Teachable moments tend to present themselves at unexpected times, materializing in surprising ways, opening a door or a window into a serendipitous opportunity to learn something vital, new, and significant. They are a happenstance that cannot—should not—be overlooked or dismissed.
Teachable moments can also be created, planned for, or carefully designed. These curated adventures are—much like the happenstance—filled with potential and rich with discovery.
Teachers know both; they plan for one, and are prepared for the other.
At Winebrenner, our instructors busy themselves each week prior to a class session, and in the weeks between trimesters, preparing lessons, organizing materials, reading deeply, mapping out avenues of thought, anticipating questions, researching likely answers, and generally pioneering the intended class session. They ready themselves for those teachable moments that pop up like a surprise party and threaten to derail all the plans in place and replace them with something, likely, more important.
Winebrenner is blessed to have six full-time faculty who are committed to teaching excellence. Our full-time faculty all possess multiple degrees and have a terminal degree (the highest degree available) for their area of expertise. They know about crafting courses that are rich with content, and they also prepare for the unexpected and the unforeseen.
Winebrenner also has as many as 50 adjunct instructors: part-time faculty members, who teach many of our elective courses, filling in where they can to assist the full-time faculty with their busy teaching schedules. All of Winebrenner’s adjuncts possess advanced degrees or terminal degrees that demonstrate their commitment to knowledge and to the art and science of imparting that knowledge to a group or to the individual.
Our professors are not out-of-touch intellectuals who sit all day in ivory towers with steepled fingers engaging in esoteric thought or omphaloskepsis. Not at all. Our professors are the kinds of people you want to invite to your game night, who know about sports, cooking, home-improvement, gardening, and much more. They are the ones you want to talk to, to ask questions, and to have on your team. These teachers of excellence engage us in lively discussions in class sessions, in person, and over the phone, and joyfully roll up their sleeves and jump in with both feet when the topics are deep or the conversations decidedly exciting.
They are always working to become better at being teachers of excellence: planning for the best classroom teachable moments they can design, yet eagerly anticipating the happenstance teachable moments that are sure to come.
These teachable moments—and these teachers of excellence—are certainly present in our graduate-level courses online, on-campus, or in many other locations where teachable moments might occur. For example, consider the class sessions of Winebrenner’s Institute of Christian Studies (ICS). The ICS was created years ago to meet the needs of the non-degree-seeking adult learners in many different environments found locally and around our country and the world. The Institute for Christian Studies takes place in settings as varied as congregational class-settings, Regional leadership development, training for ministry licensing and ordination,
international missions, with incarcerated adults, and more. ICS students can be found rubbing shoulders with Winebrenner’s master’s-level students in class break-out groups and after-class study groups.
The ICS environment brings an entirely different “feel” to a classroom, and therefore new and exciting teachable moments one might not expect to encounter.
· Right now, adjunct instructors are returning from teaching two courses to Kenyan pastors. One course, “Technology in the Church,” brought an introductory course on computers, projection, sound reinforcement, and more to men and women anxious to bring their ministry to life in a setting where some of these technologies are considered “ground-breaking.” Imagine the teachable moments that popped up there in the Kenyan classroom.
· In a few weeks, a group of student inmates at a local maximum-security prison will learn about “Apologetics”—how to defend their faith while building bridges with those who do not believe as they do—in the constrained context of, for many of them, life in prison. Teachable moments will abound.
· Churches in Pennsylvania and New York state have brought their learners together to discover not only the Gospels—which is the course they are taking together—but also how to personally plan and implement a way to teach other adult learners in their congregations about how to understand and live out the Good News. They are learners—learning to be teachers—with a teacher in love with learning. Teachable moments will present themselves and the learners must be ready to engage with them.
· Three regional conferences of congregations and congregational leaders have joined together to learn about Christian Worship and special services. In the Fall these learners will turn their attention to the great doctrines of the Bible. Recently, two Ohio church congregations have invited their friends and leaders from other congregations to study together about the Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Our teachers of excellence are finding unique techniques to step into these teachable moments.
Varied course content, varied learners, from varied backgrounds and varied places have all come together to learn and grow a little deeper in their faith understanding and their faith practice, and the Winebrenner instructors have been working diligently to bring their teaching excellence to bear.
Teaching excellence occurs when the adult learner is deeply motivated to learn. Teaching excellence requires teachers who are more than content or subject matter experts, but who create a contagious environment in which adult learners want to engage. Teaching excellence can be seen in an instructor who studies adults and learning and finds new and better ways to help adult learners engage with the content in meaningful ways—ways that change the very lives of the adult learners. Teaching excellence takes place because instructors commit to life-long learning and to communicating that love for learning in ways that pull in the adult learners in their wake.
Winebrenner uses student-learning outcomes (we call them “SLOs”) to define the learning environment and what we plan to have happen. That’s one of the ways in which we design teachable moments. Winebrenner instructors are selected and deployed because they also enjoy the give-and-take, the serendipitous, the unanticipated. Those are the happenstance teachable moments that makes learning so much fun.
Teaching excellence in both the ICS classroom and the Winebrenner master’s-level and doctoral-level learning environments rise and fall on our instructors’ commitment to andragogy, or “adult-leading,” in which we work to find the best techniques and the most creative methodologies to most fully connect adult learners with vital course content.
Teaching excellence in Winebrenner is not for the sake of the teaching, but for the sake of the adult learner who wants to grow, develop, and learn. Adult learners are our clientele, life-changing faith understanding, and life-enriching faith practice are the products we offer—teaching excellence occurs when the Spirit leads us to most effectively make those connections.
- Dr. Martin Johnson, Chief Academic Officer