Teach People, not Lessons... or concerns

So recently I've had a bit of a struggle between Preach My Gospel and myself. As missionaries try to teach people not lessons, they seem to always have a problem meeting needs, at which point I would naturally like to direct them to the "Change your teaching to meet needs" section in chapter 10. However, after missionaries read the section, they always come away thinking that people's needs and learning styles are the same thing, and they often still don't know what constitutes a true, personal need.

Well recently I've wanted to touch up on my own ability to teach people and not just fundamentals and in so doing I studied this "change your teaching" section. In response to the section I decided to focus on teaching style and see what could be learned.

I did a few activities with my missionaries to gauge how they've learned in the past, both spiritually and intellectually. Though some of the responses were to be expected ("I learn when I care about the material being covered"), others were interesting to me and shed new light on the experience that missionaries could have in the MTC. I began to see how the culture of the class that was being righteously built by the missionaries, was much more conducive to their learning than culture that I wanted to force. I began to realize that for them, study could mean something other than reading for 15 minutes. I noticed how each missionary learned from each activity individually, and better understood what experiences they could have based on the set up. As we changed to teaching to meet their learning needs, we saw this seemingly unmotivated district become active gospel learners.

I still wish that spiritual needs were more clear in Preach My Gospel, however, I am really grateful for the principles given to help us teach to the learning needs of people. It's incredible to see how much of a difference it makes when missionaries are being taught to their understanding.