"Immediate necessity makes many things convenient, which if continued would grow into oppressions. Expedience and right are different things."--Jefferson

Friday, September 9, 2016

Fantastic Lesson Plan Resource for Mentors

Questions about mentor training?  Here you go!

I am training to be a Seminary teacher for my church and in the training, they outline how to make a lesson plan with the purpose of teaching principles so that the youth may apply them. It involved the "crust" skills (context and content) but puts them in their appropriate place as the overall goal of teaching in Vanguard is to change "cores" and strengthen them by helping the students seek for, recognize and identify true principles in all they learn in the world around them.

I have had many people ask me, "How do I seek for principles and teach them?"
This is the way.
Check out the learning videos: New Teacher Training Resource 
I would focus on lesson #9.  The lessons can be time consuming if done in their entirety but you can skim over them to get the gist.  In fact, if you review the lessons #5-8, you will see that they have taken the three step approach of knowledge, understand and intelligence and expanded it a bit, but it is the same basic idea, incorporating the core and crust concepts as well (without identifying them as such :).)
  • Understand the context and content-crust
  • Identify important doctrine and principles-knowledge-core/crust
  • Understand the doctrine and principles-understanding-core
  • Feel the truth and importance of those doctrines and principles-deeper understanding-core
  • Apply the truths in their lives-intelligence-core
 I love this!
In the above trainings, it suggests that you identify the different segments of material you want to cover and then determine which depth you want to take each one during class, since rarely can you cover all your material to application (at least I can't, by the time you want to add all those cool object lessons and application simulations :)!).

The following chart is fantastic and I can see so much potential in applying it in Vanguard!  For those who have been uncomfortable "winging it" (as I seem to do), here is a great way to start and for those of us who wing it because we feel like we have to, this is a remarkably concise way to organize and direct our lesson preparation to make it more effective.

handout, Determining What to Teach
Lesson Plan Outline

Not only would mentors benefit from this but think about what would happen for our youth if they were able to take the material they were covering and weigh and apportion inspired depth with their different areas of study!

Ahhh...the possibilities.