One of the challenges new teachers face is learning to teach without reading from the manual. It can be very frightening for a beginning instructor to trust herself to teach from memory. Following are some tips for weaning yourself from the manual.
It's important for teachers to understand that reading from the manual reduces their effectiveness in many ways. First, students who see a teacher reading believes the teacher is not prepared or is not skilled. Secondly, the students may feel they can misbehave because you are looking at the manual and not at them. Third, when you teach with the book in hand, you are not open to the promptings of the Spirit, and cannot teach to the individual students.
Begin by preparing your lesson well. Start well in advance in order to have a great deal of time to learn the material. Two or three Sundays before you teach, read the lesson. Each week, read the next lesson you will teach, plus two or more lessons you will teach in coming weeks. This helps you become familiar with the material and keeps the topic in mind in case you find material you want to use during the week. Pray before reading, so the Spirit will guide you. Ask for help in memorizing the material.
Once you have planned your lesson, make an outline of it. Use the headings of each section and a brief reminder of the teaching method. If you are telling stories, jot the name of the characters. (If you forget them, though, simply change them as long as it isn't a true story.) Practice giving the lesson from the outline. Open your manual, but put it to one side and place the outline in front of you. You might also tape it over your sink and anywhere else you spend time. Give the lesson out loud and in your mind again and again using the outline.
If it seems hard to learn it, take one section at a time to learn. Study the first dark headline in your manual. Outline that section and practice telling it. Then learn the second section. Now practice telling those two sections together. Continue until the lesson is learned. If you are unable to learn all of it, you will at least be able to start your lesson without the manual.
When you teach, ease yourself into being manual-free. I find it gives me confidence to have the manual open on the table, even though I don't use it. I put the table beside my chair and open the manual in case I really freeze. It is also there if I find I need something I had intended to skip. Put your outline on the table as well, and use it when you teach. Later, you may find you don't really even need the outline, although having it there will help you if you lose your train of thought.
There are several ways to use your outline discreetly. If you are teaching small children, place the outline on the wall behind them. They will never notice, but you will be looking forward instead of sideways when you teach. My young readers enjoy seeing my outline. So, I write the outline on a large sheet of paper and tape it up during each class. They like to be called on to read the next item on the list, which I often write in the form of a question.
(Instead of writing Reverence, I might write, "How can you show reverence?). This has an additional advantage. We always have a craft at the end of the lesson and they no longer ask when we are doing the craft. They can see for themselves. They also know that if we don't finish everything on the list, we won't get to the craft, so they behave better.
If you teach adults or teens, turn each section of the lesson into a question. Write the questions on strips of paper or posterboard and tape them to the wall. Use a question as the lesson title. Then follow the list of questions as you teach. The list reminds you what comes next, but students don't realize that is why you use it. I found this helped students understand where the lesson was headed so that they didn't wander off on tangents.
As you free yourself from the manual, you will be more open to promptings of the Spirit as you teach. You will be surprised at how much more attentive your students become and you will find that you enjoy teaching more than you ever have.
Powerful Tips for Powerful Teachers: Helping Youth Find Their Spiritual Wings
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