How to Teach Religion

2. To what extent do you use the topical method? Do your pupils succeed in discussing the topics with fair completeness? Do you always supplement with matter of your own, or expand the topics by asking questions when the discussion has been incomplete?

3. Stenographic reports of various recitations have shown that teachers often themselves use from two to three or four times as many words in the lesson hour as all the pupils combined. Do you believe that for young pupils this is good teaching? Have you any accurate notion of the time you yourself take? Do you talk too much?

4. Study your questioning in the recitation and determine as well as you can which of the principles of good questioning you are most successful in applying; which you are least successful in applying.

5. To what extent do you use the story as a method of instruction? How do you judge you would rank as a story-teller? To what extent have you studied the art of story-telling? Are you constantly improving? What difference have you noted in the interest of a class when a story is told and when it is read?

FOR FURTHER READING

Betts, The Recitation.

Hamilton, The Recitation.

Home, Story-Telling, Questioning and Studying.

St. John, Stories and Story-Telling.

Houghton, Telling Bible Stories.

notes

1

The point of view and in some degree the outlines of this and several following chapters have been adapted from the author's text "Class-Room Method and Management," by permission of the publishers, The Bobbs-Merrill Co., Indianapolis.

2

God the Invisible King, p. 44.