Sunday School for Dummies: How to Use and Develop New Teachers
December 19, 2011
December 19, 2011
Do you have more teaching slots for adult Sunday School programs than you have teachers to fill them? More than a few pastors would say so.
In my church, we have 850 members, quite a few of whom are excellent teachers. But to fill our schedule of adult Sunday school classes we need 72 teachers each year, assuming no one teaches more than one quarter each. It’s a stretch to find that many men who know their Bibles well and are capable teachers and have the time to devote to teaching a class.
Our solution? We have adapted our adult Sunday school program to accommodate less-qualified teachers. Aside from filling a class schedule, this enables us to train more men to teach, which carries additional benefits.
TRICKS OF THE TRADE FOR DEVELOPING NEW SUNDAY SCHOOL TEACHERS
As our adult Sunday school program has matured, we have learned a number of tricks of the trade for developing inexperienced teachers. Here are a few of the more salient lessons:
1. Ask new teachers to teach from a manuscript.
We’ve found over the years that while teaching from a manuscript is unnatural for most new teachers, with some practice most can learn to do this in a way that is engaging and compelling. If we must choose, we would rather have material that is biblically sound but presented dryly than a compelling speaker teaching heresy or fluff. And, over time, with a manuscript our teachers can generally provide the best of both worlds.
This isn’t just our church’s experience. Prior to working as a full-time pastor, I ran a line of business at an executive education firm. There also, the dozens of new teachers who started with the company each year began by teaching from a manuscript, and for largely the same reasons. The integrity of the content was virtually guaranteed, and new teachers could quickly learn to be engaging with a manuscript.
Of course, this approach to teaching has its advantages and disadvantages.
Advantages:
One potential disadvantage worth mentioning:
2. Adopt a master-teacher, rather than discussion-based, approach.
A discussion-based class is less predictable and thus much more difficult to manage than a class where the majority of the talking is from the teacher at the front of the class. As a result, most of the adult Sunday School classes at our church are based on a master-teacher approach, and the few that are more conversational in nature are taught by more experienced teachers.
The master-teacher approach has additional benefits as well. By relying primarily on what the teacher has to say rather than what the class has to say, we are able to communicate more material in the short time that we have. And this approach makes it clear that we are most interested in hearing what the teacher has to say rather than what the class has to say. After all, the teacher is the one selected by the elders based on his understanding of the content, and the teacher is the one who spent several hours preparing for the class.
But, you might say, people learn better in an interactive environment, don’t they? Maybe you’ve heard the statistics which say that people retain 10% of what they read, 30% of what they hear, and 70% of what they discuss. As it turns out, these figures are not grounded in any kind of research and have been disproved repeatedly.[1] People can refine their ability to learn from a monologue. After all, the primary teaching methods we see in the New Testament are sermons and letters designed to be read to churches—both monologues by their very nature.
Of course, a master-teacher approach does have its drawbacks. Here are some of the disadvantages of this style and some ways we’ve tried to compensate:
3. Adopt a team-teaching approach for each class.
A final strategy for helping inexperienced teachers to teach effectively is to ensure that at least two men are responsible for teaching each class. Ideally, one of them (the “lead” teacher) has more experience and one of them (the “supporting” teacher) is new to public teaching. In some of our classes, we actually have three different men teach so that we can train more men in the skill of teaching.
Below are some of the expectations for lead and supporting teachers that we’ve established over time.
Lead Teacher Expectations
Supporting Teacher Expectations
Sometimes the lead teacher is responsible for the majority of teaching. But many of our lead teachers, having embraced their role as coaches, prefer to do the minority of teaching so that more opportunities can be given to helping a new teacher learn how to teach.
[1] Lalley, J., & R. Miller (2007). The learning pyramid: Does it point in teachers in the right direction? Education 128 (1), 64-79. Available here.