A Teaching Handbook for Wiccans and Pagans

About the Author

Thea Sabin is an editor and writer whose professional work currently focuses on web content management, curriculum development, and instructional design. She holds a master's degree in education and has taught a variety of subjects—including writing, editing, high school English and theater, gardening, cooking, crafts, Wicca, and astrology—off and on for more than two decades. A practicing Wiccan since her teens, she first started teaching Wicca—very, very badly and long before she was ready—in college. She wrote this book in the hope that it would help other teachers find the confidence to teach Paganism and get a better start than she did. Her first book was
Wicca for Beginners
. In the little spare time she has, she likes to do anything related to art, play with her megalomaniacal parrot, watch very bad foreign movies, and travel whenever possible.

Llewellyn Publications

Woodbury, Minnesota

Copyright Information

A Teaching Handbook for Wiccans & Pagans: Practical Guidance for Sharing Your Path
© 2012 by Thea Sabin

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Llewellyn Publications, except in the form of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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First e-book edition © 2012

E-book ISBN: 9780738730011

Book design by Rebecca Zins

Cover design by Lisa Novak
Cover image of Japanese maple © Jonathan Cohen/Vetta/PunchStock

Cover illustration from
1100 Designs and Motifs from Historic Places
by John Leighton (Dover Publications, 1995)

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction
: Teaching Our Teachers

Chapter 1
Benefits and Challenges of Teaching

Chapter 2
Space, Time, Energy, Money, and Legalities

Chapter 3
Finding and Screening Students

Chapter 4
Adult Learning Styles

Chapter 5
Some Basic Teaching Techniques

Chapter 6
Creating a Class Session

Chapter 7
Preparing to Teach an In-Person Class

Chapter 8
Giving a Great Presentation and Interacting with Students

Chapter 9
Taking It Online

C hapter 1
0
A Few Possible Pitfalls

Chapter 1
1
Care and Feeding of the Teacher

Chapter 1
2
From Teacher to Clergy

Conclusion
: Okay, Now Go Change the World!

Appendix A
: Screening Questions

Appendix B
: Sample Syllabuses

Appendix C
: Resources

Appendix D
: About the Interviewees

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the Pagan teachers who took time out from their often-crazy schedules to allow me to interview them for this book: Anne Marie, Brian, Christopher, Ellen, Holli, Melanie, Oberon, Patrick, Pete, Sarah, Stephanie, Sylva, and Thorn. It was very important to me that this book reflect the experiences of many teachers, not just mine. Thank you for generously sharing your stories and wisdom.

Every teacher is the product of the hard work of many other teachers. It's impossible to list all my teachers, but I especially want to acknowledge Shekinah, Otto, Dot, Adam D., Abuela M., Eran, Akasha, and my extraordinary grandmother. This book is as much the result of your hard work as it is my own.

I'd also like to thank my students, who have taught me far more than I have ever taught them and who have been incredibly patient while I neglected them to finish this book. All of you inspire me every day, and I am proud to know you.

Thanks also to the people closest to me, who have put up with me during this not-so-pretty writing process. Thanks to Alicia and Pam for understanding the therapeutic properties of bad monster movies and road trips involving coconut cake and drag queens. Thanks to Susan, my patient and serene sister-friend, who helped keep me (reasonably) sane and who I want to be like when I grow up. And thanks to Ken, who made me laugh throughout this process and who stubbornly refuses to understand how incredibly important that was. I love you, goofy boy.

And extra-special thanks to my mad scientist-Zen-ninja-MacGyver-caveman-ubergeek husband, who did extra chores, taught extra classes, transcribed endless interviews, took care of my beloved pets, put up with my crankiness, and never let me give up. You are my partner in crime, my rock, my love, and a kick-butt high priest to boot. Go make fire, baby. But not in the living room this time, okay?

[contents]

Introduction

Teaching Our Teachers

I was inspired to write this book because I frequently get letters, email, and Facebook messages from people looking for teachers. All the time, I hear things like “There aren't any teachers in my area,” “I don't know where to start,” “I know there are online classes, but I don't know which ones are best for me,” “I want to find out if this path is for me,” “I really want to learn the [name of tradition here] tradition,” and “I want to study with others.”

Most of these people are aware that there is a ton of information on the Internet, lots of books available, and mentorship and even community online. But many people yearn for more. They want a personal connection in their spiritual growth. They want someone to see their magic and feel their energy and tell them that they're “doing it right.” They want the experience of communing with deity in the presence of like-minded others—whether that be in person or online—or at least with the guidance of like-minded others.

As more and more seekers explore Paganism, there just aren't enough teachers to go around. Although having a teacher is not necessary for being Pagan—self-training is perfectly valid, many Pagans never have a teacher, and some prefer to be self-taught—the demand for teachers is still far greater than the supply. The upshot is that Pagans who have never taught are stepping up to fill the gap, which not only educates one person or group but ultimately strengthens the whole community.

Druid and author Ellen Evert Hopman considers service to the community—including teaching—an essential part of being a Druid:

In ancient times, Druids were advisors to the kings. The Druid was the teacher, the genealogist, and the historian for the tribe. In other words, they were serving the tribe…. You performed a function for the tribe. There is no such thing as a solitary Druid. So in order to really be a Druid, as far as I'm concerned, you need to be serving somebody.

