Your Hidden Curriculum

What do people learn from you about the Christian life? Sometimes it's what you never intended to teach.

John Ortberg | posted 4/09/2009

A newsletter from the editors of Leadership Journal
Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Hi, friend:

An elder statesman once told me: "If you try to imitate someone who's really good at something, you'll probably imitate the wrong thing." His example: students of a powerful New York preacher tended to preach with their pulpit robes open, just as their mentor did. But an open pulpit robe was certainly not what made that urban preacher's sermons so powerful. The students were imitating the wrong thing.

John Ortberg points out that all of us who lead, whether teachers or preachers or leaders of any sort, have both a formal curriculum (what we intend to communicate) and a hidden curriculum (what we don't realize we're communicating). Sometimes our hidden curriculum reinforces our formal curriculum, but other times it undermines what we intend to get across. You'll recognize more of the larger picture in Ortberg's article, Your Hidden Curriculum.

Read more at LeadershipJournal.net