What's the New Integrated Curriculum in 2018?

In another thread, we received this comment:

richmanll wrote:With the new integrated curriculum coming in 2018 for children, youth, and adults, there will be less of a need to have a tool to schedule lessons for the year and post them. The materials to be provided to teachers and students will include a study schedule.

Is this going to change everything? For example, with Relief Society and Melchizedek Priesthood no longer have "teachings of the prophets" on the 2nd and 3rd Sundays and general conference addresses on the 4th Sundays?

Is all the youth curriculum (Sunday School/YM/YW) going to change again?

Will there be no more Gospel Principles class? (or is it Gospel Essentials?)

richmanll said there will be less need to have a tool, but I have to imagine with the new "teaching in the Savior's way" program that they'll still want us to prepare in advance for class (one of the things I liked about Lesson Schedules was the ease of studying for class in advance).

Or will the study schedule that richmanll mentioned dictate what we are to study on a given week, church wide? If so, I suppose they could post it on lds.org for the whole church. That would actually be nice. Then if I go to a different ward, I'm not getting a lesson repeat from the previous week. But, if it's going to be a study schedule like we currently have--a list of lessons with no date--then there's the need for a tool so we know what lesson we're doing on what date. The current youth curriculum has monthly themes, but even in that, you're supposed to pick certain subtopics each week, and the Lesson Schedules tool allows you to do that.

Hmm...we might be stuck waiting until August to find out more.

Several years ago when the church first started hinting at the change in 2014 the general Sunday School president said the new curriculum would be similar to the come follow me program the youth currently have. http://www.deseretnews.com/article/8656 ... tml?pg=all

In a personal conversation I had with a member of the relief society general board, she affirmed that that was the direction things were headed, but that nothing was completely firm with how it would go just yet. This was over 18 months ago.

I'm sure there won't be a Monson Teachings book published until after his death; he still have much to teach us. While there are literally millions of members who were not around when they first started publishing the books in the mid 90's, I doubt they will start over with them.

The biggest thing is to not fret over what will happen. Trust that everything will work out in the end. Change is hard, but well worth changing that cottage into a mansion.

You might be interested to listen to a podcast with a SS president that participated in the initial beta last year, 2016 https://leadinglds.org/how-i-lead-as-su ... l-program/

The church usually does this beta thing a couple years in a row, learn and tweak after the first year, then implement the 3rd year after the 2nd year is completed with tweaks.

@richmanll

Anything you could add would be great. I know one thing my previous stake benefited from was that I knew someone who had been in the beta of come follow me and that it heavily used the videos. I was able to work with a Stake President and FM to update TV's in our meetinghouses ahead of come follow me, where most stakes were stuck backpedaling and trying to figure out what to do. TONS of money came out of ward and stake budgets to upgrade TV's (regardless of what the 'rules' were) so any adjustments might be nice.

For example: If the new system involves a similar structure as come, follow me, but also in the home, do families at home know how to screen cast from Apple or Android? for Lessons? Do members have those technologies in their homes? Will the Church be adding some kind of consistent presentation technology to go along with LDS Media Library (which seems to be build to accompany this newer integrated curriculum)? Will we have enough Lead-time to get ready to start well out-of-the-gate in January 2018?

One example of the roll-out of Come, Follow Me - arguably a real disaster. The program as designed relied on the Internet in Meetinghouses (a three year plan to get all meetinghouses on the internet fell short, really short, 'internet access' didn't really mean that we could stream and have lessons online, it really meant, to FM anyway, that MLS could do it's work online and leaders could get their email/etc..) So we had to backpedal and say, well, we really intended all along that you download everything before you come to church and play it on your own personal devices (because TV's were so old in most meetinghouses we couldn't connect to them to play the videos).... Internet issues and TV infrastructure problems really showed how badly this rolled out, it caused SIGNIFICANT pain (time/hours away from families) to volunteers that were tasked by Stake President, most of whom came up with unique, individualized solutions to the problem.

The latest example of rolling out new curriculum items came with D&C this year. Peggy @ SLTRIB wrote an article quoting some curriculum folks, the newsroom put out an article about the Revelations in context first week of December, then nothing. NO communication to Bishops/Branch Presidents, Stake Presidencies, that something changed, just a quiet little update online and to the mobile tools content of the D&C Teacher Manual - NOT EVEN the member class participation manual was updated. The Teacher Manual was updated in the last week of December, giving teachers less than a couple of weeks to prepare information on the seer stone use in translation, the first vision accounts, etc...

It would be so nice, if we had communication about this new methodology WELL before we start to use it... something the First Presidency would announce at General Conference, For instance. Hey, families, starting next year, here's how this is going to work, you might start to put in place some strategies in your family home evenings this year to help ease the transition.

