section looks at instructional strategies you can use.

You'll learn about:

• Kid focused instruction
• Strategies for acquiring knowledge (facts, ideas, details)
• Strategies for acquiring skills (rituals, patterns, habits)
• Strategies that work toward deeper understandings (finding meaning in the knowledge and skills)

Focus on Kids

When elementary teachers — professional or volunteer — are asked, "What class is this?" they usually answer with the age or grade of the children. The class belongs to the kids. Yet, it is easy to focus instructional strategies on the teacher — what to say, do, or show. But the #1 instructional skill is the ability to focus first on what the kids will do. Then think about what you might say or do.

Acquiring Knowledge

The ability to develop deeper understandings of ideas and values requires a base of knowledge. Examples of Sunday school knowledge (facts and ideas) include:

• The name of Moses' sister
• The names of the fruits of the Spirit
• The ability to describe the primary difference between books in the Old and New Testaments
• The ability to identify direct connections between stories in the Old and New Testaments

Teacher strategies that help children gain knowledge include:

• Tell a story
• Read from a variety of resources — Biblical translations or paraphrases, your Leader Guide, information given to you by your learning planner, or information from a Web site
• Draw word or picture timelines to sequence events
• Find the location of a city or lake on a map from the time of the story
• Show a model or picture
• Ask questions that have specific answers to help children retain the knowledge

Students actively receive or take in this knowledge as they:

• Observe
• Practice
• Listen
• Take notes (ask older kids to write three actions they hear as you tell a story)
• Ask and answer questions
• Participate in a variety of paper and pencil or oral puzzles and game activities. NOTE: Be sure the activity leads to learning. Being busy and learning are the same. An occasional "find-a-word" just for fun is not inherently bad; however, it doesn't help retain new knowledge.

Acquiring Skills

Developing deeper understanding also depends on learning skills that are a part of faith practices. Examples of skills learned in Sunday school include:

• Meditative practices
• Making the sign of the cross
• Prayer postures
• Ability to find your way around the Bible and worship books
• Worship practices

Teacher strategies for developing skills are like those used by a coach. They include:

• Model the desired skill
• Provide time for guided practice
• Give feedback during student attempts

Students develop skills through practice:

• Attempt the skill
• Listen to feedback
• Try again
• Reflect
• Revise

Developing Understanding

Developing deeper understandings is a more complicated process. The questions congregations hope children will be able to answer as they mature in the church are big ones.

• What does this church believe? What do my parents believe? Is this what I believe? What does this have to do with how I choose to live?
• How do I define faith community? What is my place in this community? What is my responsibility to the community or theirs to me? Who is welcome in this community? What does that mean about my responsibility to others?
• How do the worship and daily life traditions and practices contribute to continual growth in my faith?

Developing personal answers to these questions occurs over a long period of time and in a variety of settings. One of the joys of teaching children is that sometimes they get to the heart of deep understanding before we do. Adults can let concern for intellectual understandings get in the way of personal and spiritual understandings. There is so much we want kids to understand that sometimes we don't see what they already know.

Six types of understandings are outlined in Understanding by Design (Wiggins. 1998). What can help children explore each type of understanding?

• Explanation: The ability to provide knowledgeable and justifiable accounts of events, actions, and ideas. Why is that so? What explains these events? How can we prove it?
• Interpretation: Providing meaning through narratives and translations. What does this mean? Why does it matter? How does it relate to me?
• Application: The ability to use knowledge effectively in new situations and diverse contexts. How and where can I use this will knowledge, skill, or understanding?
• Perspective: Developing critical and insightful points of view. What is assumed about what I know? Is this reasonable? What are the strengths and weaknesses of this idea? What the limits? So what?
• Empathy: The ability to get inside another person's feelings and worldview. How does it seem to you? What do they see that I don't? What do I need to experience if I am to understand?
• Self-knowledge: The wisdom to know one's own ignorance and how one's patterns of thought and action inform as well as prejudice understanding. How does who I am shape my views? What are my blind spots? What am I prone to misunderstand because of prejudice, habit, or style?

Teacher strategies that help children explore and expand personal understandings include:

• Encourage children to look for and ask many questions.
• Model life-long exctiement in the learning process.
• Help kids reflect through the lens of faith-filled responses to problems or concerns in their lives, your church, local community, country, or the world. Give each child time to talk about things that have happened and what might happen in the future. The issues can be immediate (sharing), or global and ongoing (war).
• Listen without judgement as they begin to frame their own ideas.
• Ask questions that do not have one right answer and encourage them to talk with each other.

Students develop personal understanding as they:

• Interview others — in class and out.
• Attempt to explain something to someone else.
• Create visual, musical, or poetry descriptions.
• Think about the potential of what "could be."
• Participate fully in the joys and challenges of life.