Dear colleague,
A great mini-sermon is a subversive little bit of messaging. In 30-60 seconds, the teacher communicates in an “oh, by the way” manner that learning is good for all kinds of reasons. As they do this over time, they try to paint with all the colors of the Rainbow of Why.
When we get really good at mini-sermons, they are masterpieces of subversion. They act like Trojan horses, coming through the front gates of our students' minds, and then later, as they are pondering our insanity or artfulness or creativity or nonchalantness, their meaning overtakes the city.
The classic example of a mini-sermon is Caroline Ong's in her high school Geometry class:
Though I unpack the many good things in this short mini-sermon on pp. 128-129 of The Will to Learn, what I'll point your mind to here is the brief, “Oh, by the way” nature of this mini-sermon.
Whenever I talk to my students about the “WHY DO WE HAVE TO DO THIS!?” questions their hearts (and often mouths!) are asking, I like to picture the following scenario:
- As soon as I start espousing the value of my class, of school, of the work of learning, my skeptical students begin putting up their walls. By high school, these walls go up quickly. I like to literally picture little bricks building themselves in my students' hearts, rapidly growing and becoming a fortress.
- If I'm not careful about the MINI part of mini-sermons, by the time I'm done ranting about how beautiful or good or enjoyable it is to push yourself in school, the wall will be completely built. I can give the most beautiful and compelling speech in the world to my high schoolers, but if the speech is too long, it still runs into a bunch of fully constructed walls.
- But if I'm quick, by the time I'm finished, the walls aren't completely up yet. The message comes through. And I think you can hear this a bit at the end of Caroline's mini-sermon in the video above, when the students nervously chuckle as she says, “Math is beautiful. Okay, so, we are not going to make a scale…” She delivers the message, passionately, calmly, genuinely, and then she moves right back into the lesson. The students are caught off guard. They're like, “Wait…what just happened?”
And then, we move right back into the lesson, signaling with our brevity that the work is too important for us to lose too much time to a sermon.
Do not underestimate, colleague, the power of doing lots of these over the course of a semester. Whether you see proof of its impact or not, the impact is there. Your mini-sermons are Trojan horses.
Or to use a more fitting analogy, they are seeds. Student motivation is a power within each student that can be cultivated if we plant, tend, and nurture the garden day by day.
Teaching right beside you,
DSJR
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