Good ideas and I guess all I really require in a GD teacher is someone who actually prepares for the lesson. I want someone who doesn’t have the the lesson manual in their hands, reading from it, throughout the lesson. If they’ve done some preparing, in our adult Sunday School, the class members will participate and hop into a discussion so it works.

I am glad to hear that you’ve had 2 good teachers in a row, that is a bonus.

So what type of Gospel Doctrine teacher do you prefer?

For anyone who wants to take a look I have now posted Lesson 32 on my blog (click on link up above) and you can see what it looks like at this moment, comments and ideas appreciated.

I have followed, more or less the outline above and have decided to have a debate (in a very mild sense — really more of a discussion from a point of view) looking at the idea that Joseph has done more for salvation save Jesus. We are going to look at the heads of various dispensations and see how Joseph in fact compares. So for example it is fairly clear to me that without Adam you don’t have salvation at all so he seems pretty important to me.

it is a tough one and I suspect the discussion could go on for a long time in a blog but I would shut it down as fast as I could in class.

CS Eric, thanks for that thought, in a youth class especially if it is relatively small (mine is about 12 max but that varies of course) you really can develop a learning place, instead of waiting for the teacher to ask all the questions and bring all resources they start doing some of it, very exciting to be in.

I think your first principle is the single most important difference between good teachers and bad ones in the Church. If your goal is to teach, then that best happens if you concentrate your focus on the important parts/principles of the lesson. If you just want to cover the material, I don’t think it gives students a chance to really learn anything–the “mile wide and inch deep” approach.

I don’t teach GD now, but when I did, I spent more time developing real questions that helped the class see why the principles were important, rather than the “Sunday School” answers. I like your idea of putting things in context. Until I learned more of the background like you describe, I couldn’t answer the question of “Why would anybody want to kill Joesph Smith?” In the New Testament, we learn why the mobs wanted to kill Christ, but we rarely learn at Church why the mobs wanted to kill Joseph.