Upcoming adjustments to the Sunday meeting schedule give teachers the opportunity to create shorter, more impactful lessons.
To help with this transition, we asked experienced teachers to share their best tips for narrowing down what to teach.
1. Focus on Quality over Coverage
While planning and teaching a lesson, keeping “quality over coverage” in mind can help set the tone for the Spirit to direct both personal preparation and classroom discussions.
My husband, Joseph Wiederhold, is a professional educator, and he relies on this idea as a backbone for effective teaching. He explains, “You should understand the lesson, but instead of thinking content-first, you have the class [and] individual members in your mind, and you’re thinking about what they need.”
While quality isn’t something we can directly measure, teachers can use class participation as a type of gauge. To help achieve this, Joseph recommends spending time crafting meaningful, specific questions with the class members in mind.
He shares, “The Lord can help you understand [questions to ask] without needing to know all the backstory and gossip of [students’] lives. ... Because ultimately, going to church is not about becoming a biblical scholar, it’s about becoming a more devout follower of Jesus Christ.”
2. Create General Conference Connections
Part of the challenge in preparing a lesson for a shorter time frame is that teachers have a wealth of uplifting content to choose from.
Maria Eckersley, author of Teaching Easter: 15 Hands-on Lessons to Help You Study, Teach, and Delight in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, has a talent for coming up with hands-on object lessons and creative ways to teach Come, Follow Me. She narrows down what to focus on for a lesson by studying general conference talks. She shares, “With a limited amount of time and a lot to teach, I focus on the words of the prophets.”
Maria suggests that teachers listen to recent general conference addresses as much as possible and then look for ways to link the doctrine and ideas shared in the talks to the Come, Follow Me curriculum. Using this preparation idea can help teachers create bridges of understanding and relevance for students between the words of modern and ancient prophets.
“Those are the most power-packed Come, Follow Me moments for me,” Maria shares. “When you find those connection points, that’s when the Spirit swoops in and makes a lesson awesome. Because all the sudden, things feel applicable, rather than just interesting.”
3. Begin and End with Christ
Bookending each lesson with speaking and testifying of Jesus Christ makes our time in class more spiritually enriching. One way to begin a lesson like this is to take up the challenge recently issued by Young Women General President Emily Belle Freeman: “Open your scriptures within five minutes of starting your lesson.”
In a social media video, she explained that they have been doing this at their General Young Women presidency and advisory council meetings, and they’ve noticed that the Spirit comes sooner and feels stronger. “Our discussions are more meaningful, and we are learning more,” President Freeman says. “But the very best [thing] is our friendships are being strengthened because we are sisters in Christ.”
Teachers can also begin class with a question that points everyone to the Savior. CES instructor Jeff Redmond shared the following questions that can help teachers start or end the class with thoughts on the Savior.
- How does this scripture account help you feel closer to Jesus Christ?
- What attributes of the Savior are modeled by the people in this account?
- What might Jesus Christ want you to take away from this scripture story?
- Which aspects of the story draw your attention back to the Savior and His life and Atonement?
- How might applying principles from this story influence your discipleship?
- What Christ-centered symbols do you see in the account? What significance do they hold for you?
- Why might the Savior have wanted this story included in the scriptural record?
Asking a Christ-centered question is also a good way to regroup after a distraction or tangent.
Even with the best-planned lessons, teachers won’t always be able to share what was carefully planned. Classrooms are a place of congregation, and sometimes the energy in the room may be different than we hoped.
In these situations, teachers can trust that what has been prepared by the Spirit will come through. Trust in the Savior’s promise that “where two or three are gathered together in [His] name”, He will be with us.
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