The holiday season from Thanksgiving to Christmas to New Year’s seems to zoom by. Personal schedules get busier than ever. The Church plans special holiday programs, activities, and parties. Even Bible teachers who love to teach might struggle to find time and motivation to prepare lessons. To add teacher training over the holidays to an already stressed calendar may seem fruitless, perhaps a bit insensitive.
Will teachers attend a meeting? If they do come, will their hearts and minds be into it or too distracted? But, do you really want to lay aside training for this period of time? What alternative is there?
How to Maintain Teacher Training Over the Holidays
Who says teacher training requires a meeting? This Teacher Training Blog has already provided a series of posts about teacher training ruts. Review the various means for training listed in that post and you might find something that will work well over the holiday season.
And, why must training consume a lot of people’s time? Something simple and brief can leave an impact. Consider doing something like the following for teacher training over the holidays:
Think through one or two sentence teaching tips most relevant to your individual teachers. Make note cards with one tip per card. Every week during the holiday season, distribute a card to each of the teachers. Over the span of these two months, they will have received some good reminders. You can go the extra mile in personalizing the messages using their names or perhaps the name of the class they teach and/or decorating the cards for even greater appeal.
Compose brief messages relevant to the specific holidays to send to teachers through some form of social media, e-mail, or even postal mail. For example, …
for Halloween you might send a message reminding them that not everyone agrees with celebrating this holiday, suggesting how to handle differing views
at Thanksgiving you might send a message asking if their students know how thankful you are for them, explaining how critical relationship-building is in the teaching process.
for Christmas, you might send a message about the reason Jesus came to earth to be our Savior, leading into some tips for guiding their students to accepting Christ as their Savior.
at New Year’s, you might send a message about how the New Year reminds us of how God wants to make us new, emphasizing that the goal of teaching should be changed lives.
Notice how each of these ideas weaves together the holiday and training.
Make Training About Holiday Effects
Teachers will feel the effects of the holidays in the classroom. Remind them of how God exhorts us to make the “most of every opportunity” (Eph. 5:16). This would be a good time to provide training on how to do that.
Make teacher training over the holidays about the holidays so they’re ready for the holidays!
Need help with training?
You could distribute this two-page document to them with some tips for teaching over the holidays: Intruders in the Classroom that Steal & Vandalize
And/or, you could send them links to the following articles:
The story of Christmas and Easter of the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus is more than a great valentine love story. It’s true, not a mere fable or holiday tradition. Jesus is not make-believe but real. The power of God to raise Jesus from the dead and perform all the other miracles written in the Bible takes more than a make-believe superpower. Unless people see Jesus as real and worthy of more than a simple nod of acknowledgment over the holidays, the 
God tells us to “make the most of every opportunity” (Eph. 5:16). “Every” would include the holidays. Use the following acrostic as a reminder of what will help you foster a more conducive learning experience over holiday seasons.