Tag: assessment

Transform and grow your RE program, questions

Below are the questions asked by participants in the workshop “Transform and Grow Your RE Program,” a workshop I led at the Pacific Central District annual meeting on April 28, 2012. (First post in this series.)

Questions about tracking attendance

(1) Under “policy governance,” should religious education [RE] attendance numbers be shared with the Board? (every month?) — the congregation? — or just the executive team?

I don’t think it matters whether you’re using “policy governance” or any other kind of governance, I believe we should share attendance figures as widely as possible. In my congregation, I report RE attendance every month to the Board, key staffers, the RE committee, and the Committee on Ministry. Attendance figures for the year always go in the annual report, which goes to all congregational members. I also sometimes report attendance to parents/guardians and volunteers.

One key strategy for transforming a congregational system is building in as many positive feedback loops as possible. Positive feedback loops are those ways that people learn how things are going, and that they receive good feelings when things are going well (negative feedback loops are destructive communications like malicious gossip, triangulation, scolding, meanness, etc.). So as a general principle, I say we should be building lots of positive feedback loops all the time, especially with crucial metrics as attendance figures.

(2) Can we see a sample of the spreadsheet you use to track enrollment and average attendance?

Here’s a PDF of our Excel attendance spreadsheet for April, 2012, at the UU Church of Palo Alto: REAttendSample.xls

Unfortunately, I cannot share the spreadsheet we use to track enrollment, as it contains the names and birthdates of legal minors. Continue reading “Transform and grow your RE program, questions”

Teaching teachers to teach

Joe introduced me to Learner.org, a Web site with online resources for professional development for schoolteachers, as well as classroom resources. Joe particularly mentioned the online videos that are designed to help schoolteachers become better teachers. So I watched a video of a fourth grade teacher leading a small group literature discussion. The small group setting was somewhat akin to a Sunday school class: plenty of personalized interaction between the teacher and the students, and teacher-guided interaction between the students. The general subject area, responding to literature, is also akin to Sunday school classes: discussing a work of literature, and talking about what’s going on in the work. The video shows an experienced teacher, Rich Thompson, actually teaching children, and the video also includes Thompson reflecting on how he teaches.

I found I learned a lot from watching this experienced teacher. I learned a lot just from watching his body language with the children, e.g., as the two boys drift away, Thompson puts his hands on the backs of their chairs to keep them included. I also liked the tone of voice he used: he was warm and calm, open and friendly; you can tell he likes the children he’s working with. I noticed the way he expressed his own thoughts and ideas about the book they were discussing, so he could model how an experienced reader engages with a text (“Did you notice that the book was War and Peace? Do you know how big that book is? That’s the book she used to hit the bear with”). And I really liked the way he did formative assessment at the end of the lesson, talking briefly with each child about what they did well, and where they could improve.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have resources like this for volunteer Sunday school teachers? Unfortunately, producing a series of twenty-minutes videos like this would be expensive, and liberal religious institutions don’t have the resources to do something of this caliber (and I feel that producing a poor video would be worse than no video at all). But given how hard it is to deliver training to volunteer teachers, it is something to think about.

Reasons for decline

In yesterday’s post, I talked about the numerical decline of Unitarian Universalism, and asked why we are declining. Readers left thoughtful and interesting comments giving their ideas of why we’re declining. In tomorrow’s post, In Thursday’s post, I’ll suggest some ways we might reverse our numerical decline. Now are some of my thoughts about why the numbers of certified members of Unitarian Universalist congregations are declining:

(1) During the Great Recession, congregations have been facing budget shortfalls, and one obvious way to cut costs is to reduce the number of certified members. Congregations pay dues to the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) and to their local district for each certified member; fewer members means less dues to pay.

(2) UUA salary guidelines are pegged to congregation size, so a congregation that is hiring a new staffer may have motivation to have fewer certified members in order to drop down to a lower salary range in the guidelines.

(3) People who come from no previous religious background may see no benefit in becoming members of a congregation, or may not understand membership.

(4) Membership is declining because there are fewer people in our congregations — more on this in this next set of comments.

