Educational Leadership: The Bishop as Teacher
The College for Bishops Leadership Institute was established to provide educational resources for new bishops as well as trending informational resources for all bishops. Educational Leadership: The Bishop as Teacher focuses on specific resources related to teaching:
New items are added monthly. To comment or suggest new topics or resources, please use the feedback form at the bottom of this page.
Effective Teaching Practices
Bringing Calling Back to Life: A Conversation with Dr. Kathleen Cahalan
Many Christians confuse calling with discovering one secret "right" path in life. According to Dr. Kathleen Cahalan, Saint John’s University School of Theology, this individualistic view of vocation is often harmful. Instead, she advocates for returning to a more communal understanding of Christian calling where people see their callings first to be communities of faith. This podcast episode is from the Collegeville Institute's Communities of Calling Initiative and explores practicing vocation as a dynamic verb rather than a static noun.
Recently Hired Faculty Step into (Virtual) Classrooms
In this recent article from Crossings, new faculty members at Church Divinity School of the Pacific offer reflections on this year’s classroom experiences, exploring such topics as building relational formation for a healthy ministry foundation, preaching with confidence, and attending in love to crisis management and racial justice.
A Problem with Vocation
One of the best ways we can help students discern their callings is to enable them to see that they may really be called to be healers rather than, say, pediatric oncologists. Church-related colleges and universities have been pretty good at encouraging students to try out a lot of things to study and experience. But they have done less well at helping students navigate the theological and conceptual confusions that inhibit their ability to discern, as many of them would put it, “what God has called me to do.”
Language to Get Us Through Covid-19
Since the pandemic began over a year ago, religious leaders have sought ways to support the larger community while providing for the needs of the members of their congregations. This essay references the Collegeville Institute’s Communities of Calling Initiative (CCI), which invites partner congregations to design new projects or enhance existing ministries to help Christians discover and deepen their sense of God’s calling in their lives.
Listening Sessions: Fourteen Colleagues on Leadership and the Future of the Church
How has our thinking about leadership formation changed during this past year and what gives us hope about the future of the Church? Crossings at Church Divinity School of the Pacific recently explored these formation questions with bishops from across the United States. Excerpts are featured here as well as information about podcasts of the full interviews.
Distracted Minds: Your Classroom Can Be a Retreat in Dark Times
Flow states--that optimal experience of sustained interest and attention--are a vital part of a thriving and happy life, but this past year has been filled with distractions that create anxiety and tension. Teachers have an incredible gift to offer students: the opportunity to come together and learn something meaningful. Support and sustain your students’ attention and you contribute not only to their learning but their well-being too.
A Christian Life of Faith: Signs and Thresholds Along the Way
Just over a year ago, a group of lay formation leaders in the Episcopal Church led a three-day gathering that focused on what it means to be a lay professional in the Church and how such leaders are supported along the journey of faith. A Life of Faithful Living: Signs and Thresholds along The Way is the result and it is being made freely available with hopes that this document will assist in developing programs / pathways for individuals and groups seeking to go deeper in their faith from a formation perspective.
The 10 Most Significant Education Studies of 2020
This year, as the pandemic disrupted life across the entire globe, teachers scrambled to transform their physical classrooms into virtual—or even hybrid—ones, and researchers slowly began to collect insights into what works, and what doesn’t, in online learning environments around the world. Edutopia highlights ten of the most significant studies.
Guide to Changing Faith Formation for a Changed World
We have all been witnesses to a world that has been dramatically changed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. We are growing in the realization that the impact of the pandemic will not be a short term experience. Re-opening our buildings for Sunday worship and gathering people in medium or large groups remain challenging and/or not possible. How might our faith formation plans adapt to this new reality?
Forming Faith through Playlists
At this time when many are not yet able to gather in person for faith formation, playlists are a great way to equip and empower individuals and families to continue their faith growth at home in ways that are not overwhelming or add “one more thing” to life. Here is a brief overview with a list of excellent examples.
3 Brain-Based Strategies that Encourage Deeper Thinking
With uncertainty hovering over fall plans, teaching and learning continue to look different than ever before. While administrators juggle with tough choices, almost every teacher is back to reading, reflecting, and restructuring their lesson plans to keep their learners engaged and learning—and as equitable as possible given the constraints. This post from Edutopia examines three strategies, informed by the learning sciences, that teachers can use online or face-to-face to deepen student learning: retrieval practice, elaboration, and concept mapping.
Map Your Learning: A Step by Step Guide to Concept Mapping
Concept mapping is the process of organizing your understanding of concepts and the relationships between concepts into a structured diagram. At minimum a map contains two concepts connected by a directional arrow labeled to describe the relationship between the two concepts. Here is a concise guide to using this process in the classroom.
A Side Effect of the Covid-19 Pandemic? Reading Got a Lot Harder
Lots of people, it seems, are struggling to stay focused on the written word. (Are you still here? Good!) College instructors have expressed an inability to read at the breadth and depth that they’re used to. Personal productivity has plummeted. And that’s fine, they’ve decided.Their recent struggles, they say, have made them more empathetic to the ways their students are struggling, too.
teaching through a pandemic: a mindset for this moment
Over 500 teachers joined two Facebook conversations about teaching during the coronavirus pandemic. Even the most optimistic educators agreed that a shift in mindset would be required as we move ahead. There are plenty of strategies and tactics for distance learning and online teaching but here are the crucial emotional and psychological scaffolds that our audience agreed would be needed to teach in this new paradigm.
why you should ignore all that coronavirus-inspired productivity pressure
Many dedicated teachers are fighting valiantly for a sense of normalcy. They hope to buckle down for a short stint until things get back to normal. Behind this scramble for productivity is a perilous assumption. The answer to the question everyone is asking — "When will this be over?" — is simple and obvious, yet terribly hard to accept. The answer is never.
want mastery? Let students find their own way
To understand anything, learners must wrestle with a concept. As so many teachers know, what sometimes passes for true learning—say, the recitation of facts on a standardized test—is only a shallow impersonation of the real thing. Confusion—the struggle to reconcile contradictory ideas—compels the learner not only to further investigate notions but to acquire additional information in the process.
How to Get Started with Culturally Responsive Teaching
The world of education is buzzing with talk of being more culturally responsive, but what does that mean, and how important is it really? Culturally responsive teaching (CRT) attempts to bridge the gap between teacher and student by helping the teacher understand the cultural nuances that may cause a relationship to break down—which ultimately causes student achievement to break down as well.
How to Make Your Teaching More Engaging
Certainly some teachers are naturally compelling and intuitively spark a zest for learning in students. Most of us have to work at it. You can energize your classroom by using principles available to any faculty member willing to investigate and apply them.