Teaching Restored

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What does it actually look like to teach the gospel in the home? In Part 1 of our new Teaching in the Home series, Kevin and Julie go back to President Nelson's 2018 announcement and notice something easy to miss: the invitation was never to hold more formal lessons at home. It was to change the culture in our homes. They unpack the difference between responsibility and accountability, why "mom guilt" often comes from carrying accountability that was never ours, and why we should never have let the Church carry the accountability for our own learning.

Then it gets practical. From pizza prayers to Deuteronomy 6 ("talk of them when thou sittest in thine house"), Kevin and Julie explore free-flowing gospel conversations, asking questions that invite meaning instead of information, getting curious about what works with your kids, and making space by deciding what to let go of. This series is an invitation, not a guilt trip. Give yourself a "drop of awesome" for what you're already doing right, and come find the joy in it with us.

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Become a member of Teaching Restored: https://members.teachingrestored.com What you think of yourself, and what you think of the people in your class, shapes every lesson before you say a word. In this episode, Kevin Jones and Julie Hillyard walk through a four-quadrant model from Neil Pasricha's The Happiness Equation and apply it to gospel teaching. Low opinion of yourself and others? Cynical. High opinion of yourself, low of others? Arrogant. High opinion of others, low of yourself? Self-deprecating. High opinion of both? Confident and humble. They talk honestly about the quadrants they've taught from, why so many teachers are quietly lowering expectations after the move to 25-minute classes, and why true confidence has nothing to prove.

Then they get practical: you can't just will yourself into a better mindset, but you can behave your way there, and the key behavior is curiosity. Julie and Kevin share how to absorb the material, seek the Spirit, and then ask "What am I curious about?" before you build the lesson, so you prepare for what your class will bring instead of what you'll feed them. Along the way: "Who am I being that is making them act this way?", why genuine interest gives people the chance to prove you right, and why the best teacher is like a dictionary, fully prepared and letting the class choose what they want to learn. _

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Several weeks into the new 25-minute lessons for Sunday School, Relief Society, Elders Quorum, and youth classes, how is it actually going? Kevin Jones and Julie Hillyard sit down with seminary teacher and trainer Kyle Smith and ward Sunday School president John Hester to debrief the change. They share what they're seeing in their own wards: youth who love the pace, teachers who feel the shorter scripture blocks free them from the myth of coverage, adults who are slower to transition, and new ideas like youth teaching pods. John walks through feedback from the Leading Saints Zion Lab community, and the pattern is clear: the 25-minute format works beautifully when we teach in the Savior's way, and the time pressure becomes overwhelming when we slip back into lecture.

The group digs into why lessons can feel more focused yet struggle with meaningful discussion, why a great discussion doesn't automatically make a great class, and how a simple ladder of questions and a little comfort with silence can move a class toward real application and toward Christ. Drawing on Brother Gabriel W. Reid's October 2026 general conference talk, they explore 25 minutes as an invitation rather than a limitation, how to extend invitations with an open hand instead of guilt, how weekly lessons build relationships, and how a teacher can tell whether a lesson worked. Their closing advice: embrace discomfort, choose one truth and one inspired question, and focus on Jesus.

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Is your Relief Society or Elders Quorum lesson on General Conference just a stack of numbered quote strips? In this episode, Kevin Jones and Julie Hillyard sit down with Kyle Smith and John Hester to share over a dozen fresh ways to teach conference talks so your class actually engages. You'll hear how to let a speaker's style shape your lesson, why object lessons like this conference's oatmeal example stick, how to view a talk through a worldwide "big tent" lens, and why we're really meant to teach doctrines and principles drawn from the talks, not the talks themselves. Plus, John shares a set of inspired discussion questions that work with any conference talk, available as a free download on the episode page at teachingrestored.com.

Then the ideas get deeper. Try asking "What did the speaker NOT say?" and "Why did he say it that way?" Break a talk into its principle, doctrine, illustration, promise and invitation. Start with a real-life problem, play "takeaway" with a truth you take for granted, and uncover the hidden assumptions behind a principle. We close with a challenge for every Latter-day Saint: if we believe we have living prophets and apostles, do we know what they just said? And are we teaching General Conference in our homes as much as we teach the scriptures?

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How do you teach the doctrine of marriage, the family proclamation, or the plan of salvation when someone in the room is living a very different experience than you? In this episode, Kevin Jones and Julie Hillyard sit down with Sky, a Gospel Doctrine teacher, BYU film grad, husband, and father who experiences same-sex attraction and chose a temple marriage. Sky shares what gave him the courage to take that leap, why his marriage became his greatest strength instead of something to white-knuckle through, and how he has learned that life with the gospel is "always better, but not necessarily easier."

Together they explore how teachers can be sensitive without sanitizing: tying personal experiences back to the Savior instead of making them political, giving grace to class members who don't yet have the words, protecting psychological safety, and teaching doctrine in a way that shows the compassion built into it. They also talk about why relief isn't the same as revelation, why the doctrine doesn't need defending so much as declaring, and why our job in a 25-minute lesson isn't to resolve every hard question but to invite the Spirit, the true teacher, to do that work.

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What do you do when a student, a friend, or your own adult child comes to you shaken by something they read about church history? Seminary and institute teacher Justin Bates, who is finishing a PhD in history with a dissertation on the Brooklyn Saints, joins Kevin Jones and Julie Hillyard to talk about teaching hard history in a way that builds faith and relationships instead of winning arguments. Justin explains why there's usually a "question behind the question," why a good legal case doesn't change a heart, and how the Savior's Bread of Life sermon in John 6 shows us to train fishermen instead of handing out fish. He also shares practical ideas for any 25-minute class: ask your class what they need before you prepare, let them vote on the direction, and give them the sources so they can practice finding answers themselves.

