JULY, 2004

Each month on the Grace Publications web page we will be bringing “Teaching Tips” to you which we pray will be helpful in your teaching ministry. We welcome your comments and will look forward to having you share your “Teaching Tips” as well.

For our first “Teaching Tips” article we thought it would be good for each of us to look at ourselves as a Teacher. God can bestow no greater compliment upon us than to place His book in our hands and call us – Teacher. This He has done. In return, we desire to be the best teacher we can be.

HOW DO YOU COMPARE?

How do you compare with the average Sunday school teacher in the United States as to age? Education? Time spent in lesson preparation? Materials used for preparing the lesson? In promptness on Sunday morning? Regularity of attendance? Use of modern methods? Satisfaction with your teaching?

In his book, “Teach With Success” Guy P. Leavitt gives the following description of the average Sunday school teacher. His conclusions come as the result of surveys taken of a cross section of teachers without regard to size or kind of church or town. Here is the description:

“The average teacher is a woman, because four out of every five of the 2,741,929 Sunday school teachers in the United States are women. That is why the teacher is usually referred to as “she.”

“She is about forty-five years old, the mother of two children, has a high-school education plus one year of college; but has no teaching experience except that gained in her own church’s Sunday school.

“She began teaching in her teens, and has had no formal instruction in how to teach.

“She spends less than an hour a week in preparing her lesson for Sunday, and that usually on Saturday night.

“In this preparation she relies entirely upon her Bible and quarterly.

“She usually arrives late at Sunday school and is absent ten Sundays a year.

“Although there have been many improvements in materials and methods for teaching in the Sunday school, she makes little use of them. Usually she teaches in the same way Sunday after Sunday.

“In spite of this evidence of incompetency, she feels that her work as a teacher is successful. The reason she gives for her amazing self-satisfaction will surprise you. She attributes her success as a teacher to her thorough and regular preparation!

“That is a picture of the average Sunday school teacher. What would you say is her greatest fault? Does she need a better education? Does she spend too little time preparing the lesson? Ought she to use more than the Bible and quarterly in her preparation? Are her tardiness and her absenteeism her worst faults?

“These are all serious enough, but they are not the most serious. The average teacher’s worst weakness is her self-satisfaction. She does not know that she needs improvement; or if she does inwardly admit now and then that she would like better results from her teaching, she does nothing about it.”

HOPEFULLY, THIS IS NOT YOU.

We trust that you are a better teacher than the average. We trust that you want to improve. That is the first step. The second step is to look at yourself and determine where you need improving and how that improvement can come about.

In our future “Teaching Tips” we hope to address these issues and give you tools that will enable you to be the best teacher possible so that through your teaching ministry lives will be changed for Jesus Christ.

HOPE TO SEE YOU NEXT MONTH!!