Classroom Oikos: Information, Imitation, Innovation: Teaching

   In teaching, there is a strategy we use to model new ideas to students called "I do, we do, you do". This follows the information, imitation, innovation discipleship triangle. It is not only important to go through these steps for your own discipleship but also to help those you are discipling through these stages as well.

"I do"

       When I am teaching a new concept to students, I need to not only show them how I work through the concept but I have to share with them my thought process as well. When we want to introduce a new idea to those we are discipling, we have to show them how it looks in our lives and be open with our thought processes. 

"We do"

       After I have showed students how to do something, then it's their turn to practice. They practice in a safe environment where I can help them if they get stuck. It also helps me to see their thought processes so I can clear up misconceptions. When we are discipling, we have to let those we are leading practice what we teach. We need to be there while they practice so we can help them if and when they stumble. 

"You do"

       Once the students have seen me do something then had some practice with me there to help them, they are ready to work on their own. In discipleship, our goal is to make disciples that make disciples. At some point, we have to be ready to let them go and make disciples on their own. 

       If you aren't discipling people yet, what's stopping you? If you are, what stage are your disciples in? Do they need you to show them a living example of what you want them to know? Do they need guided practice? Or is it time to let them go?  Comment below!

Classroom Oikos: Information, Imitation, Innovation: Becoming a Teacher

One of the best things about the teacher training I had was that it followed the discipleship triangle of information---> imitation---> innovation. Discipleship is kind of like apprenticeship, learning to become like someone, do what they do. This is how I became a teacher.

Discipleship Triangle

Information

In college, I was majoring in elementary education. I had professors at Valparaiso University that introduced me to guided reading, professors at Joliet Junior College who taught me the psychology of children and professors at University of Missouri- St. Louis that introduced me to teaching philosophies. Then I went to graduate school and had professors that taught me behavior management strategies, strategies for working with students with special needs and strategies for working in urban environments. I was chock-full of helpful teacher information and ready for the next stage. 

Imitation 

In my last year of graduate school, I had a practicum where I worked with small groups of gifted fifth graders on math and a small group of second graders on reading. I observed their teachers to learn how they put strategies into practice. Then I had my student teaching. I watched a second grade teacher in her room, watched her pacing, her questioning and her organization. Then I took over her class to do what she did. After that, they said I was ready for the final stage. 

Innovation

I was given my own first grade classroom starting Fall 2013. I used my knowledge of guided reading, behavior management, and working in an urban environment coupled with my experience of building student-teacher relationships, lesson pacing and organization to start teaching the group of 18 six-year-olds. I had many questions and several mentors. I was able to go to them to get information or watch them to imitate them with things I had never done until I could start doing it in a way that fit me and my classroom. 

Doing missional community requires the same three stages. Get information about missional communities, what they are, how to do them and where to start them. At this point there are two common mistakes. One is that in our information-saturated world, it is easy to stay in the "information" stage. There are many people in the education that have a lot of information about classrooms that make decisions about how classrooms should be run without any of the imitation or innovation and that cause a lot of damage for the classrooms they oversee. Information is important. However, it is impossible to make effective changes with just knowing a lot about something. 

The other mistake we tend to make is to go from information to innovation without doing any imitating. Any teacher that I know that didn't do student teaching, did not survive a year. These are intelligent, strong, loving people that did not have the proper support to succeed. No one showed them how to do it. With that said, find someone who is doing missional communities and follow them. We do coaching huddles, partake in a learning community and are a part of TOM to network with other people "doing the stuff". Set yourself up for success. 

Once you've read about and followed people doing missional communities, then you're ready to innovate. Find new ways to integrate yourself into the community you are reaching out to. Take the things you learned from the people you read and people you followed and make them work in your context. 

So where do you find yourself? Do you need information? What topic can we help you find information on? Do you need people to imitate? What is your goal and how can we help you connect to people doing that? Do you need to innovate? Tell us your thoughts below. 

Classroom Oikos: Introduction

I have decided to start a new series I'm calling "Classroom Oikos". It will be on lessons I've learned as a classroom teacher about living as a family on mission. This series will take any series that Jarred comes up with, monthly updates from our Oikos and guest writers' series, all of which are in the works. 

As a note of privacy, students names will be changed as will any coworkers that have asked me to keep their names private.

The classroom is not a perfect example of Oikos for a few reasons:

1. The students are assigned to me as opposed to me finding people of peace. This means they might not want to be a part of the family but they don't really have a choice. 

2. Although we do have a mission of sorts (different depending on who you ask), there isn't an "out" component as far as trying to bring outsiders in.