Now, here are my thoughts on why Sunday morning attendance is declining:

(1) The target audience for most Unitarian Universalist congregations is upper middle class white people living in wealthy suburbs. This is a declining group. Whites are headed towards being a minority group in U.S. society. And younger white people are returning to live in cities, and often can’t afford to live in wealthy suburbs.

(2) Patterns of religious participation are changing. Instead of participating in a traditional congregation, people in the U.S. may be doing something else. They may choose to attend occasional weekend workshops in spirituality; or may choose to adopt a home-based “do-it-yourself” approach to spirituality; or may be experimenting with alternative religious communities such as intentional communities, the so-called “new monasticism,” etc.; or may choose to participate in two or more religious communities simultaneously (possibly with a lower level of commitment in each); or may be experimenting with the various forms of online religion; etc.

(3) Many Unitarian Universalist congregations have become de facto ethnic churches — white upper middle class enclaves. Such ethnic churches are increasingly unattractive to younger people who are accustomed to living and working in multiracial, multicultural environments.

(4) Sunday is no longer a day when no one has anything to do (except for real estate agents). Many people work on Sundays; children have sports and extra curricular commitments on Sundays; adults have sports and extra curricular commitments on Sundays; etc. On top of that, people these days are used to 24/7 shopping online, gyms that are open until late, etc. — we are a society that wants to be able to do what we want, when we want. This is one reason why voting by mail has increasing so quickly. yet most of our congregations offer only one service on Sunday mornings.

(5) Services in many Unitarian Universalist congregations do not have particularly high production values. Opera singers are having to learn how to act — no more planting yourself center stage and singing as loud as you can — so that opera can survive in competition with TV, online videos, video games, etc. Just so, those who lead Sunday services need to incorporate stagecraft, visual excitement, etc., into their skills — it’s no longer enough to plant a preacher behind a pulpit.

(6)Many Unitarian Universalist congregations have lessened their commitment to providing programming for families with children — more on this in this next set of comments.

And here are my thoughts on why religious education enrollment is declining:

(1) Professional religious educators are a dying breed. The economic situations of most congregation has led to cuts in religious education staffing. Positions calling for a minister of religious education are being downgraded to director of religious education, or associate or assistant minister. Full-time positions are disappearing, and part-time positions are losing hours. Sabbatical leave for religious educators is almost unheard of. As a result, religious education as a profession is not attracting many high quality candidates; many religious educators are part-timers who take the job because it’s convenient, not because they are actually inspired to do religious education as a career. Furthermore, the number of career religious educators (trained professionals who plan to make this their career) is dwindling; in the past, career religious educators helped support the untrained, part-time and temporary religious educators.

(2) UUA and district support for religious education is down. Many districts have replaced district religious education consultants with district program consultants. Staff and funding for the religious education department of the UUA has been cut.

(3) The UUA religious education department is inward-focussed and seemingly unaware of wider developments in the fields of religious education, and education more broadly. The UUA’s religious education department has insisted in recasting itself as the “Lifespan Faith Development” department; but religious education is a well-recognized field with an international professional organization, scholars doing relevant research, and many practitioners in other liberal denominations and faiths; whereas “faith development” is a field restricted to a few developmental psychologists following in the footsteps of James Fowler. Two examples of the inward focus of the UUA when it comes to religious education: while the rest of the U.S. prioritizes assessment within education, the UUA still focusses on curriculum; and while the broader educational world grapples with all the new insights from cognitive science, UUA materials show little or no influence of cognitive science insights.

(4) Current congregational leadership is often drawn from empty nesters and retired people, some of whom don’t want to spend money on kids. In more than one congregation, I’ve actually heard older people advocate that their congergation be a sort of “over-55 community.” Even one or two people like this can be enough to scare away families with children.

(5) The religious education programs of too many congregation are woefully out of date. Our best curriculum guides are from twenty or more years ago — and in any case, today’s families are accustomed to educational programs that are driven by assessment, not by curriculum. Youth groups still mostly operate using a model that became popular about 1970. Sunday school facilities are typically outdated, and often have a lot of deferred maintenance.