2024 Lesson Schedule for classes

[fsiufanua]

Unless the church has raised the lesson schedule calendar from the dead, what are some of your ideas on coordinating lessons for class, for the advisors, leaders, youth, and parents who help them?

Here is one idea, a Shared Google Sheet:

Intent/ Results

• Make it easy for advisors and leaders to know who is up next and give time for youth to have a good heads up when it is their turn to teach.

• To rotate evenly through the youth to teach or assist with lessons.

• A way to easily cut and paste relevant information to communicate with youth and parents about an upcoming lesson.

• To have one place to see an overview of what is going on (special events, people out of town, etc) when planning who teaches when.

• Ultimate result: More youth teaching and more prepared. Advisors contact their youth more often with the relevant information they need removing barriers that keep them from preparing ahead of time. Anything to add to that 1% improvement, right?

Requirements

• Privacy and minimal administration: Only share access (editor) to limited advisors and leaders to minimize access management. Giving it to parents, even view only is too much. Because the children have their names on the sheet, it is not to be given out as "Anyone with the link" can access it as I did for this sheet below.

• Self-management: I then let the advisors and leaders manipulate the table as far as who is teaching.

• Teaching opportunities: a "teaching pool tab" to help advisors track who teaches or helps teach and distribute those teaching opportunities to more youth instead of defaulting to the same 3 people every time. (WHY this option is needed!)

• Ease of communicating important details: When a youth is scheduled to teach a lesson, I use this sheet to cut and paste the relevant info (day, lesson, link, their name) to them or their parents, then follow up to see if they need help or instruction. I make it clear when, what, and how much help they can get from me.

• Train and instruct advisors and leaders on how to use this list to communicate (copy and paste) relevant info to the youth for teaching and preparing to learn in class that week. Giving reminders with easy links to the specific lessons and encouragement in conjunction with what parents might be doing in their homes, also inviting their children to study this week's material. Like marketing, the more reminders, the more likely an outcome.

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DOWNLOAD LINK
You can make a copy of this Google sheet and modify it all you want: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing.

Here is a shared Google Doc I quickly put together with links to 2024. The only disadvantage is if the Church changes a lesson link it won't be updated here. You will want to change the special events for stake conferences, etc.
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Thoughts
It would be nice to just give teachers and users the link to the main lesson page https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/stu ... 4?lang=eng and let them be accountable, but I'm about making it easier for teachers and youth to teach and therefore put it in front of them.


What are your thoughts and ideas?

[russellhltn]

Unless the church has raised the lesson schedule calendar from the dead,

In a way, it has. It's part of Gospel Library.

The PH and RS Presidencies can enter the lessors for their 2nd/4th Sunday. Church Headquarters handles the Come, Follow me.

In both cases, the listing is linked to the proper place in GL, so jab of the finger and you're reading the lesson.

The only thing not covered is 5th Sunday, or what I call "Bishop's Choice".

[sbradshaw]

I agree with russellhltn – for knowing what the current lesson is, it will be better to teach the youth and leaders how to use the Come, Follow Me card in Gospel Library to get to the latest lesson (which they can use at any time in any ward throughout their life), instead of pointing them to an external spreadsheet that they have to bookmark and you have to manually keep updated.

The Come, Follow Me card on Home in Gospel Library is the most convenient way for knowing what the current week's lesson is, but unfortunately it doesn't solve the problem of who's teaching. For that, I like your spreadsheet. Maybe you could use a formula in one of the spreadsheet cells that pulls data from the table and plugs it into a template message that can be copy/pasted into a text message? Something like "Hi, [name]! Just a reminder that you have the lesson in our quorum meeting this Sunday, [date]. Let me know if you will be traveling or won't be able to teach."

[fsiufanua]

This spreadsheet was designed for the leaders, NOT the youth. It helps us coordinate who is teaching next and allows more youth to help teach (rotation). Managing file access would be a nightmare anyway. The lesson links are there for convenience and to help the leaders cut and paste reminders to the parents or youth about what they will be teaching on a given Sunday. To clarify, in our quorum, we work with the youth to decide who teaches the lesson and they usually teach the entire time (except for the welcome and theme). Once in a while, the advisors teach the lesson.

I agree that leaders need to teach the youth how to teach and not just through them a URL link to do study on their own (but I know one decon who would thrive on that ). I also do not believe in tossing newbies into the lake and seeing if they will float or sink to the bottom. I do like the toss-them-in method, but only with a foundation of principles and guidelines so they have a significantly better chance at success.

For example, I noticed last year our youth teachers were just copying each other on how to teach. They just read from the questions at the top of the lesson page until the time ran out, easy peasy. There is so much more they are missing like counseling together about accomplishing work in their area and going through one of the activities in the lesson (or making one up under inspiration). Giving them better instruction and examples (leadership) will be a great help this year.

In our discussions on how to train the youth. Here are a few options:

Ideas for helping youth teach more effectively in class:

• One-on-one training over the phone or a visit to their home with parents. Especially youth who have never taught before.

• Having a Sunday or Sundays (multiple reminders during the year or when needed) where we cover this topic at the beginning of class

• Helping the parents of the youth review that short section on the church website and let them teach their child (home-centered).

• A combination of the ideas above depending on need. Whatever the spirit prompts us to do.

For all the youth (and adults) that use smartphones, I encourage them to add the cfm widgethttps://lds365.com/2023/10/12/how-to-us ... y-widgets/ on their phone for quick access to this week's lesson.