Page 6 - AV Presentations - Student Textbook

So, you step up the process. You demonstrate how to build a cabinet.
The entire class watches you cut out the parts and assemble it. You
demonstrate how to make the doors and how to attach them to the
frames. When you are done, you still will not have a student who
really knows how to build a cabinet. The students may have a little
better idea, but most of them would fail at building a cabinet on their
own.

Your best approach is for you to make them cut out the pieces of the cabinet, stopping along the way,
giving them instruction and showing them how, but letting them put a cabinet together on their own. If
you do it that way, guess what? At the end of the class, the students will know how to build a cabinet.

Did you know that when the effective teacher has completed the class, the students should know how
to do what was taught? In fact, that is the real test of an effective (great) teacher. If students can DO
what you have taught them to DO, then you have taught. Otherwise, as the teacher, you have just
exercised your mouth.

Now let’s apply this information to preaching a sermon or teaching a lesson. In presenting a sermon or
lesson, most pastors or teachers stand up in front of the audience in front of a pulpit. They read the
Bible and perhaps talk for about 45 minutes so the audience just HEARS what the pastor shares. So
basically, they lecture. We will shortly learn about attention spans of an audience. But for a sneak
preview, most people can concentrate on a sermon for about 25 minutes. After that, their mind begins
to wander. That’s just the way God made us. It’s then no surprise that few people can remember the
subject of last week’s sermon let along any of its points and why so many Christians can sit in church for
years and know so little about God’s Word.

But, you say, that’s what preachers do. They get up and talk for 45 minutes and that’s what we have
been doing for zillions of years! It’s funny when we keep doing the same thing over and over again
event though it is the least effective way to pass information on to our audience!

Years ago my pastor wanted to preach a sermon on Joseph, Mary’s husband. It was to be a Christmas
sermon. I challenged my pastor to be creative and try something different rather than presenting a
sermon. The next Sunday the pastor came out dressed like Joseph with a full beard. His entire sermon
was a dramatization of what Joseph must have thought or felt when Mary got pregnant and through the
entire birth process. The audience was mesmerized. I can, to this day (about 45 years later) remember
almost every point of the sermon. It was amazing!

So a great teacher or preacher works very hard at involving his students in the passage at hand, bringing
them to the point of doing something about what they are learning. Interaction is the key to retention
and audio-visual presentations added to your sermon or lecture add a great deal toward student
retention!

3. Connection

“A great teacher has to connect new information to information that

the student already knows.”

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