Asking Big Questions in SRE

Asking these Big Questions in your SRE class will allow your students to learn the most important points of the lesson

As you prepare for your lessons this year, ask this one question: Who does this person think Jesus is?

When I was in high school, I was the kind of student who drove teachers crazy. I wasn’t naughty (passing notes to the boys notwithstanding), and I wasn’t disrespectful, although I could be a bit casual in the way I related to my teachers, nicknaming Mrs Gordon “Gordo” for instance. 

No, the really annoying thing I did was that no matter what the subject was (science, maths, geography – but never English, because that was my favourite) I would almost always ask this question:

What’s the point of learning this?

Maybe that’s why, as an SRE teacher, I’m passionate about making it clear to my students what the point of every lesson is!

As I prepare to teach B-Cycle this year, teaching through the gospel of Luke, I’m going to ask this one question every lesson: 

Who does this person think Jesus is?

So, in lesson 1, which looks at the Angel’s message to Mary in Luke 1, I’m going to ask my students:

“Who does the angel think Jesus is?”.

In lesson 2, which looks at the ministry of John the Baptist from Luke 3, I’m going to ask my students:

“Who does John the Baptist think Jesus is?”

In lesson 3, which looks at Jesus’ rejection in Nazareth from Luke 4, I’m going to ask my students:

“Who do the crowds in Nazareth think Jesus is?”

Introducing a “Big Question” like this at the beginning of the lesson, and answering it at the end of the lesson is a teaching strategy called Visible Learning. Educational researcher John Hattie aggregated thousands of articles about best teaching practice and found that making clear learning outcomes is one of the most powerful strategies teachers can use to increase the effectiveness of their teaching.

In our situation, the learning outcome is: “We are going to answer this Big Question” by the end of the lesson.

The benefits of using the Big Question strategy in SRE are numerous and include:

1.       It gives you a framework for your lesson preparation

Having one big question that you want the students to be able to answer at the end of the lesson helps you tailor your learning activities to suit.

For example, if I’m using the question from lesson 1: “Who does the Angel think Jesus is?”, I will be writing my lesson plan to help me draw out the words and phrases that will help the students answer this. I may also decide to find an exercise where they call out the different titles for Jesus in the passage.

All of these tweaks to the lesson are based on my teaching goal, which is: to help the students answer the big question for the week.

2.       It gives you a clear “launch” and “landing” for your lesson

I will talk more about “launching” and “landing” the lesson in my next article. But for now, if you introduce the Big Question at the beginning of the lesson, it will launch the students into the lesson content with purpose: they know where they are going. If you answer the Big Question at the end of the lesson, it will help them see the destination they’ve arrived at and what they’ve learned as a result of the lesson.

3.       It helps make learning “sticky”

Big Questions are also really helpful in reviewing past lessons. It almost ends up working like a mini-catechism which you can return to throughout the semester.

At the beginning of week 2, for instance, I will ask: “Who can remember the Big Question from last week”? Or, if that’s too tricky, I will ask, “Last week we asked ‘Who did the Angel think Jesus is?’. Can anyone remember one of the names of Jesus they said?”.

It’s amazing how asking one simple key question like this helps unlock last week’s content so much more effectively than an open question like “Who can remember what we learned last week?” 

4.       It links all the lessons for the semester together as one cohesive unit of learning

Using the same format for the Big Question each week is deliberate because it points students to the fact that over the whole semester, we are thinking about who people think Jesus is. By the end of the semester, they will see lots of different opinions about Jesus from Luke’s Gospel and build a complete picture themselves of who they think Jesus is.

Using Big Questions is one small change you can make in your lessons which with have a huge impact on the effectiveness of your teaching. Why not give it a go?

Below is a list of Big Questions I will be using as we look at B1 this term – feel free to use them yourself.

• Lesson 1: “Who does the angel think Jesus is?”.

• Lesson 2: “Who does John the Baptist think Jesus is?”

• Lesson 3: “Who do the crowds in Nazareth think Jesus is?”

• Lesson 4: “Who do the disciples think Jesus is?”

• Lesson 5: “Who do the Pharisees think Jesus is?”

• Lesson 6: “Who do the disciples think Jesus is?”

• Lesson 7: “Who does Jairus think Jesus is?”

• Lesson 8: “Who does Peter think Jesus is?”

• Lesson 9: “Who does Judas and the Pharisees think Jesus is?”

• Lesson 10: “Who do you think Jesus is?”