Lessons Learned:
- Meet with the teacher beforehand and share what you hope to accomplish during their teaching time. Although I did meet with our teacher beforehand, I did not let them know the make-up of our youth program. Not all youth groups are similar in students that attend, so had they been better prepared for the type of students we have, they might have tweeked their overall presentation a bit.
- Make sure you know exactly what they are going to share. You don’t want to be thrown any curveballs during the presentation as they may share something completely outlandish.
- Be prepared to follow up afterwards. When you teach on anything, it is always good to have a follow up strategy. This is even more important when you teach on such an important subject or an outside teacher comes in to share. One of the best things Katie, my Associate, did after one of our meetings was she grabbed a bunch of girls immediately after the presentation was over and began to process with them what was said and how they were feeling. You may not need to do something like that, but following up in the next week would be a great start.
- Do a thorough evaluation afterwards. Oftentimes organizations will give you an evaluation to fill out. However, I have found that most of them are pretty generic. This particular group’s evaluation was very generic. Therefore, instead of writing out an evaluation, I went and met with the person who presented and gave them a verbal one. I have found that when you write up something, people may misconstrue your comments. So, if you have some harder things to say on an evaluation, it is better to talk it over with them rather than write it. Speak the truth in love, but definitely speak the truth.