Teaching in the Savior's Way
The model
Every deck on this site is an attempt to actually do one thing: the framework the Church teaches for teaching. This page is the framework, and then how four cards a day are built out of it.
Five principles, not four
The framework is usually drawn as three overlapping circles inside a ring. Three principles describe what you do with the material. Two describe how you hold the room. Where all three circles meet is the point of the whole thing.
The three circles are things you can plan. The ring is not — you cannot schedule loving the class or teaching by the Spirit into a lesson outline. But the ring is what decides whether the circles land, which is why it is drawn around them rather than beside them.
And the gold shape in the middle is the reason for the other four. Not comprehension, not participation, not a well-run forty minutes. Conversion.
Where the four cards come from
A deck is four cards because a class is twenty minutes and the framework has to become something you can actually hold up on a screen. Each card takes one job.
| Card | What is on it | Which principle it serves |
|---|---|---|
| 0 Context Setup |
Who wrote it, when, what kind of writing it is, why it mattered then. | Teach the Doctrine. You cannot teach a text students have no purchase on. |
| 1 Direct Text Interaction & AI |
The specific verses, and a prompt students run themselves. | Invite Diligent Learning. They do the work; the teacher does not do it for them. |
| 2 Talk About Experience |
Two or three real questions, and the norms for answering them. | Invite Diligent Learning, and the ring — this is where loving the class shows. |
| 3 Christ-Centered Action |
Christ first, then one thing to actually do, handing into the journal. | Focus on Jesus Christ, aimed at conversion. |
Card 3 always opens with a column headed Start With Jesus. That is a structural rule, not a preference — it is there so that the Savior is not something the lesson gets to if there is time.
Not every day is four cards
Some days are not scripture-block days, and pretending otherwise produces a bad deck. There are four shapes:
| Deck | Cards | For |
|---|---|---|
| Scripture | 4 | Normal teaching days. The full four-card model above. |
| Doctrinal Mastery | 2 | Practice days: why mastery matters, then three passages as an arc. |
| Life Preparation | 2 | A real activity with numbered steps, then a personal plan. For doing, not reading. |
| Virtual day | 1 | No class. One portrait card read on a phone: read, think, create, send it in. |
Still to be written
Why this model, in the teacher's own words — what changed about the class after the in-service, what it fixed, and what it turned out to cost. That section belongs to Bryan and is deliberately not drafted here.
A note on the word "four-part"
Inside this repository the model gets called the "four-part model," which is a convenient shorthand and slightly wrong. The framework has five named principles. The deck has four cards. The cards are one teacher's implementation of the framework, not the framework itself — and if you build your own decks, they need not be four.