In the second half, Justin takes us inside a historian's toolkit. "The past is a foreign country," so we have to guard against presentism, remember that we only hold one piece of a thousand-piece puzzle, and see people like Peter and Moses as whole persons rather than their worst day. He walks through the historical method (source acquisition, source verification, and synthesis) and points to easy-to-reach resources in the Gospel Library, including Church History Topics and Answers to Church History Questions. His message is clear: don't be afraid of studying history, be afraid of not studying enough. And then take your conclusions to God, the source of all truth.

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Kevin and Julie sit down with Drew Walters, a seminary and institute teacher of 25 years from Sterling, Alberta, who did something most teachers only think about: he stripped every piece of technology out of his classroom. No slides. No devices. No accompaniment — they sang every hymn a cappella. What he wanted to know was simple and a little uncomfortable: if the power went out and everything crashed, would he still have the skills to teach students from the word? The answer surprised him, and the stories he brought along — the back row of boys scrolling through a devotional, the girl whose paper scriptures were unmistakably hers, the sister missionary who looked him dead in the eye and said her Book of Mormon was not for sale at any price — make the case better than any argument could.

We talk about how technology gets in the way, how it helps learn, and Drew talks to each one without ever claiming the other side is wrong. Along the way: why students sing better without the recording playing, why dictating a quote beats projecting it, what "no involvement, no commitment" means when you're asking teenagers to give up their phones, and Drew's closing idea that the root of teach means to point — so a teacher's whole job is to point at the Savior. If PowerPoint makes a point, the point is to point to the Maker. Whatever side of this you land on, you'll teach differently on Sunday.

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Teaching Restored started as a podcast Kevin and Julie were doing on the side. Then Kyle called, they joined forces, a whole slew of volunteers came in behind them, and it turned into something much bigger than any of them expected. So here's the announcement: Teaching Restored is now an official nonprofit organization — and along with it, a new Teaching Restored Membership. It's $7 a month, $5 a month for anyone who joins in September, and it comes with two tools the team has been quietly building and testing for months.

Tool one is a scripture commentary built for the book you're actually teaching. For Proverbs, that means an overview and infographic of the book, a "Christ and your students" section that maps symbols and patterns to the Savior, a column of real student needs matched to the principles that meet them, chapter summaries, a full verse-by-verse commentary pulled from the Seminary manual, the Institute manuals, Scripture Helps in the Gospel Library, the Come, Follow Me manual and scholarly sources — plus three ready-made 25-minute lesson outlines.

Tool two is a teacher self-evaluation. You record your own lesson, upload the audio, and it comes back with how many times you connected to Christ and where you didn't, how your teaching lined up with the five principles from Teaching in the Savior's Way, your speaking time versus your class's, the four types of questions you asked and whether they got deeper, how you handled the answers people gave, how deep those answers went, how many contributions were solicited versus offered freely, how long your stories actually ran — and then your strengths and one or two areas to work on, each linked to an episode or a passage that helps. Both tools are inside the membership, more are coming, and joining is what keeps the whole thing running. Links below.

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Many hit 2nd Nephi, run into Isaiah, and quietly give up. Kyle Smith opens this episode with the story that made him an "Isaiah defender" — overhearing a gas station clerk tell a new Book of Mormon reader to just skip the Isaiah chapters — and Julie lays out why that's so costly: 66 chapters, 1,292 verses, roughly a third of the Book of Mormon quoting him, 57 quotations in the New Testament, and about 100 references in the Doctrine and Covenants. You'd have to play dodgeball with your scriptures to avoid Isaiah. And it isn't optional: in 3rd Nephi 23:1 the Savior Himself gives a commandment to search these things, because, as 1st Nephi 19:23 puts it, Isaiah's words more fully persuade us to believe in the Lord our Redeemer.

So Kevin, Julie, and Kyle walk through four keys to understanding Isaiah — all four of them drawn straight from 2nd Nephi 25, where Nephi hands us the instructions. Understand the manner of the Jews: the poetry, the parallelism, the chiasmus, and the imagery (Kyle shares a symbolism cheat sheet built from Alonzo Gaskill's The Lost Language of Symbolism — numbers, colors, body parts, animals, directions — and explains why the ten tribes going north is not an accident). Be filled with the spirit of prophecy, which Revelation 19:10 defines as the testimony of Jesus — and which takes intention, not just worthiness. Know the region round about: Kyle walks an Old Testament timeline showing the split kingdoms, Assyria, the scattering of Israel, Babylon, and Persia, and where Isaiah and Lehi sit on it. And finally, live in the latter days — use hindsight, the Book of Mormon, chapter headings, and yes, Google. Plus practical help for teachers working with only 25 minutes a week, and both resources will be posted free at https://teachingrestored.com.

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The 25-minute adjustment is here — so instead of talking about it for one more episode, we ran one. Ryan Wilkins joins Kevin Jones and Julie Hillyard to teach an unscripted, real-time 25-minute lesson on a title of the Savior most of us think we already understand: the Rock. Ryan walks through four different rocks in scripture. No lecture, no right answers, no exhausting every point. Just scripture, questions, and three people wrestling out loud.

Then we stop and take the whole thing apart. What made it work? Ryan opened with a problem, not a principle — "what keeps you up at night?" — and brought it back at the end so every insight landed on something real. He picked four things instead of covering everything, said "there's more we could say about that" and kept moving, made it obvious there was no right answer, and did far less talking than anyone expected. We get into preparing your class during the week instead of only in class, training people to ask questions, why "slow down" is the right counsel even when you have less time, why an unfinished discussion is a productive one, and why prescribing application may be the thing to give up first. If you taught yesterday and it went sideways — or it went great and you want to know why — this is the episode.

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