I spent nearly twenty years as a classroom teacher, but it was my three-year stint in middle school English where I found the largest concentration of parrots. Not actual parrots, but the type of student who only spoke when they had the correct answer. The type of student who could only give the answer if it was word-for-word what was in the book, notes, or said by others. Never was this more obvious than when I transitioned from public to private school and from elementary to middle school. The students that I encountered lacked the ability to think or write creatively. They wanted precise instructions—how many sentences to write, which page held the answer—and often responded with recall-level answers that failed to address the question. While these well-behaved students might appear successful by traditional standards, their reliance on regurgitation and low-level thinking revealed a deeper problem: they were not being trained to process and think deeply. They resembled parrots more than the budding thinkers they needed to become.
Parroting runs counter to meaningful processing—the engine of worldview formation. In other words, the less parents and educators work on students’ and children’s ability to think deeply about ideas, the less able they will be to withstand false ideas they encounter throughout their lives.
1. Ask Better Questions – Instead of asking questions whose only correct answer is a single fact, ask open-ended questions that require analysis, evaluation, and creation. The way we phrase questions to kids sends a message about the kind of thinking we expect from them. Likewise, our posture as we listen and wait for that answer does the same. As educators, it is easy to be caught up in the demands on our time, particularly when it comes to what needs to be “covered” during a class period. That’s likely why good questions, and careful listening and responding, are not often observed in classrooms.
In order for our students to become young adults with a maturing biblical
worldview, we have to break the habit and expectation of information
regurgitation. If we train our students to think by recalling and restating someone else’s thinking all the time, they will carry that into life. In the “real world,” they will more often find someone else’s thinking that contradicts a biblical worldview. Good questions invite deeper thinking—but without the skills to process those questions, many students still struggle to respond meaningfully.
2. Teach Cognitive Skills for Processing – In early childhood classrooms, you might hear a teacher ask students to “put your thinking cap on.” This common phrase signals to students that they are switching from listening to thinking. The visual imagery and cueing are effective for early learners, but what usually follows is a prompt to help them understand what should be happening while the imaginary thinking cap is on. Somewhere along the way, teachers tend to forget that thinking skills need to be explicitly taught to students. At every age and in every class, good thinking can be taught. Some of those cognitive skills are:
- Active listening
- Summarizing
- Monitoring one’s own understanding
- Reading with annotation
- Retelling
- Memorizing (Used well, memorization serves thinking— it doesn’t replace it. It supplies students with the raw material needed for deeper reasoning, which includes Scripture memorization and defending the faith.)
In order for our students to become young adults with a maturing biblical worldview, they need a repertoire of cognitive skills to engage with the ideas and ideologies of the culture, without losing their faith in the process. As Christian educators, we should make it a high priority at all levels and in all subjects to build the capacity to think well. Thinking skills shape how students process ideas internally, but conversation is where those ideas are expressed, examined, and formed in community.
3. Practice Meaningful Conversations – When it comes to the role of conversation in biblical worldview formation, research confirms what we anecdotally know. Conversations are the primary way that young adults will process their experiences and make meaning of them. This should give us tremendous pause. After all, you only need to observe people sitting at tables in a restaurant or watch guests on news outlets to understand that the conversation model has changed dramatically in the last few decades. Educators can no longer assume that good conversations are being modeled around the dinner table. Instead, the model on display runs counter to that. Students see distracted listening, one-sided conversations, short clips of information, and unsupported claims that are promoted and pushed as truth.
In order for our students to become young adults with a maturing biblical worldview, they need practice in meaningful conversations. Practice is more than unstructured group work or turning and talking to a neighbor. Practice involves teaching and practicing discourse skills that form a conversation model that will serve students well in life. In early childhood, this means building the ability to:
- Take turns
- Ask clarifying questions
- Paraphrase what was said
As students get older, the work continues in those foundational skills, but progresses to include more complex skills for meaningful conversation, such as the ability to:
- Work with evidence to support claims
- Respond to counterarguments
- Distinguish fact from opinion
- Build on others’ ideas
- Express their ideas in love
Biblical worldview formation does not happen solely through information transfer. It happens through sustained engagement with ideas, habits of thought, and practices that shape how students see, interpret, and engage with the world. If our goal is to help produce students who will faithfully follow Christ amid a culture of competing narratives, we must move beyond encouraging good parrots and commit to forming good thinkers. These shifts are not easy in classrooms constrained by pacing guides, testing demands, and limited time—but they are necessary if formation, not mere coverage, is the goal. It requires patience, intentionality, and time, but it is precisely this kind of formation that prepares young people for a lifetime of fruitful development of a biblical worldview.
By Dr. Maggie Pope