GRADUATE & UNDERGRADUATE PROGRAMS

This manual is for field instructors and students of Our Daily Bread, Bible Institute enrolled in an internship course. All internship courses are available either on a part-time or full-time basis in the fall, spring, or summer semesters. Course sites and field instructors must be approved by the faculty before beginning an internship. Three credits are awarded to students who complete a part-time or concurrent internship. For a part-time internship, a minimum of ten hours per week must be spent in the ministry over the period of one semester (not to include travel or attendance at regular church services, but including a one hour practicum session). At least one hour per week must be spent with the field instructor as described in the Equipping Plan sheet. The number of weeks an intern is involved is the primary determinant of the grade received for the course. Twelve weeks is the minimum involvement required for a grade of:

A, ten weeks for a grade of

B, and eight weeks for a grade of

C. Additional grading criteria are described in the syllabus for each internship.

Six credits are awarded to students who complete a full-time internship. The field instructor must meet with the intern at least one hour a week, although several hours per week is normal in a full-time internship. A full-time internship is based on total hours and total number of weeks spent in the internship ministry. These two factors are the primary determinant of the grade received for the course. For a grade of A the minimum involvement is twelve weeks and a total of at least 480 hours involvement. For a grade of B the minimums are ten weeks and 400 hours. For a grade of C the minimums are eight weeks and 320 hours. The total hours of involvement must be spread out over the internship but may be unevenly distributed. Additional grading criteria are described in the syllabus for each internship. Students taking a full-time internship are considered to be taking a full load although additional course work or employment may be permitted if they do not interfere with the internship.

The purpose of an internship is to provide field-based education that helps a student integrate classroom studies with field ministry; to acquire, reinforce, and refine ministry knowledge and skills; and to develop and assess Christian character. Fundamentally, an internship is an educational experience. It is not just a situation in which the student ministers for a few months, though this is an important part of an internship. Field Education is not just Christian service; it differs in the following ways.

Medical schools teach prospective doctors in the hospital wards as well as in the lecture halls. Law schools educate their students in the courtroom as well as in the classroom. Professional teachers must serve in a supervised student teaching internship in a school in addition to mastering the facts of their field.

As a general rule the more practical the lessons which need to be learned, the more the educational experience must be integrated into real life through field-based education and personalized instruction. Whenever an educational objective is to move a person from present skills toward better performance, the best educational process will be field-based and personal.

Studies of educational effectiveness reveal that generally we remember only a small amount of what we hear in a context such as a lecture or sermon—sometimes as low as ten percent. If we both hear and observe, such as when a student observes a ministry or sees a drama, recall is often in the fifty percent range. However, when we hear, observe and participate in our educational experiences, recall can jump up to ninety percent of what was communicated. In other words, the most effective way to teach ministry is to involve the student in ministry. Personalized field-based education, therefore, is one of the most effective methods of education.

As a field instructor, you have undertaken the responsibility of training a student who is preparing for ministry. This training is of great importance. A leader in one of the largest ministries in the world has said: "Through the years, I have observed that some of our new trainees who appeared to have great potential for God have been crippled, and perhaps permanently injured, because they were not properly trained."

In recognition that we produce after our own kind, Our Daily Bread, Bible Institute looks on you as fulfilling a vital role in equipping students for ministry. The student who learns to minister effectively will likely become a Christian leader who continues to do so and who can equip the saints to do so.

As an individual who has the ability and experience in ministry sufficient to qualify as a field instructor you will be the primary trainer of a student. This privilege and responsibility should be carried out mainly on the field, in the actual doing of ministry, rather than in an office or classroom. As the name implies, the field instructor is primarily an equipper (2 Tim. 2:2). Equipping is the heart of your ministry to the intern. The following has proved to be an effective and flexible model to use in equipping an intern.

Good field education ("equipping") involves teaching, modeling, observing, and evaluating both attitudes and abilities. This equipping should be under girded by an attitude that seeks to help the intern become a well balanced, mature person.

The field instructor and intern should consult the internship syllabus for ideas on appropriate goals. Each internship will always have other goals unique to that situation.