I hope we don't get

Include “Family History IS A Powerful Resource” we do to use!

Help a non member or new member enter their family names, stories and photos in the Family Tree app. We help them use their tablet or phone to share it with their family and they offer to help them. As we help them “
the Lord is preparing to receive the restored gospel.” Preach My Gospel page 65

I was so excited in 2004 when I read in Preach My Gospel Family History is a Powerful Resource... My wife and I served a mission we asked the young Elders how is family history a powerful resource they said they did not know we have two grandchildren serving mission and two more grandchildren are getting ready to go.

Preach My Gospel Mission President • Share your four-generation chart with missionaries, and explain how you use it in your finding efforts.

5.4.2 Ward Council discuss ways to use family history work to find people for the full-time missionaries to teach and to reach out to new members and less-active members.

Don't count on anyone connecting to FamilySearch during your block of meetings if your meetinghouse internet connection is a DSL running at 6 Mbps or less. Every personal electronic device in the building is connected to that DSL modem during your block of meetings.

drepouille wrote:Every personal electronic device in the building is connected to that DSL modem during your block of meetings.

Checking email, social media status and even downloading updates (since devices tend to treat WiFi as "free" and unlimited internet). All this while it sits in the owners pocket or purse.

fhront wrote:Include “Family History IS A Powerful Resource” we do to use!

Is this a suggestion you are making for the future curriculum? If so, I recommend you send it through one of the Feedback links at LDS.org because it is unlikely to be seen here by anyone who is preparing curriculum materials.

russellhltn wrote:

drepouille wrote:Every personal electronic device in the building is connected to that DSL modem during your block of meetings.

Checking email, social media status and even downloading updates (since devices tend to treat WiFi as "free" and unlimited internet). All this while it sits in the owners pocket or purse.

So, Every personal Electronic device being connected is true, it is often 2 devices for some at the same time. However, I don't care, I don't think it matters. I've been doing this kind of thing STS since before Meetinghouses had Internet - except only those that had Family History Centers - Some which used dial-up Modem connections for connectivity. My experience has included 9 buildings in one Stake that averaged 1.54Mbps DSL Connectivity and a second stake where we average 25Mbps connections.

I have NEVER EVER EVER EVER experienced, nor had complaints that people couldn't perform their ecclesiastical duties because of bandwidth constraints.

First, FM's were contracted for YEARS to support 10Down1Up speeds at MAX (or that's what the national contracts all said....) I think that's been updated at his point to 25D1U.

Even so:
1. Family Search Classes aren't successful because no group of 10 users will be able to use family search on 1.5Mbps neither on 25 Mbps because that site was built as a Bandwidth HOG.
2. I had more issues in the past with IP's available (adding in multiple User Zones fixed it) but that wasn't really fixed until a couple years ago when the standardized the local user zones on a 192.168.x.x standard.

The micro-management of the bandwidth by a small number of people outside ecclesiastical input does't seem to be very worth-while in my opinion. The only real problem that exists is the issue of people stopping by the meetinghouse and 'using' the Internet for free (this is more a problem internationally than in the US/Canada but does present a problem there)

The Network team is STILL thinking of providing the ability to turn the internet on/off for specific Roles in the church which I think would be a disaster - Hey, the Bishop, the Ward Council can use it, but the poor kid in class using an electronic device to follow along with the scriptures can't (because they only have a device with wifi and not a data plan LIKE TONS of families I know that 'control' access by providing the wifi-only thing)....

The younger generation doesn't think twice about looking at facebook/snapchat/instagram/whatever and being in SS at the same time, they also do the same thing at Work and with family and friends. It's a social norm and not something that we're likely to see change anytime soon.

'Get Off My Lawn' mentality is not going to move the Gospel Forward in a digital age!

Do we know yet which manuals the clerks need to order for the 2018 curriculum?

2018 curriculum can be found on LDS.org:
https://www.lds.org/bc/content/ldsorg/m ... f?lang=eng

johnshaw wrote:I have NEVER EVER EVER EVER experienced, nor had complaints that people couldn't perform their ecclesiastical duties because of bandwidth constraints.

I have. And simply saying that FM can wave and magic wand and up change that is not always the case. I've tried. I've really tried. We're stuck with 4G for the foreseeable future.

johnshaw wrote:The Network team is STILL thinking of providing the ability to turn the internet on/off for specific Roles in the church which I think would be a disaster

I'm not sure where you're getting that information. Calling-based was abandoned some time ago when they discovered that it would be a mess to implement securely. The last I heard about a year ago was that they were thinking of having 3 levels of filtering, the most restrictive being "church sites only".

johnshaw wrote:'Get Off My Lawn' mentality is not going to move the Gospel Forward in a digital age!

