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Training Time Management

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When leading a Good Soil seminar, how do you get through all of the seminar material on time without seeming rushed?

Three simple hints will help you stay on target with your time constraints and still cover what you must.

  1. Teach with a team. If you try to teach the whole seminar by yourself, you may have other problems as well, but one will be trying to stay within time limits. When one teacher is up front the other one or two can be in the back making sure the whole team is staying on task and on time. Now, communication regarding time constraints should only be done between teachers and not in front of the class—even jokingly. That only detracts from the subject and from credibility. It’s great to be part of a team that is helping one another behind the scenes and supportive up front. But how do you know if you are off schedule?
  2. Use the GSED Teaching Assignments Template. On http://www.goodsoil.com, under the “Trainers Resources” tab, one of the many resources you will find is this template. Besides dividing the teaching into chunks, it also lists the amount of time each chunk should take (if teaching the entire seminar in 14 hours) and assigns each chunk to a teacher. When you sit down after teaching a chunk, you can see how the time is going. Also, when a teacher is ‘waxing eloquent’ over their time, the other teachers can discreetly help him/her finish up sooner (see #1).
  3. Use a timer for activities. Controlling the time in this manner helps keep you on schedule. There are many types of timers you can use from oven/egg timers to sophisticated timers you can project from your computer. One free download available is from “Cool Timer.” Simply google ‘cool timer’ and you will find this easy to use timer. Check the "Links" section under "Resources" to see where you can purchase the on-screen timer that we use (TimerTools Software).
Why don’t you spend more seminar time training people to use The Story of Hope?

For one thing, it’s just a simple issue related to the amount of time we have available in a seminar (a full 14 hours of teaching time is what we need).  In order to cover the other necessary parts of the seminar, we can’t afford the luxury of spending more time on The Story of Hope than is currently allotted in the seminar teaching plan.

But we do spend a good part of the second day in The Story of Hope.  We do cover every section of the book and give practice times for some of them.  I suppose that many seminar participants would enjoy and benefit from a teaching overview of the forty Bible events, but that would consume quite a bit of time.

The 130 page Leader’s Guide for The Story of Hope was created to compensate for the fact that we can’t give in-class instruction on the content of each of the 40 events or the methods for leading people through those events in a study setting.

We believe that post-seminar practice or real-ministry experience using The Story of Hope is the key to becoming comfortable with it, within ten days to two weeks after the seminar training.  Ideally, that should be with an unbeliever or a new believer in order to get the feel of handling real questions.  Maybe you can approach a friend who is not saved or is young in the faith and tell him or her that you just received training to lead The Story of Hope Bible studies and need someone to help you learn more about how to lead them.  Perhaps appealing to their willingness to help would be a good way to get them involved.

Other practice ideas that we often recommend include using it for a devotional study with your family or simply leading another Christian friend through it for the sake of practice—perhaps alternating the person who leads each event study.  We’ve discovered that it generally takes three experiences leading a study before you will feel comfortable with the process.

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