Character development is a major part of Our Daily Bread, Bible Institute philosophy of education called Total Person Training (TPT). Every internship should have at least some goals focused on the development or maintenance of character and related issues. An internship must deal with more than simply equipping the intern with ministry skills. Attitudes, values, motivations and beliefs are crucial because all ministry that pleases God flows out of these, the heart.

The following four phases are an intentional process for equipping an intern. The amount of emphasis given to any of the four phases will vary, often significantly, depending on three factors. The first factor is the nature of the equipping goal itself. As you look at the sample Equipping Plan sheet in the syllabus, you will see that some good goals require very little instructing but lots of modeling. Others require a lot of observing, and so forth.

Very few goals lend themselves to exactly one quarter of your time spent on each of the four phases. Second, the amount of emphasis allotted to each of the four phases will be determined in part by the prior experience and background the intern has related to this particular goal. Third, the nature of the people you are ministering to will also, at times, affect the amount of time spent on each of the four phases.

The first phase in field education is instructing. Some of your instructing will be done during your weekly conference with the intern. Other instructing will occur during in-the-field ministry time. You may wish to use seminars, readings, field consultants, and other means for accomplishing the instructional part of an objective. At times, the instructional element will be "skills and methods." At other times it will be dealing with biblical passages and theological issues that determine our response as ministers of the gospel. While the primary place for learning the biblical and theological foundations for ministry is the student’s classroom based learning, a certain amount of such learning will be a part of every internship. As a field instructor, if you are not sure of what the student has or will learn in a classroom course and therefore what you should cover as part of the internship, please email the faculty member who is supervising the intern.

Instructing provides the intern with the basic knowledge needed to do something. The second phase in the equipping process is modeling. This takes an intern from the theoretical understanding of ministry gained in the instructing phase to actually observing ministry while the field Instructor models or demonstrates. It is crucial to proper training that a behavior or skill be demonstrated before the intern is expected to reproduce it. Modeling is most effective when it occurs in a real-life situation. If this is not possible, then the field instructor should consider using role-play, simulation, or other methods. The modeling phase is often what differentiates a field instructor from a field supervisor. A field instructor is someone actually involved in the ministry the student is being equipped for. Thus, they can say, "watch me." In contrast, the field supervisor usually is busy with other needs and merely provides supervision and encouragement for the intern to "go do it" rather than the more effective "watch me."

The third phase in the equipping process is observing the intern do what the instructor has modeled. The instructor should be careful to observe what is done effectively as well as what is done ineffectively. The instructor should be sensitive that what one intern may find very difficult to do another may find no challenge at all.

In general, if it is within the range of the intern’s ability to do the task at hand, it is better for the instructor to let the intern stumble and learn from a failure. If the intern is obviously unprepared and unable to continue then the instructor may wish to phase in and either help out or, if necessary, take over. It is very important to remember that an intern will only learn a practical skill by doing it and that too much dependence on an instructor results in poor learning. The ability to do something well usually is preceded by inability to do it at all. The freedom to fail is usually a prerequisite for the freedom to learn.

The final phase in the Field Education process is evaluating. Here the field instructor and the intern evaluate what the intern has done. Evaluation often occurs after the demonstration phase, but it is crucial that it occur after the observation phase. The evaluation should consist of the instructor pointing out in a helpful way what was done well in addition to what needs improvement. Usually the intern will have questions to ask. Review of some of the materials covered in the teaching phase may be needed as well as additional role-playing. The instructor needs to demonstrate a sensitivity here which does not expect the intern to reach an impossible level of proficiency. On the other hand, the intern should be given adequate responsibility to be challenged to develop ministry skills. Good evaluation is constructive and helpful as well as honest and thorough. Like good instruction, good evaluation will also deal with biblical and theological issues in ministry.

After the evaluation phase, the field instructor should be better able to decide when and how to guide the intern in other training objectives. At times, further teaching and/or modeling and observation will be needed. At other times a new training objective can be introduced.

Field Education thus involves four phases: instructing, modeling, observing, and evaluating. Good field education always involves more than these four phases. It must be marked by an underlying attitude that pervades these other activities. This is, of course, an attitude of love, concern, and commitment that the intern can sense. An instructor who has this attitude will always be seeking to help the intern become more well-balanced, spiritually mature, and better able to serve Christ effectively.

