Training People to Teach
Howard Hendricks
If Harvard cannot assume their professors can communicate, how much less can churches.
— Howard Hendricks A young woman, an award-winning interior designer, saw that her church needed a Sunday school teacher for one of the children's classes. She volunteered. They put curriculum in her hands and said, "If you can read it, you can teach it." She couldn't. She tried, she read, she stumbled through some classes—and she quit. Though it has been years since, she was traumatized by the experience, and if anyone asks her to teach, she responds with a decisive, "No!" She is not the only gun-shy ex-teacher sitting in the pews of our churches. And who can blame her? At the same time, who can blame pastors, Sunday school superintendents, and education committees? Just as my daughter-in-law had curriculum shoved in her hands, many pastors have teacher training dropped in their laps, having little more expertise in teacher training than she had in teaching. And training teachers can be as tough as teaching a primary class. But it's not impossible. In fact, multitudes of churches across America—both large and small—are doing an outstanding job of equipping volunteers to teach with excellence. As I have participated in and observed such programs, I see a few common threads that run through their teacher training. Causing to Learn
First and foremost, effective teachers understand, consciously or intuitively, what teaching is and isn't. Unfortunately, many teachers still think of teaching as dumping content. They assume that when they have unloaded the weekly information from the curriculum, they have taught. As long as they didn't forget what to say or stumble around in the lesson, as long as the students didn't break into bedlam or look too ...
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