Preparing and Teaching Life Preparation Lessons: Introduction
S&I Annual Training Broadcast 2025
Thursday, January 23, 2025
Brother Jason Willard: Hi, my name is Jason Willard. Like you, I love Heavenly Father and His Son, Jesus Christ, with all of my heart. I love the youth and young adults throughout the world. Like you, my greatest desire is to help them deepen their conversion to Jesus Christ and His restored gospel, qualify for the blessings of the temple, and prepare themselves, their families, and others for eternal life with their Father in Heaven.
To that end, I would like to share some thoughts that will make it easier for you to prepare and teach the Life Preparation lessons. In January 2024, Brother Chad Webb introduced these thematic lessons that would be taught one to two times each week. Developed from topics such as mission, temple and educational preparation; scripture study skills; emotional resilience; life-skills; and teachings of latter-day prophets.
He also shared with us the vision and purpose of these Life Preparation lessons when he said:
Brother Chad H Webb: Our hope is to help prepare a generation of youth to know how to study the scriptures and to be riveted to the teachings of living prophets. A generation of emotionally resilient youth, who have the skills and capacity to succeed in school, become righteous fathers and mothers, and who will lead in the Church and in their communities. Our hope is to help a generation be prepared to understand the covenants of the temple, who are deeply committed to keep them, and a generation of missionaries who are worthy, qualified, spiritually energized, and prepared to represent the Savior in inviting the world to come to Him.
Our hope is to prepare a generation of disciples of Jesus Christ who are deeply converted to Him and His restored gospel throughout their lives.
Brother Jason Willard: As we have visited with teachers who have been teaching these thematic lessons this past year, we are finding that this hope is becoming a reality. Teachers who begin with this end in mind, this vision of who we hope that the rising generation becomes, are seeing the miracles that Brother Webb envisioned. With the why of Life Preparation lessons clearly fixed in our minds, let’s talk about the how of preparing and teaching these thematic lessons. Recently, I went to a seminary class to teach one of these Life Preparation lessons. Since I’m an ordained patriarch in my stake, I thought it would be easy just to teach the lesson on patriarchal blessings. So I went to the class with the intent to teach about patriarchal blessings.
It was a good experience. After I had taught the class, I was visiting with one of our curriculum writers and I found out that this lesson, along with the other Life Preparation lessons, were written in such a way as to help the teacher do much more than simply teach about a certain topic. I discovered that each lesson had three basic elements: a specific purpose, a bolded truth found in the word of God, and an activity where every student would have the opportunity to demonstrate their learning.
With these three essentials in mind, I prepared to teach the same lesson to a different seminary class a few weeks later. The difference in the learning experience was astounding. Students who had already received their patriarchal blessing expressed a sincere desire to study their blessing more intently. One young man that I’ll never forget shared with the class his desire to prepare more diligently for the mission that his blessing mentioned.
Among the students that had not yet received their patriarchal blessing there was a young woman who shared with tears in her eyes the urgent need she felt to receive her blessing right away. No longer was I the expert—the patriarch—teaching about patriarchal blessings. I was doing what any teacher could do anywhere in the world because of these three basic skills. To help you and your students have life-changing Life Preparation lessons, let’s see what this looks like in an in-service lesson, a teacher’s personal lesson preparation, and finally in a classroom with students.