Discipleship Academies: Where Teachers Get to Actually Teach

When I was in high school, I had no idea what I wanted to be, and then I took a child development class. In this class, we had the privilege of being a teacher's aide at the local elementary school. I was paired with Mrs. Nollner, the first-grade teacher. She was such a gem! She actually let me sit and work with the students, not just grade papers or make copies for her. It was in Mrs. Nollner’s first-grade classroom that I knew I wanted to be a teacher. As I ended my high school career and looked ahead to college, my advisor asked me what I wanted to do. My response was, “I want to teach children how to read.” So four years later and lots of dollars later, I had a degree that said I could do that. I went into the public school system expecting what I had experienced in Mrs. Nollner’s first-grade classroom.

My teaching career began in 2001, and I can honestly say my first year of teaching school wasn’t horrible. I learned with my students that year. Each year after that was dramatically different. The next 15 years of my teaching career were spent having my eyes completely opened to a very changing education system. The school system was turning more towards “standardizing” students. Everything in my district focused on state-standard learning skills and state testing. It was the opposite of what I learned in college and had seen in the small town classrooms I had observed in. The teaching strategies I was taught were a student-based approach, using classroom management skills as a key part of engaging students in the lessons I had prepared for them.

I had been taught that students all learn differently and relationships were key in the classroom. Now my classroom felt like we had to hurry up and teach everything before the next testing session. Each year got progressively worse, and my anxiety as a teacher grew, as the pressure to have students pass state testing became the top priority in my classroom. I was told repeatedly that if you won’t follow the standards and perform in such a way that students passed the state standardized test, the teacher after me would.

By 2018, my hope that things would change in the public school system was completely lost. I could not watch children be the last priority anymore, so I made the decision to retire.

Choosing to leave the public school system was a relief, but also extremely hard because I truly loved to teach, I loved kids, and I loved education. At this point, I had no idea there was anything else out there. I knew about private schools, but honestly, only what I had seen in movies and on TV: expensive and college preparatory schools. Not to mention, I was living in a very small town, where the public school was the heartbeat of the community. I had resigned to the fact that my teaching would be in church on Sundays and Wednesdays, and I would have to be okay with that. BUT GOD… He had a different plan!

The Lord had a friend approach me about teaching in a Christian school a few miles down the road. I will forever be grateful for this intervention and the nudge the Lord gave me not to give up on education. I started teaching in a larger Microschool in a combined classroom of 3rd and 4th graders, who joined with the 2nd graders on many lessons. This multi-age style of teaching was totally new and out of the box for me. It was also new for me to see Biblical truths woven into every subject and every lesson. I finally found the way the Lord intended school to be!

What I witnessed in my first year in Christian education opened the door for me to realize how much more education could really be and that there was a way for children to learn without being tested to death. The lie that we have all bought into is that bigger and flashier is better. I was totally bought in when I was in public school. I thought my students needed all the newest technology and teaching trends to learn. If we had more of those types of things, the system would work better, and students would pass the tests more easily. The problem with that is that technology and fancy teaching trends don’t get to the heart of the matter. The heart of the matter is that we are living in a broken world with broken people who need hope spoken over and into them constantly.

A child who is starting their day in God’s word is setting their day with hope at the foundation. A child who is starting with a test prep problem on the whiteboard that only 50% of students can solve is starting his or her day feeling hopeless. Students learning in a Discipleship Academy aren’t just hearing the Bible in the morning. They are seeing and hearing God’s word, the story of God’s people, and God’s purpose for design in every lesson. There is time in the day to reflect on bigger picture problems beyond just what is being tested on or what the state standard says a child is to learn. Students are critically thinking through history and people in history through a Biblical lens. Learning is real and concrete.

The multiage classroom allows for younger students to hear older students dig into deeper questions about the world, and yet fosters the fact that the younger students are still soaking up the foundational skills. There is nothing better than watching an older student teach a younger student. The familial relationships that form inside a one-room schoolhouse/multiage classroom are incredible. This type of learning helps students take ownership of their education. Teachers actually get to teach. After teaching in a Microschool, I finally felt like I was doing what I always thought school would be like, those many years before, when I said, “I just want to teach kids to read.”