Maybe the name of this post should really be, “Don’t be afraid to be a little sneaky.”

This week in my junior high small group, my co-leader and I had a goal in mind. The week before, we were trying to talk through a toughtopic that was going to be very challenging for our guys to get their minds around. From that talk, a lot of awesome, deep questions came up and all the guys were really tracking. This week our goal was to get those questions flowing again, but we knew it had to start organically or it wouldn’t work.

How do you force something that you want to be organic?

We had to plan something that would get us to our goal of getting good questions flowing again, but not in a way that we start it. We went into the group discussion time knowing what we wanted to do and how we were going to do it. We brought up last week and the fact that we didn’t get through our main discussion question because of other things that came up. Then we asked the question that got everything started: Is there anything you’re still confused about?

From that moment, the guys took over and started asking the exact type of questions we were hoping for. We had another great night of discussion and deep thinking, all because we had a strategy and we stuck to a plan to not be obvious in our goals.

Question: What are some ways you strategize to get to a particular goal with your students? Let me know here.