I hope today’s lesson will be of use to parents for preparing their family devotionals and family home evenings. Last week at church we received some training as an entire congregation on how to become better teachers at church and in the home. And I got some wonderful suggestions that I wanted to include in today’s blog.
The church is going to implement an entirely new way to teach lessons. More responsibility is being put upon the teacher to pray and study on a lesson for the class and to provide time for self-reflection on the teacher’s behalf to know what to teach their students. The training discussed how important it is for the ability to listen to the students and thus the teacher will be better inspired to know what topics to teach their students.
The training touched upon how Christ provided such a good example of being a teacher. How Christ addressed the Pharisees was different than how he addressed the Samaritans. The training gave an example of how Christ listened to Nicodemus and in turn responded to his specific questions. Often many of Christ lessons involved a dialogue between himself and the person he was teaching.
This training reminds me of how different parents will involve their kids to help contribute to a family devotional or family home evening. I have several memories of my own childhood where my single parent, my mother, made sure we had a weekly family home evening. My sisters and brother took turns in being involved.
I remember when I was a teenager when the church started having some of the youth preform leadership responsibilities. While there were adults in the room I and others who were members of various presidencies by age group and were given the responsibility to conduct a meeting. There were times when we as members of the presidency would direct the meeting that encompass the entire collection of youth of the congregation. That was both scary and educational for me in gaining new skills as a teenager.
The training emphasize the importance of listening to the youth as that can influence what topics a teacher may teach their class. If they know what concerns the students have, they can touch upon topics that the students are really interested in. It also helps to initiate a dialogue between the teacher and student.
The biggest observation I have on this new curriculum is that teachers and students rely more heavily upon the promptings of the spirit in addition to self-study. Hummm if we don’t watch it we might learn how to use the promptings of the Spirit in our daily lives as well.
Today’s training was very educational. If you have some ideas on this topic, I invite you to share them in the comment section of this blog. If you also happen to have a personal website please feel free to share it. Thanks.
