From Teaching to Build Faith and Faithfulness Kathy K. Clayton taught:
When we know our audience well, we can customize instruction and select information that is responsive to their needs. Too often teachers and parents work so hard to prepare lessons that they become emotionally attached to the material they have prepared. A digression from the prepared text caused by a question or comment from a student or child is seen as an interruption. In reality questions should guide the lesson: lessons should not stifle the questions. If we are fortunate enough to have a class member or child who will brave an authentic question or comment, we should embrace that change of direction with gratitude and flexibility. Our teaching should be directed by class member or family needs.
Preparing a wonderful lesson plan that is abandoned because of an important, unforeseen need that arises because during a class period can almost always be expected in a good class. Teachers need not feel that their preparation was in vain. Just as lots of pressure upstream causes a rich and steady flow at the spigot, so lots of preparation in advance enables a rich and steady flow of the Spirit in the class. No worthy preparation is wasted. Every teacher should hope that they will not be able to deliver all the material they have prepared because the class will be so fully engaged in learning that they will be spilling over with questions and comments that promote personalization of the concepts being taught. The objective should be to learn in the communal way described in Doctrine and Covenants 88:122, “Let one speak at a time and let all listen to his sayings, that when all have been spoken, that all may be edified of all and that every [person] may have an equal privilege.” The goal has everything to do with edification of people in the class, not delivery of required material. The prepared material is the vehicle for accessing the Spirit and framing the discussion.
. . . . One mission president staged a role-playing event for a zone conference. . . . Without any briefing regarding the people they were about to meet, the missionaries were instructed to enter the cultural hall and find people to teach. . . . Only one pair of missionaries diverted from their prepared text when they noticed a woman that was sitting on a bench was crying. When those missionaries abandoned their script and asked her if they could help, she responded that she had just lost a child and was devastated, thinking that she would never see her child again. The missionaries who deliberately acquainted themselves with their audience and departed from the prepared text to respond to her need were able to have a truly meaningful teaching experience.
For a teacher in any capacity to be willing to set aside a prepared script to address the needs of the class is far more important than covering predetermined material. No matter how clever the lesson that a parent has prepared for family home evening may be, if the parent unexpectedly become aware of a need in a child as a result of something he has noticed or a prompting from the Spirit, he will be more likely to truly teach if he promptly sets aside the clever prepared lesson and trusts the prompting. While it is nice to consult friends and the internet for lesson ideas, there my be risks in chaining ourselves to the ideas we find there, however appealing they may be. If those lesson ideas are not truly responsive to the needs of our learners, they are not the right lessons to deliver, no matter how creative they are. ~Kathy K. Clayton, Teaching to Build Faith and Faithfulness, Deseret Book, Salt Lake City, 34-35
