Hello, fellow teachers, and thank you for joining us for the Gospel Teaching podcast.

Before we get started, I wanted to provide you with a little background behind the purpose of this podcast.

My name is Casey Paul Griffiths, and I've been a religion teacher for over 20 years.

I've taught seminary, institute, a number of different classes at church, and I'm currently a professor of church history and doctrine at Brigham Young University.

Over the course of my career, I've learned that all around me, there's a wealth of knowledge about effective teaching.

In fact, when I was a brand new seminary teacher, I taught at a seminary in Utah where there were 13 other teachers.

I carpeled to work every day with five of those teachers.

And the conversations we had on our way to work while we ate lunch together

and while we prepared our lessons were invaluable.

In fact, as my career progressed, I moved to different settings and found new challenges.

In my current role, I have a lot of resources and I work with some amazing teachers, but we don't always have

the time to sit and discuss our craft like we did at my first seminary. I also know that many

gospel teachers don't have the luxury of a big faculty to mentor them like I did. Well, this podcast

is an attempt to recreate that opportunity to learn the skills of gospel teaching by listening

to great teachers. Over the course of several months, we sought out some of the finest teachers

we could find and spoke with them to get a feel for their approach to teaching and their methodology.

Over the course of the next few episodes, you'll hear these passionate teachers talk about

preparing lessons, asking good questions, resolving concerns, one-on-one mentoring, and a number of other

topics. We decided to limit ourselves to only 11 episodes for now, but we could have kept going.

There were many gifted teachers that we wanted to sit down with, but we made the decision to make this a limited series that could be completed in a relatively short period of time.

By the time you finished all the episodes, we hope you'll have a good feel for some of the fundamentals of teaching the restored gospel of Jesus Christ.

And when you're done, we also hope that you'll return occasionally to an episode here or there when you feel the need to sharpen those skills.

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