Day by Day with Gina

Sunday woes

So my husband and I attended this very interesting session on Sunday School improvement. We were hoping this would be a chance to allow our opinions to be heard and to offer some much-needed suggestions for our church. We were asked to come to the church from 3-6 on a Sunday afternoon.
Why, you might ask, would we need such a long time frame? I asked the same question. Even though I knew what we would be doing, which was a relatively complex evaluation process on implications of different statements, I thought we would surely be done early.
And we would have been, had it not been facilitated (and I use that term loosely) by an expert (again, use that term loosely) on this process.
Being a teacher, I am constantly learning new ways to activate my 12-year old audience and keep them hooked for periods of time. While this makes me better at my job, it also causes me to be critical of those who perhaps don't have such training. Keep that in mind, and forgive me if I sound harsh. But shouldn't people who are facilitating and training large groups be able to do so efficiently?
Anyway. Maybe that was too much to ask. This very nice and God-loving individual spent the first hour giving us instructions. Now, I am no genius, but that is just too long to spend giving directions to a bunch of mature, intelligent adults. He gave us roughly thirty minutes to do what he had spent an hour explaining. That doesn't seem to make sense to me, but oh well. We did it anyway, and did it pretty well under the circumstances, I must say. Then, he asked us to go back and evaluate what we did from a different perspective. Sounds easy, right? Well, it could have been clear if you were explaining it well (any teacher knows this). Unfortunately, we didn't have a good teacher facilitating us. So he spend the next 30 minutes giving us instructions we didn't need, not answering the questions we needed answered, and then gave us, you guessed it, 15 minutes to complete the assignment. When we had trouble (due to his lack of good direction) he stopped the group and gave us a guilt trip about not being able to see things from the right perspective. Our problem? I don't think so.
In short, I felt his purpose in being there was 1) to hear himself talk and preach and 2) to promote his strategy. The problem was, that was not the reason all 100 of us were in that room, and it was frustrating.
He's a nice guy who is probably really trying, but he needs some training on how to facilitate a large group instead of how to speak to a large group.
And that was my Sunday afternoon.

posted by Gina @ 7:33 PM