Teaching Tactics

How can we incorporate religious material culture into the classroom? How can we teach students the skills to analyze material objects? In this session, I demonstrate the value of incorporating material objects into the classroom by modeling an active learning activity for analyzing religious children’s toys. I further show how this activity can be adapted for any collection of material objects. 

Compassionate listening and empathy are powerful and transformative to receive, particularly in times of struggle, but is all too uncommon to experience. Fortunately, the skills of attuning to another with warm curiosity can be learned. In my graduate spiritual caregiving seminars, I first teach "Empathy Guesses," a highly structured exercise that builds feelings and needs vocabulary while also engendering in students unexpected feelings of gratitude for being seen and heard by peers, and confidence in their capacity to be of benefit to others. Habits of social communication and internal monologues also arise that do no serve connection when another needs one's presence; they can be recognized and set aside. Students discover that the intention and effort to understand another matters more than getting it "right". This is a teaching tactic that develops spiritual and professional formation for the aspiring chaplain, minister, educator, or religious leader. 

Research shows that student attention spans keep lessening; yet, we still need students to read and interpret texts. Inspired by a technique made famous by early Christian monks, but borrowed from Judaism, lectio divina—with is incumbent four levels of meaning—helps students slow down and spend time reading. For this “teaching tactic,” we think with the four levels of literal, meditative, responsive and contemplative. This tactic provides ancient tools for modern critical thinking. 

In recent decades, memory athletes have performed wild feats of mental acumen, memorizing decks of cards in minutes and repeating endless series of digits. Their success lies in using modifications of the ancient memory palace system. These techniques can be learned by anyone with an average working memory. Unfortunately, they have also had little impact on classroom pedagogy, since most of them are adapted to vast series of abstract data and not to meaningful, interrelated pieces of information. Moreover, these techniques are generally ill-suited to memorizing verbatim text or language learning. However, an exception lies with Biblical Hebrew, a language with a triconsonantal root system and a type of vocabulary perfectly suited to use the person-action-object memory palace technique. This paper will explore the current efforts and powerful pedagogical possibilities of applying an ancient technique to this ancient language and creating innovative approaches to the study of Biblical Hebrew. 

This Teaching Tactics lightning presentation offers three classroom-tested tactics for teaching in a space where many students, especially nonreligious students, use the course as a catalyst for their own spiritual formation, often because they lack other supportive contexts. The tactics are designed to support student meaning-making while maintaining academic norms and ensuring equitable participation for students who are and are not engaging in formation. First, methodological agnosticism establishes a shared classroom covenant: the course evaluates interpretation, evidence, concepts, and methods without affirming or denying students’ truth-claims. Second, the theory of co-production reframes “religion” and “nonreligion” as relationally produced categories, turning personal testimony into analyzable data without requiring disclosure or belief. Third, an A + (B or C) assignment architecture requires a common academic foundation (Part A) and offers two equally valued pathways: Option B (additional analysis) or Option C (grounded reflection). Together these tactics operationalize rigorous, ethically defensible pedagogy for formation-adjacent classrooms.