I was very impressed with the skills of a particular teacher at church today. Besides touching upon a wonderful theme, faith and repentance, she employed multiple skills that made her lesson exceptional. I can tell that she’s had multiple years as a teacher in the public school system. As this blog is geared to help myself and others learn how to become better teachers and communicators as I would share my observations with you.

The following are some of her techniques. I hope these comments can be useful to Sunday school teachers, youth ministries, family counselors, and parents.

I didn’t have a copy of the manual in front of me so I don’t know if the Scriptures she was quoting was in the manual itself, but one technique I found she did very effectively, was to go ahead and read parts of  a scripture and she would leave out a word that the audience could fill in verbally. By doing this, she successfully involve the audience not only mentally but also having the participants in the presentation.

She use a variety of sources and examples to illustrate her points. She illustrated the openness of Christ, love for us with the example of the Christest statue which has his hounds outstretched. The statute illustrates Christ’s desire help us and his love

She also had a handout that had three useful components. One was some memorable quotes. To she has some sections of the form blank to be filled in by class members and third, she had a diagram of where we were responsible to fill in the answers.

She use memorable quotes. One I liked in particular was: procrastination is the threat of eternal life.

She shared a personal experience. She talked about her home life were her brother’s son came to visit. His had forgotten homework and the dad reprimanded the boy for forgetting. They would now have to travel back to where the boys live to get his homework. This trip would be very inconvenient as well ask time-consuming. When the father came back into the room with his keys, the young boy was very contrite and apologized to his father. The father offered forgiveness to his son and mentioned that a lot times people forget things. This was a very good example of repentance and forgiveness.

Another good example: this instructor followed up with comments from class members by either providing supporting comments are seeking additional comments from other members of the class..

She also gave a specific references in the Scriptures that illustrated the concepts that she want to share.

She used visionary or emotional object lessons to illustrate a point. To share the concept of us want to thirst after the Spirit of God. She made a comparison about when the fast, how are extremely hungry we are at the end. Some of us may feel very desperate to be fed and just like we hunger for food, so there are certain people who seek or hunger for the spirit of God.

She also had an assignment for the class to consider certain concepts throughout the week.

Finally, she wrapped up a wonderful lesson by presenting her personal testimony of Christ. I don’t know if she would want me to mention her name on Facebook or in a blog, but those that go to church with me and who attended the same lesson will know who I am talking about.

It was the wide variety of techniques and she employed during the lesson that I found really illustrated the quality of teachers, persons.

Do you have a teacher who had techniques that you admired? Please feel free to share them in the comment section of this blog. Thank you.