3. There is no multiplicative element to a classroom that you would want in an Oikos. 

Despite those differences, the classroom is a GREAT example of Oikos for a few reasons:

1. Discipleship is the number one focus within the classroom, building both character and competency in every area of life

2. The student-teacher relationship is very similar to the spiritual children-spiritual parent relationship that is seen in Oikos.  

3. We are in the classroom over 30 hours a week which gives us the life on life component that Oikos strives for. 

I hope you enjoy the stories and more than that, I hope you can gain some insight into the workings of missional communities. 

This is the school where all the magic happens. 

October 2015

       Unfortunately, the Cubs were out of the running for the World Series very quickly into October. That allowed us to stay focused on family, church planting and investing in some key people. 

Most of the energy of the month went to my new fourth grade class. Because of the staple rhythms we had in place, we were able to help a friend in crisis, prepare a sermon, cast vision for our family, do the Residency + intensive, and continue to build covenant with new people despite the class being one of the highest priorities. 

October ended up being a time of God really continuing to build into us.  We realize that as pioneers within our context, we are going to be looked at and to by people wanting to learn more about and/or do missional lifestyles. Since we are not doing it great yet by any stretch of the imagination, our strength will be in transparency and relationship. God is continuing to bring avenues for us to build relationships that are also making us more visible. 

Our missional community is getting ready to move into a new season in which we will be raising up new leaders. With Katy and Jarred foreseeing a lot of energy going towards the bakery in the coming months we are looking for the next group of people the we can start a huddle with to bring up leaders that can continue breaking ground in the community.

Katy and Jon handing out candy to the neighbors. We over doubled the amount of kids we handed out candy to from last year (up from 10 to 25). We are counting it as a measure of growth!

Robert decided that Hope Vineyard would take part in a Learning Community. We have realized that this is still the best way to get connected with the 3DM movement. Because of the current nature of the LCs, I personally won't be able to go to the immersions.  Jarred will be able to go. Besides the people in Robert's huddle, there are two more people going, one out of personal interest and another to observe. 

As we look to getting into the swing of the holiday season that is upcoming, we are excited for a few things. First, we will be completing the first quarter of Residency + which is exciting because the next quarters will be more hands on as far as church planting goes. Second, we will be doing some covenant time with the people in our family that we will start huddling in the next season. Finally, we are looking forward to our annual time of retreat that happens in this season. 

This is the final post that we will have about our story for the foreseeable future. Our purpose in writing this blog was first and foremost transparency. We also wanted to share with people who wanted to start doing missional communities how our start looked. We still have a wealth of knowledge/access to knowledge about starting missional communities so we would like to offer the upcoming season of the blog up to those of you that are desiring to start missional living in your own lives. So tell us, how can we be supportive? What questions do you have? What information do you need? What strategies can we help you with? We will be looking to have guests writers and the more direction we get from you our readers, the more applicable it can be! Thanks for your input!

Love, 

The Irby's

September 2015

        September brought less rhythms than we had anticipated. We realized we might be in a longer period of rest than we had thought. The rhythms that have stuck so far have been really great. 

We have continued to do family dinners every other Sunday. The attendance at the dinners has been much like it was a year ago at this time; we have a few regulars and many people coming through for a visit. 

There were three "Irby family" rhythms that we tried to keep up. In order of least successful to most successful:

1. We made dinners for the week on Saturday. Jarred and I kept up with that and one time we had an apartment full of people join us. It was tons of fun and everyone who came was super grateful for the meals. We will still try inviting people in October. 

2. Our "Fear the Walking Dead" nights were pretty regularly attended but not by the same people. With the end of the season approaching, we will decide if it is a rhythm to keep up for "The Walking Dead". 

3. Every morning Jarred and I eat breakfast together. We realized that we eat breakfast at around the same time Courtney gets off work. Since she's near by, we invited her to come over when she gets off and eat with us. It has been a great time of connecting and fellowshipping.

Full freezer after a Saturday of cooking with friends. 

       We had another 3DM pilgrimage.  The day before was a TOM dinner. It was awesome to connect with people of the TOM family and break bread with them. Several people we had met before and many we had met through covenant huddles or Facebook so it was nice to finally see them face to face. The 3DM pilgrimage was almost an extension of that. There were about 50 people, many of whom were in TOM and the covenant relationship was definitely forefront. 

Our Residency+ class started. We got off to a slow sort which caused us to do a little cramming. The dynamics of the group are not what we would have expected. Jarred and I are the only two that are church planting and Jarred is the only male. We are excited to see what God will be teaching us through this process. 

In the later part of the month, my class assignment got changed from first grade to forth grade.  It did not start right away because my principal was trying to prevent the change from needing to happen.  The assignment starts the first Monday of October. 

