An evening with Elder Bednar (Seminaries and Institutes Employee Fireside)

J. Hathaway

May 9, 2020 - 5 minutes read - 954 words

Each year the Seminary and Institute teachers of the Church Education System for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints hosts a night with a general authority. I remember attending these when I was trying to get hired as a seminary teacher. BYU-I faculty are invited to participate in a remote stream of these firesides. My wife and I attended with a few friends that also teach at BYU-I at the beginning of the year. As always, Elder Bednar didn’t follow the traditional speaker protocol. He held more of a town hall meeting with a small set of employees. It also appeared pre-recorded.

The Elder Bednar town hall

The church website has a link to the entire fireside. It is worth watching the whole video. I want to highlight a few ideas that Elder Bednar emphasized during his presentation. The overarching goal of the night seemed to focus on moving the seminary teachers out of the lecture style of teaching, and to get them to rethink stereotypical phrases that are used in the church. One topic that caught my attention was his intention to get the teachers out of ’the script’ mentality of faithfulness. That topic then leads to a rethinking of revelation and how one might teach through questions to break people out of ’the script'.

The script

As I have been studying about wisdom and learning quite a bit over the last three months, this section caught my attention. In my post titled, ‘The scale from foolish to wise (1 Corinthians 1:25)’, I shared a quote that lined up with Elder Bednar’s message.

Mindlessness refers to the unquestioning acceptance of any one set of constraints or axioms that algorithmically ‘determine’ the problem-solving steps one needs to take in order to produce the desired behavior. Mindfulness and mindlessness cannot, therefore, be traded off linearly against each other. The moment we have accepted - unconditionally - a set of constraints or objectives, we have ceased to become mindful and have instead become mindless. (Pg. 229)¹

A YouTube clip is below, and the Otter transcript is here.

After Elder Bednar’s presentation, we had a long conversation about how Elder Bednar corrected the following woman when she appeared to be talking in ‘script’ language. My wife thought he was a little to direct and wished he had let her finish her statement. I tend to teach like Elder Bednar and appreciated his style. Either way, I hope we catch his message about the language we use and how it can affect our thoughts about the gospel. A YouTube clip is below, and the Otter transcript is here.

Ask don’t tell

I have this problem at times. In my excitement, I can settle into a tell type of conversation. I appreciated his discussion about how to transition into questions to get people to understand on their own. I attempted this style of communication in my last post with the questions I posed about President Eyring’s talk. A YouTube clip is below, and the Otter transcript is here.

Revelation

Elder Bednar provided insight into President Hinckley’s revelation on small temples. His comments lined up quite well with my ‘Inspiration, Revelation, and God’’s Will: Temples and Gordon B. Hinckley’ post. However, he made a much more forceful comment about revelation being about timing much more than the thing being revealed. A YouTube clip is below, and the Otter transcript is here.

Conclusion

I love Elder Bednar and his style. He acts and believes in accordance with Goerge Cobb’s quote below.

Shorn of all subtlety and led naked out of the protective fold of educational research literature, there comes a sheepish little fact: lectures don’t work nearly as well as many of us would like to think -George Cobb-

In fact, I keep expecting him to break out of the speaking pattern in General Conference one of these years. That is the only place that I have seen him give a standard lecture. He thrives in the setting were learners and the teacher are indistinguishable.

I, too, believe that we must rethink and step out of our ‘scripts’. In the process of asking good questions, our fellow learners and we can become more.

The theory of ‘scripts’ is an interpersonal and social - rather than individual - action plan. A script regulates the interpersonal behaviors. … Often, scripts are enacted mindlessly. Some scripts are based on a priori established mutual attribution of cognitive jurisdiction or of cognitive incapacity. Take, for instance, the teacher-student script. ‘My teacher’s a jerk, and he thinks I’m a fool’ - goes an old rap line. The teacher teaches. In his own mind, he has cognitive jurisdiction over the subject matter. His ‘script’ calls for him to be correct all of the time, for the student to ‘stupid’ or ‘incapable of giving the right answer’ some of the time. In the teacher’s script, the student is in the classroom to learn, to be evaluated, and to fail some of the time. Otherwise, there would not be much that the teacher could teach the student. … The mindlessness of the teacher is a key ingredient in the student’s script. The core axiom of this script seems to be the teacher’s own stupidity in not seeing the game the student is playing. (Pg. 222-223). The text just before the second quote is, ‘Mindfulness rests on the insight that we should consider not the ways in which people resolve problems and the validity of their answers, but rather on the kinds of problems they choose to resolve. Mindfulness, then, refers not to a finite capacity for consistency checks, but rather to a process or phenomenon by which new thought-shapes (ideas, categories, mental images) that organize perception are generated.’ ↩︎