This may involve some counseling by the field instructor. The aim of counseling is personal growth. Some instructors find it difficult to confront another person with personal problems and they omit this aspect. But this does not help the intern. The extremes must be avoided: preoccupation with counseling and neglect of it.

Personal inadequacies in the intern may indicate deeper problems and a counselor is wise who attacks a problem at its root and does not simply deal with the superficial manifestations of the problem. The primary role of the field instructor as counselor is to help the intern discover and deal constructively with problems in such a way that the intern develops the capacity to continue this process independently.

Eight steps are involved in fulfilling all the requirements of an internship. It is the intern’s responsibility to insure that all these are completed.

The first step a student must take is to make arrangements with a field instructor who has been approved or can be approved for the particular internship. Our Daily Bread, Bible Institute office maintains a file of field instructors who have been approved and is constantly adding to this list. Although it is the individual field instructor who is approved, for convenience they are filed by sites (the church or para-church organization with which the field instructor is associated). If the student desires to obtain approval for a field instructor not in the file, the proposed field instructor must return a completed Request for Field Instructor Approval form to the school office and complete the Field Education Workshop before the student can enroll in the internship.

Having received the commitment of an approved field instructor, the student may then enroll in the internship. Students may register for an internship before they have the commitment of a field instructor, but Our Daily Bread, Bible Institute can not guarantee a placement, although the student who is open to different areas of the metropolitan area and types of ministry will usually have little difficulty finding a placement.

Shortly after registration each fall and spring, a workshop will be conducted on campus for the field instructors for the purpose of familiarizing them with the requirements of an internship. Notice will be given the first week of the semester concerning the time and place of the workshop. Field instructors must attend the workshop only once before conducting any internships. If unable to attend, the Field Instructor may view a video of the workshop available in the audiovisual department.

Remember that effective Field Education consists of instructing, modeling, observing, and evaluating. Every effort should be made to take an intern through all four phases of this process. In those instances, when it is not convenient or possible for the intern to participate in a particular activity, the field instructor should consider completing the training process by use of role-playing so that the intern will be better prepared to minister in that situation when called on to do so. In other situations part of the instruction phase may be best accomplished by going to a special seminar or bringing in a specialist in a given area of instruction. The whole process of field education stands or falls with the quality of training given the intern in the field. One hour per week is the minimum length of time for the field instructor to spend with the intern. Field instructors who are equipping several students may have group conferences with all of their interns every other week or have a field consultant (defined in step 5) meet with the interns on alternate weeks. The field instructor should meet with each intern individually as often as, or more frequently than, the intern meets in a group conference or with a field consultant.

The fifth step is optional. The field instructor may wish to recruit someone from the congregation or organization to serve as the intern’s field consultant. The field instructor would typically do this when there are more interns than time for personal training (especially in the modeling and observing phases of training) or when an "expert" is available who could do more for the intern in this area than the field instructor could. Some of the best field consultants are lay persons who have been involved in a ministry for years and have accumulated experience and wisdom that is irreplaceable. The field consultant must be a person who is more experienced than the intern for the delegated equipping objective. A qualified field consultant can lighten the field instructor’s load, as well as benefit the intern by providing another teacher in the instruction phase of training, another model in the modeling phase, another observer in the observation phase, and another evaluator in the evaluation phase. The field instructor is responsible for selecting a field consultant if desired. The field consultant may bear up to half of the responsibility for the internship. The field instructor must personally conduct at least half of the intern’s training and, of course, bear responsibility for the total internship experience.

The last step the intern needs to take before actually beginning the internship is to fill out the Field Education Covenant. This should be done by the field instructor in a meeting with the intern and field consultant (if one is used). The purpose of the Covenant and Equipping Plan Sheet is to put all the essential information about the internship on paper so that every person involved knows what to do and what the other people involved are

doing. Attach a copy of the Equipping Plan Sheet to the Covenant. The field instructor and intern should keep a copy of these documents. Return these documents to the school office by the third Friday of the semester. You may assume that the Covenant and Equipping Plan Sheet are acceptable unless you hear otherwise from Our Daily Bread, Bible Institute. When these documents are properly completed, returned to the school and approved by a faculty member, the student becomes eligible to receive credit on the completion of the internship.