As we look forward to October, the new group of kids is only the tip of the iceberg for what we are excited about. We are hoping to begin forming the team we want to launch our church plant with.   We are exited to continue in the Residency. And we are hoping to watch the Cubbies win the World Series.

August 2015

        This is the first blog I write in "real time" pervious to now, it has been a summary of where we've been with a pretty good idea of what had happened next. If the tone changes at all, that's why. 

Jarred and I weren't quite ready to start our rhythms after our brief break in July so we decided to wait until September to start figuring them out. By the end of the month, we knew we wanted to be spending more time with the Goldsteins as we transitioned to them being the spiritual parents of our MC. We also knew we wanted to see Courtney more because she had continually showed herself as a person of peace to us and we wanted to invest in her because of that. 

Most of our rhythms were getting established around food.  In order to see Courtney more, we decided we would start inviting her to our morning breakfasts on the morning she would be getting off of work. We had also been trying to make our meals for the week on Saturday so we are going to invite people to join us to get some cooking done and hang out time in. 

We officially got the building for the deli/bakery in August so although there are no firm plans for how to get a consistent rhythm with working on that, it is very exciting and something we are looking forward to figuring out. That will be a major contributor to spending intentional time with the Goldsteins. We know we have to be careful to get covenant time in too so it's not all work, work, work.

Katy and Jon in front of the bakery. 

Katy and Jon decided to start family dinners in August so our MC got back into the rhythm of dinners once every other week. At our first dinner we met together with the core people to talk about what our mission-vision might be. It was decided that we would focus on the LGBT community because that seemed to be who we were attracting. 

Our second dinner we opened it up to invite people we had met at the block party. We had 6 new neighbors show up. All the people that showed up were church going people. They were excited about what we were doing and started becoming consistent (so far). 

Through the new people we met at family dinners, Jarred and I found another thing to start inviting people into. We got cable which meant access to AMC which meant "Fear the Walking Dead" and "The Walking Dead". There is not a shortage of people who don't have cable but want to be current with those shows so we obliged. Each episode we have had more people come over than the last. It has been a blast. 

As we look forward into September we are excited about a few things. First, there is a pilgrimage coming up of 3DM and TOM members and we can't wait to see some friends and family again. Secondly, Jarred and I signed up for the Vineyard's Residency+ to prepare for church planting. Finally, we are eager to start getting into some rhythms. 

July 2015

       July was the big block party.  We were all very excited because we knew at the very least we were going to have fun.  I borrowed my godchildren for the weekend ages 4, 3 and 2 since none of us had kids so we needed a kid element to get the families out.

It was a great success!  We had over 60 people come out that were not part of our family.  The washers tournament was the biggest pull that brought everyone together confirming that we do in fact live in the south.  

        Everyone was so grateful that someone had put this together.  There were neighbors that had lived in the neighborhood 20, 30, 40+ years who said it had been about a decade since they had had a block party but that they had done them every year for a very long time before that.  The newer neighbors were glad at the opportunity to meet other people in the area.

After the party was all said and done we realized we really did more work than was necessary.  Very little of the planned activities actually happened in the time that we planned them.  Kids pretty much just played with everything the whole time.  Water was a big hit.  We made WAY too much food because most people brought out their own food.  Even our music became obsolete when the neighbors brought out their karaoke.

Block party!

As had become our rhythm, after a major event, we did some resting.  We took the month off in July from organized time which meant no huddles and no family dinners.  We officially stepped out of Robert’s huddle because we needed to focus energy on our family as opposed to transitioning the church.  Not only did we want to rest and prune back to make space and conserve energy for the fruit that would come, but we also were all going to be on various vacations for the month of July.  Also, with the bakery on the table, we wanted to take a step back and pray into what the next season would look like since it was potentially much different than what we had been doing up until now.

One of the “vacations” that Jarred and I went on was the Vineyard Global Gathering.  There was so much from that week that God did in our hearts, confirming we were to plant a church, the blessing of our family and connecting with other TOM members (only one of whom was at the Vineyard conference.  The other three were just in the area so we visited them).

Robert signed up for a side meeting about missional communities.  He had three extra tickets so he asked those of us in his huddle to come having one representative from each household.  It ended up being me, Robyn and my mom.  At this meeting, we realized that the Vineyard did not officially have anything to say about missional communities so we were at the “Damn Historic Meeting” that started the conversation.  Of the 20+ people that were there, 3.5 of us were doing missional communities.  Robyn and I were two of them, mom was the .5.  When we got back from the meeting and I talked with Jarred about it, we realized that we had accidentally fallen into the forefront of the MC movement with the Vineyard.  That was the genesis of this blog.