The team members of the Office of Vocation & Ministry at Hellenic College Holy Cross have written a series of articles over the past few years on various aspects of the practices and experiences of youth and young adult ministry. Below you will find these articles. We pray they will serve you and your community well in your journey serving Christ!
Dr. Ann Bezzerides
The Value of Great Questions: We have found that lessons for high school youth and young adults are best framed around real questions—questions that are truly worth exploring. Real questions provoke students to think for they resonate with their own concerns or hidden questions. They can’t be answered by “yes” or “no”. They provoke real discussion, investigation, and dependence on theologians for depth of knowledge, wisdom, and insight. For example, these are some of the questions that anchor one unit of CrossRoad Classroom:
Great, real questions serve as an introduction to dig into some amazing Orthodox theology.
Writing: It’s tempting to shy away from having students write anything in a religious education setting because we don’t want them to feel too much like they’re in “school.” However, we have found there are many reasons to have students write in a class/group that outweigh this concern. Here are our top two:
If you’d like more ideas for how to use writing as a tool for learning at CrossRoad, email Dr. Ann Bezzerides.
Discussion Time: The goal of discussion time is for students to process the material/content they’ve been presented, digest it, and begin to make it their own. Often, hearing peers talk out how they’re learning or questioning the material can be a huge teaching element as well. The question is: how do we make group discussion really work where everyone feels comfortable speaking and asking questions both of their teacher and of their peers? This can be especially hard in Church groups where attendance will fluctuate from session to session, so you may build a great rapport with one group one week, and then the next week are missing two involved students and have three other students who were absent the prior week. If the discussion time is painful to sit through, then no one is going to learn from it and they’d be better off just reading the whole time! We have two almost-too-easy solutions to help with this situation:
It can take too long to comment after every student’s response; so don’t let it become a situation where you as teacher have a back-and-forth with each student. Instead, we find it useful to be listening carefully to each student, and try to find common themes or threads among their answers, and then make a statement at the end that shows you’ve been listening and what you’ve learned from their responses. Exceptions to this will be when someone says something really troubling or confusing—then you should probe and ask for clarification. If a student clearly says something that needs further addressing, affirm them, “thank you for sharing that,” and ask if you can talk about it after class. For any one-on-one conversations with students, be well aware of Youth Protection guidelines.
Group Size: For discussion groups, we think 6-8 students is the perfect number; much beyond ten students, and it becomes impossible to have the kind of discussion we mentioned above, where everyone is given a chance to speak. If you do have a large group, here are two options:
Dr. Ann Bezzerides
Dr. Ann Bezzerides
Fr. Nicholas Belcher
Mary Long
Dn. Michael Tishel
Dr. Ann Bezzerides
Mary Long
Dr. Ann Bezzerides
Dr. Ann Bezzerides
Dr. Ann Bezzerides
