You have twenty-five minutes.
What are you going to ask?
The Sunday schedule got shorter. The lesson didn’t. *Teaching Restored* is a practical guide to teaching the restored gospel with inspired questions — so your class stops listening to you and starts learning from the Spirit.
We prepare content. We almost never prepare questions.
You know the lesson. The teacher recaps the chapter everyone already read. A ten-minute video covers the same story again. Someone asks what Nephi’s father was named, and nobody answers — not because they don’t know, but because there’s no reason to say it out loud. Phones come out. Class ends. Nothing changed.
“Too often, we don’t prepare questions for a lesson. We prepare content, and questions are a secondary or tertiary part of that lesson.”
“All questions are not created equal. And yet that is what we have been taught. Not directly, but by assumption. Nobody explains what a really good question is.”
This book explains it.
Five kinds of questions. One of them changes lives.
Kevin Jones spent his career designing learning for organizations like NASA, AT&T, and Dow — then spent years watching what actually happens in a Latter-day Saint classroom. What he found is that nearly every question we ask falls into one of five types, and most of us only ever use the first two.
– Binary — one of two options. Simple, disarming, and the type the Savior used most.
– Factual — it has a true answer. Useful, and easy to overuse until the room goes quiet.
– Explanatory— it asks someone to think, not to recall.
– Introspective — it can’t be answered without going deep inside the heart. This is where testimony gets borne in the answer.
– Transformative — it stops a person in their tracks and reshapes how they see the world. You don’t manufacture these. You make room for them.
“This is the difference between teaching content and teaching people. When we teach content, we focus on delivering the information. But when we focus on teaching people, the content often comes from them in the form of answers.”
What’s Inside?
What you get in 200+ pages
– The five question and answer types, with dozens of examples, ready-to-use question banks, and a seven-point test for telling an Explanatory question from an Introspective one.
– Fifteen strategies for asking great questions — Linear, Outside In, Softball to Hardball, The Unforeseen Gap, The Better Question, and eleven more.
– Four cautions, including manufactured alignment: the habit of fishing for the “Sunday School answer” until the class learns that honesty isn’t wanted.
– The other half — answers. How to hear what someone actually said, reframe it, and respond when the answer is a stall, a deflection, or a real cry for help.
– A chapter for your calling. Sunday School, Relief Society, elders quorum, youth, Primary, missionaries, church leaders, parents — and one for yourself.
– A way to evaluate your own teaching, including the Twenty Questions exercise, the talk-time test, and the free classroom evaluation tool at teachingrestored.com.
Every principle is grounded in the way the Savior taught — Alma 5, where 41 of 48 questions are Binary; Matthew 16, where Peter is *asked* into his own testimony; Mark 10, where the Lord asks a blind man what he wants.
Who is it for?
If you teach, this is for you
Called teachers and reluctant substitutes. Parents working through *Come, Follow Me* at the kitchen table. Missionaries who want to stop presenting and start listening. Bishops and quorum presidents sitting in council meetings where the same ten people always answer.
“If the goal in our teaching is to consistently and powerfully help others develop their faith in their Savior, using great questions isn’t optional.”
Ask a better question this Sunday