“If you want to build a ship, don’t herd people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work but rather, teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery in The Little Prince

This quotation reminds us that the ultimate appeal of our education must be to our students’ hearts, or “kardia,” as Jamie Smith reminds us. Here is how I articulate this focus for our Christian schools:

Don’t you think if students’ desire to get out to sea is strong enough, they will learn what it takes to build a boat?

Doing work for an authentic audience both inspires and engages students!  As I reflect on recent learning stories from my own classroom, connecting with an authentic audience (using the top three tiers of the hierarchy of audience) brings a buzz to the classroom: the quality of our work matters, the reason behind our work is important, and student motivation multiplies!  Not only are the students more invested and empowered, but I, as a teacher, am also more invigorated as I design formational learning experiences.

Within the TfT framework, we talk about the idea of “story” a lot–and there are really good reasons why! Brain science shows us again and again how powerfully our brains were designed by God to interact with stories. Not only do we enjoy stories for fun, but it turns out that we learn best through stories as well.

The studies in the graphic above were very compelling to me as they illustrate just how much more information we can retain when the learning is presented as part of a story rather than statistics or facts alone. This knowledge inspires and challenges me to continue the work of weaving learning into God’s story, and reminds me how truly dynamic the invitation is to “See the Story. Live the Story.” 

This weekend I had a delightful conversation with my neighbor about some of the changes happening in our neighborhood. In that conversation, I was reminded how reflecting on that change through my neighbor’s eyes deepened my understanding of its impact on us all. Reflection . . . the beautiful opportunity to consider deeply from so many perspectives and angles the ways in which we are connected to Kingdom work. It is through the intentional use of reflection practices before, during, and after learning that we invite our students to critically assess and understand how they are seeing God’s story unfolding, how they are part of the Story, and how they can enter more fully into that Story. This truth is why, in TfT schools, we recognize that whereas reflection practices take important learning time, they are essential practices because we desire meaningful, deep, transformative student learning.