Did you know that the greatest advice in any Disney movie came from a villain? Hear me out…
Let’s pretend you teach early morning seminary. You have a handful of teenage zombies 🧟 that wander into your living room every weekday at 6:00am with differing levels of enthusiasm and grooming standards. They’re fighting for their lives to stay awake.
They need a testimony of the gospel of Jesus Christ. You want to help them with that. So…
What is the most important thing you can do to ensure they have a meaningful and impactful experience in your class tomorrow morning?
Asking good questions? Listening? Well🤓actually… it’s to
Our other teaching skills would be ineffective without the critical and often neglected art of lesson preparation.
I can hear some of you… Lesson prep? An art?
I’m serious! And I’m not just saying that because I’ve written curriculum for the Church before. It’s an eternal pattern that our Heavenly Father demonstrates throughout the scriptures.
In Moses 3:5, the Lord teaches “For I, the Lord God, created all things, of which I have spoken, spiritually, before they were naturally upon the face of the earth.” The Lord also discusses how we were created from what He called “intelligences” (Abraham 3:22). Before anything on this earth was physically created, the Lord organized it and formed it spiritually. That means that the Lord in His wisdom, power, and capability still saw fit to prepare and be organized before the creation of this world.
He didn’t just “wing it.” Why do you think it’s called the Plan of Salvation?
His personal interactions with us also include preparation on His part. Think about the story of Jonah. We always focus on how Jonah was swallowed by a great fish because of his disobedience and fear, but we often overlook one small detail about the fish:
“Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.” (Jonah 1:17)
That is a pretty wild detail to overlook! The Lord didn’t make the choice to have a whale eat Jonah on the fly. It was prepared. And there are many more examples in scripture. The Lord is a perfect teacher, and much of that has to do with Him being a perfect planner and preparer.
But preparation can be… ya know…
Preparation doesn’t need to be stressful or tedious. In fact, preparing learning experiences for our students can be engaging and even miraculous. We just need to look at it from a different perspective.
So, let’s shift some paradigms!
Often when preparing to teach, we think about preparing a lesson (Reading the scriptures, reviewing the curriculum, writing the lesson plan out, making a PowerPoint presentation, etc.). However, when we focus this much on HOW and WHAT to teach, we often overlook the WHO and the WHY we teach. Of course, I’m not suggesting that studying the scriptures for ourselves and using our designated curriculums is bad (It’s essential for clear and correlated truth to be taught). What I’m saying is that sometimes we think too much about preparing and teaching lessons and we often forget that we don’t teach lessons… we teach students.
Have you ever sat in a class and felt like the teacher was ultra prepared with knowledge and details and context and audiovisual aids and object lessons… but it felt very impersonal and dry? On the opposite end of the spectrum, have you ever felt like a teacher is dynamic and fun, but you can tell they’re just winging it? Did you feel like the teacher loved or cared about you in either of those situations? Was their preparation customized and optimized for you as their student, or was it about them?
If we overprepare and spend hours crafting a presentation, it may sound professorial and informative, but it may not meet our students where they are. If we don’t prepare enough and trust in our charisma and personality to win the day, we may come off as phony and disingenuous. I’m sure it would frustrate our students if they learned that we didn’t feel the need to invest time and attention into preparing for them.
So let me share a couple of quick things I learned as a young teacher.
#1- Internalize the truth for yourself first. If the gospel isn’t in your heart, you will never be able to extend it to the hearts of others. Study and learn for yourself each time you’re preparing to teach others. You can’t give what you don’t have.
#2- Prepare less. Pray more. Our students have specific needs that won’t be found in any book or Youtube video. As a young teacher I got chastened by a leader for spending hours preparing to teach a 45-minute lesson. The lesson went poorly. My trainer pulled me aside afterward and said those exact words:
“Prepare less. Pray more.” It changed my life.
He knew that Heaven’s help would take the prep I had done and magnify it as I prayed and sought help in reaching my students. That didn’t excuse me from studying and developing skills, but it did realign my priorities a bit.
#3- Seek relevance and revelation. If the students don’t see how/why this message should matter to them then they won’t feel the need to engage. So, ask the Lord what they need. He will tell you, and they will feel that both you and the Lord know them and care about their needs.
I promise you that as you thoughtfully and prayerfully prepare to teach your students the messages found in the scriptures and words of the prophets, they will feel the truth and the love behind your words. Through your preparation and the Lord’s, they will experience miracles.