Team Background ~ How we got from there to here

Many years ago, the Writing Team was an informal and rather loose process. Volunteers simply suggested lesson ideas to one another, and then went their separate ways to write and post their lesson plans with some modest formatting applied afterward. As you can imagine, the results were uneven.

In 2015 the Board commissioned the rewriting of all 34 original WT lesson sets to make them worthy of our members' support and our evolving creative standards. The Lead Writer of this three-year effort was Neil MacQueen and our chief Editor was Luanne Payne. Their work was supervised and energized by members of our Board of Directors (each a creative lesson writer in their own right). This collaborative experiment gave birth to what we call the "New" Writing Team.

Following the 2015-2018 renovation, the Board commissioned a new list of Bible stories it wanted lesson sets written for. They also opened up membership on the Team to our members -- inviting them to come learn about the Team's creative process and the lesson writing insights pioneered by our renovation team as they worked with our Lead Writer to produce new lesson sets.

New Writing Team Goals

Learning from our past experiences, the New Writing Team aspires to:

• Greater teamwork and accountability.
• New levels of creativity.
• Training and leadership for writers.
• Create and Share lesson plans that inspire teachers and their students.
• Document the creative habits, insights, and expertise of creative writers so that future writers and our members can learn from them.

"Writers in Training"

One of the things we learned from past teams was that many volunteer writers feel unsure about their creative skills and lesson-writing ability -- and want to learn, not just write. Another thing we learned is that even the best lesson writers among us can learn a lot from the exchange of ideas AND a friendly peer review process. That's why we continue to say we are all "writers in training."

Working with our Lead Writer and Editor, each writer...

• Learns how to discover and develop creative ideas for teaching Bible stories.
• Improves their ability to write for others, as well as improves their teaching skills.
• Is challenged with new ideas about lessons and learning in Sunday School.
• Produces creative, peer-reviewed lessons that will be used by thousands of teachers over many years to come.
• And shares their gifts with writers on their team and with future writers through the improvement of our training materials and the lessons they have written.

In addition to helping creative people expand their skills and writing ability, we have created a body of writer-training articles to help volunteer writers get up to speed on what previous writers have learned to do (and not do).

Some of these "creative lesson writing" articles can be found in our "Pulling Back the Curtain" lesson writing articles forum.  Writing Team members have access to more!