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The point: teachers cannot effectively teach without skills, especially the ability to communicate. Skills buttress confidence, one key to classroom effectiveness. Skills bring enjoyment in a job well done. All in all, skilled teachers are enthusiastic teachers.

Most teachers will be guided by curriculum, but I want them also to know how to organize a lesson, how to illustrate and tell stories, how to be logical, how to deliver a message in a way that sizzles. Just as a chef who knows the science of cooking can make the most out of a book recipe, so a skillful Sunday school teacher can optimize the curriculum.

What is the best way to teach skills? I was talking with the man who heads the training of ibm personnel, and I asked him, "Who's doing the best training? Industry? The military? This is your field. Who do you think is getting the job done?"

"The best training is being done by the cults," he said. "They send people out in twos, with one person always mentoring the other. Once the trainee is capable of going on his own, they say, 'Now you're on the verge of the greatest learning experience of all: taking what we've taught you and teaching it to someone else.'"

Mentoring, of course, is not the invention of the cults. It is the model Jesus gave us, and we are wise to put it to effective use. Here are several things I've done to encourage mentoring of Sunday school teachers:

• Plant the seed early. Early in the training process, I tell teachers that I want them eventually to reproduce themselves, to mentor others into teaching. Naturally, beginning teachers are not ready to mentor, but when I announce the goal early, they begin thinking about what helps them teach well and how they might someday help another.
• Encourage some mutual mentoring. I want teachers to see themselves as part of a team, in which everyone works together, teachers helping teachers, and people mentoring one another to greater effectiveness. Although I make certain people official mentors, I want people to learn to think of themselves as responsible for others' growth as well as their own—that, after all, is the heart of mentoring.
• Use the best teachers as trainers. Mentors will reproduce what they are, whether good or bad. Even if I've had only one good teacher, I've tried to multiply from that one good stock.
  
  I've also put members who are public school teachers to good use. Even though some balk at yearlong teaching assignments, many will agree to teach short term, especially if they are asked to act as a mentor to another. They not only feel affirmed for their expertise, they are able to raise the level of the church's teaching ministry.
• Stagger hands-on involvement. When it's been possible, I've tried to alternate formal teacher training with experience in the classroom. One week I gather future teachers to train them; the next week I disperse them into classrooms where they observe a trained and experienced teacher, help in the class, and perhaps teach a portion of the lesson. This not only gives people confidence, it makes them more eager learners in the training sessions.
• Affirm and honor the mentors. Some people may want to be mentored only by the pastor or Christian education director. But if I regularly affirm and honor the mentors in the department, teachers are more willing to be mentored by them. So I sprinkle generously in training sessions and conversation comments like "John is a marvelous teacher; anyone who is fortunate enough to watch him teach is going to learn something" and "Jennifer has got to be one of the best lesson planners I know."