I see nothing wrong with prioritizing legitimate church traffic over what the member's desire for social media. If they don't like it, they can switch to their data plan. Nor would I see a problem with prioritizing a teacher's use of YouTube for the class over the general membership. It's all about managing the bandwidth for the intended purpose. It's the church's lawn, they should be able to use it without having to compete with the neighborhood.

sbradshaw wrote:2018 curriculum can be found on LDS.org:
https://www.lds.org/bc/content/ldsorg/m ... f?lang=eng

Thanks for the info. It looks like the ComeFollowMe.lds.org site hasn't been updated for adults yet, so I don't know what the lessons will be like.

Also, I noticed the Sunday School for adults and Primary will stay with the same lesson plan we've been using for years. I thought those were all changing to the "Come, Follow Me" approach, but I guess not. I'm not complaining. I continue to be uplifted and enlightened by the current curriculum being repeated on a 4 year cycle. I don't think I've learned everything yet However, we were told that we will longer need the Lesson Schedules app in 2018 because we would just have learning outlines instead of lessons. They sure look like lessons to me.

From store.lds.org:

The November 2017 Ensign and Liahona magazines and subsequent general conference issues contain the curriculum for Melchizedek Priesthood and Relief Society meetings in a new section called Come, Follow Me—For Melchizedek Priesthood and Relief Society.

Members can purchase a magazine subscription or access the magazine content on the Gospel Library app or LDS.org. Units should order copies of the conference magazine only for those Melchizedek Priesthood and Relief Society leaders and teachers who do not otherwise have access.

Review the information in Instructions for Curriculum 2018. Please consider that most curriculum materials can be viewed or downloaded at LDS.org and that those who use mobile devices can access these materials on the LDS Gospel Library mobile app. Before submitting your unit order, assess the needs of your members who prefer to use print materials. Please be careful not to order more printed copies than your unit may require.

Youth Curriculum Online

Find Come, Follow Me at lds.org/youth/learn. If your unit used Come, Follow Me in 2017, continue using this curriculum in 2018. Please use your current manuals, the online versions, or the mobile app.

Primary

2018 Outline for Sharing Time: I Am a Child of God will not be available to order. Each unit will receive three copies of this resource before January 2018.

In looking over the Questions and Answers about the New Curriculum (https://www.lds.org/manual/come-follow- ... s?lang=eng), my counselors and I saw the note about first Sundays being an opportunity for RS and Melchizedek Priesthood groups to council together regarding local needs. Our question is whether the intention is for the Relief Society to meet with the priesthood each first Sunday to have all of them meet in council OR whether the intention is for the Relief Society to meet with its members every first Sunday to hold a council to discuss our local needs and identify the solutions (and the High Priests and EQs would meet and council with their members as well)? So, basically, are we meant to have a joint priesthood/Relief Society council meeting each first Sunday, or are we meant to continue to meet separately each first Sunday and council within our groups/quorums? Does anyone have any insight to offer on that? Just trying to envision how this will be implemented.

jshill8 wrote:So, basically, are we meant to have a joint priesthood/Relief Society council meeting each first Sunday, or are we meant to continue to meet separately each first Sunday and council within our groups/quorums?

Although I see how it might be interpreted that way, I do not get the impression that the first Sunday will be a combined meeting. A member of a presidency or group would not be able to preside and sit in council with a combined quorum, group, and Relief Society, and the bishopric already does that on the fifth Sunday.

I envision it similar to what we are supposed to be doing now on the first Sunday where a member of the presidency or group leadership instructs members of the group, quorum, or Relief Society in their priesthood or organization responsibilities. But now, rather than the leader presenting and discussing the topic they select, we will actually counsel together as a group or quorum to determine how best to meet the needs of the local members within the areas of responsibility we have as a high priests group, elders quorum, or Relief Society.

That's the way I envision it.

I agree with Brother Jackson.

First Sunday Council Meeting: A presidency member or group leader leads members as they counsel together and make plans to meet local needs.

An elders quorum president from American Fork, Utah, who also participated in the pilot, said using the new curriculum helped increase the unity of the quorum and the relevancy of the lessons.

We now sit in a circle, and each week feels like a council. We are getting more engagement and more application to daily lives than I have experienced in elders quorum ever before.

These quotations do seem to indicate that RS, EQ, and HPG members will meet separately, as they do now. The difference is that it will be a council, or discussion, rather than a lesson.

And here is a quote from the Church News last week (August 25):

Local leaders will counsel together about which conference messages will best meet the needs of their members, and Relief Society and Melchizedek Priesthood quorums and groups don’t have to study the same message the same week.

If they are not studying the same message the same week, they obviously are not in a combined meeting.