Facilitator: Mark Oestriecher

Hello, seminar attendees!  Here’s the scoop on this open-sourced seminar:  my hope is that all of us will leave this 90-minutes with an actual teaching/small group/interactive series of middle school curriculum.  I’m thinking something in the realm of 3 – 6 sessions (though, if we have a good amount of people who are highly involved, we might be able to make it longer – hey, maybe we should shoot for 4 session per NYWC city, which would give us a 12-week series at the end, and I could send the whole batch out to everyone who participated.  What do you think?).  Since it’s open-source, I need your collaboration now, on the basic plan; and then I’ll need it again as we approach the convention, to pull together potential ideas for the teaching series.

If you’re going to attend this seminar, I really want your collaborative input.  If you’re not going to attend this seminar, feel free to watch the process, but please allow the collaboration (and input) to be for those who will be attending.

Let’s start with this – I’ll spend 30-ish minutes doing a bit of an overview of curriculum development and learning theory; something like this:

Overview of curriculum development

1.    understanding your audience

2.    how middle schoolers hear you, what they understand and don’t understand

3.    choosing topics (I’ll want various people to speak into this one)

4.    choosing a point

5.    thinking through an outline (like: hook, book, look, took)

A bit of learning theory

1.    understanding the cycle of learning (recall, value, speculation, trying, doing)

2.    formal, non-formal, and null curriculum

Then, we’ll divide up into groups and put together some outlines.  We’ll do this in groups, then come back as a whole and walk through each session, tweaking, prodding, plussing, ideating, editing.

based on my experience of this seminar at the Sacramento NYWC, we're

 going to work to collaboratively create one curriculum session on the theme "God's love for you."  i'll divide us into groups, and have us come up with stuff along these lines:

here's what we came up with, peeps (sorry i'm late on posting this):

topic:  God's love for us

the 1 point:  a biblical understanding of love is that love is sacrificial

scripture:  hosea/gomer

implications:

- god goes to great lengths to love us

- we don't deserve god's love

- god's love doesn't make any sense

opening/hook:  costumes of hosea and gomer (a goofy fashion show)

talking points:

- understanding the word 'sacrifice'

- god loves you enough for BIG sacrifice

- and relentless pursuit

illustrations:  talk about what MS committed relational context (friends, family, siblings)

movement:  skit w/ sharing a cookie, but the receiver takes the whole thing

media?:  a clip from "pay it foreword"

questions:

- have you every really been hurt by someone?  what did that feel like?

- what would it take for you to forgive that person?

- have you every really hurt somebody else?  how does it feel to be forgiven?

- why is it harder to forgive someone a second time for the same thing?

- what does it cos you to forgive somewhen when they hurt you?

- what did it cost god?