Is my identity as a Christian teacher important even when teaching photosynthesis or German, rather than controversial topics like creationism and evolution?
Can the teaching process itself be Christian?
Soon, could there be a way of 'teaching Christianly' in which faith influences not only the teacher's character, the content taught, and the perspective from which it is interpreted, but also the teaching itself, including the design of teaching and learning, the selection of visual aids, the arrangement of time and space, interaction, and teaching methods?

We've done our best to integrate faith and scholarship, think through a Christian worldview, and restructure our curricula. But we've rarely addressed, either on a daily basis or academically, the formative role faith can play in the concrete practice of teaching and learning, or what it might look like if the process itself, beyond the content taught, could be Christian.
The author argues that there is a real Christian way of teaching and learning.
This book is filled with vivid examples from the author's long, deep, thoughtful, and multifaceted research into how faith can function in the classroom.
Join the author on his journey to find practical Christian wisdom that breathes life into the classroom and helps learners become whole people.

We need to move away from viewing teaching as a set of skills, something to be implemented 'by the teacher to the student'.
When we teach and design learning, we create a shared lifestyle within which students can grow, providing a temporary home for them to live in.
Pedagogy is a home where teachers and students can live together for a while, a place where students are welcomed as guests and can grow within it.
Like any family, it contains resources, patterns, and patterns of intended and unintended interactions that shape how the people within it grow and imagine the world.
--- From "Chapter 1 - The Gap in Pedagogy"

Now students begin to approach me as individuals, not as tasks or challenges.
This will change the way I teach in the future, even if I don't express it in words.
Through this process and self-introduction conversations with partners, each student becomes visible, called by name, and heard by both the instructor and other students within the first 10 minutes of class.
This is important.
Apart from the changes that occurred in my students, I also experienced subtle changes in the way I viewed my students and my inner attitude.
As I began to treat my students as people I knew, I felt less nervous about how they would evaluate my performance in class, and I was able to focus more on helping them learn rather than on expressing myself.
The simple practice of learning each student's name one by one helped create a class that conveyed consideration and respect.

--- From "Chapter 2 - A 9-minute class sequence"

As we have seen, sin is 'evaluating others by one's own standards and forming social relationships with others motivated by self-interest.'
As my discomfort with the practices in my classroom grew, the sentence I just mentioned struck me as a fair description of what I had spent years teaching my students.
Yes, that's right.
I taught students how to talk about themselves, how to buy things or receive services from French and German people, and how to complain when they did not receive fair service.
Worship is a 'reaction to self-love' and an outward movement toward others.
And it includes 'respecting others as human beings of equal value.'
We write at length in our departmental documents and present to parents about how language learning can help break down cultural barriers, but it seemed unlikely that my teaching methods or the teaching practices of our department would produce such results.
There was little in our pedagogy designed to foster empathy, respect, or spiritual growth.

--- From "Chapter 4 _ The Movement of the Soul"

But this alone is not enough.
Cole goes a step further by intentionally extending basic Christian practice into the realm of his teachings.
She describes praying for her students, sharing food with them, practicing listening to them attentively, and choosing to respond with loving commitment regardless of her own feelings when students show immaturity.
As I have tried to show throughout this book, and as Cole explains elsewhere in his essay, pursuing Christian practice in educational settings goes beyond a personal commitment to prayer and gracious response; it ultimately leads to a rethinking of how pedagogy itself is embodied and shaped.
There is no quick recipe for Christian pedagogy; it is a long process, one that must be undertaken with fear and trembling, of putting off the old and putting on the new, of finding ways to speak and act in ways that resonate with the kingdom of God, and of forming shared activities.
It comes from prayer and study, from the acquired discipline of listening to students and paying attention to what happens in class, and from the humility to be willing to hear from others that our best efforts aren't quite what we thought they would be, that they aren't producing the results we envisioned.

--- From "Chapter 10 - Pedagogy and Community"