And Stephanie Raymond, cofounder of Our Lady of the Earth and Sky in Seattle, which provides classes and rituals, marvels about the effect the organization has had on the teachers and the community:

We get so much good feedback from people, and it certainly is something that keeps us going. Because there have been moments when we all kind of look at each other and we're all like, “Really? What are we doing this for?” But then something else will turn around, and you're just in tears at how amazing this thing that we've created can be for us and for everybody who's involved. I've just seen such amazing things happen in the community. It takes my breath away.

Teaching others is one of the most powerful and important things we can do as Pagans—or as people, for that matter. Good teachers are the “glue” and continuity in a community, and they enrich the lives of the people in it. Pagan teachers are facilitators, providing others with ideas, tools, support, mentoring, or practice in allowing people to find, explore, and work with the Divine, both within and outside of themselves. Teaching Pagans is life-affirming, transformative, joyous, satisfying, difficult, terrifying, and frustrating work. But I can tell you from personal experience that helping students find that “aha!” moment—when they glimpse their own connection to the sacred—is worth whatever it took to get them (and you) there.

Although this work is absolutely vital to our community, we don't seem to spend much time teaching others how to do it. I know a lot of Pagan teachers from diverse traditions and paths, and almost none of them received any real teacher training. Their teachers—if they had any—made sure they had a thorough knowledge of the material they would teach, but in most cases they didn't or were unable to give them the tools for passing it on to others.

Being great at doing something or knowing a topic well doesn't mean you can teach it, though, as anyone knows who has had a teacher who was a genius in his or her subject matter but couldn't communicate with mere mortals. Teaching is a very different skill from drawing a magic circle, using divination, meditating, or whatever else a Pagan teacher might teach. As Pagan teachers, we owe it to our students not just to learn the material we might pass on but also to learn ways of communicating it well to others.

The good news is that with a little effort, most people can learn and use basic teaching techniques. For many Pagans who want to pass along their knowledge, learning how to teach feels like it completes the circle of their own learning or like it is the next step, or evolution, of their own spiritual development. You have all this great stuff inside of you that you're bursting to share, and suddenly you have a way not only to share it, but to share it well. Learning to teach can be a very empowering and energizing experience.

You Have to Start Somewhere

Learning a little about teaching before you actually take on students can help ensure that both you and your students have a better experience, and that, in turn, is better for the Pagan community as a whole. There is some feeling in the Pagan community that inexperienced teachers can be damaging, because classes and groups led by inexperienced teachers have the potential to fall apart (sometimes dramatically), and inexperienced teachers sometimes pass on bad or incorrect information and set a less-than-admirable example for others.

People who are wary of the effects inexperienced teachers can have on the community aren't completely wrong in feeling that way. Bad teaching can be misleading for students at its best and downright destructive at its worst. But the problem is that you can't become an experienced teacher without having been an inexperienced one. You have to learn somewhere, sometime, on somebody—there's no way around the fact that your first students will be human guinea pigs. Experienced teachers don't pop up fully formed, like Athena springing from Zeus's head. Their abilities are honed over time, often through making some very big mistakes.

So—in my view, anyway—it's unrealistic to expect new teachers to be great the first time they try. If I had been held to that standard, I would not be teaching now. It is realistic, however, to expect new teachers to be patient, prepared, responsive to their students, and willing to learn from their mistakes. And it's crucial for them to go into their first teaching experience with the understanding that teaching is a sacred trust—that they are carrying on a cherished and indispensable tradition—and approach the role of teacher with the respect it deserves. A crucial part of approaching the role with respect is learning some of the teaching methods that generally have been accepted as effective through trial and error, and in some cases through scientific study. (These are called “best practices” in teacher-speak.)

The Goal of This Book

All teachers start out inexperienced, but that doesn't mean they have to start out inadequate. There are people who seem to be born teachers, and then there are the rest of us, who have to learn the hard way. I'm definitely in that second category. With this book, I set out to write the Pagan teacher training manual I wish I'd had when I began teaching. In my professional career I have worked for two educational foundations and taught all sorts of things, from writing and editing to crafts, gardening, and astrology, and even high school. It's been an amazing journey of successes and challenges, and I've rolled all of those experiences into this book, along with twenty years' worth of teaching Paganism off and on. I'm hoping that this book can give new Pagan teachers a foundation they can build on through experience to become great teachers—whether they're “naturals” or not—and help them find some courage and inspiration too.

There is no one way to teach Paganism, just as there is no one true Pagan tradition or path. But there are techniques and best practices for finding appropriate students; creating a structure, curriculum, or lesson; teaching to adult learning styles; handling group dynamics; and troubleshooting problems that can help any Pagan teacher, even if it's just an informal, one-on-one situation. My goal in writing this book is not to tell you exactly how and what you should teach but to give you tools to help you contribute to our community as a teacher, in whatever way you are called to do so.

Wicca and Paganism in This Book

Some people use the word
Pagan
to describe their religion or spirituality in much the same way that a Christian uses the word
Christian
. Others see the term
Pagan
as referring to a group of spiritual paths that includes—among others—Wiccans; Druids; Asatru; Feri; Celtic, Greek, and other Reconstructionists; and anyone else who follows a “Pagan” path and/or considers him- or herself Pagan. And some people who previously identified as Pagan are walking away from the word
Pagan
entirely. For the sake of simplicity and for the purposes of this book, when I refer to Pagans, I mean the “umbrella group” that includes Wiccans, Druids, etc.

In some cases I will be mentioning Wiccans specifically, rather than talking about all Pagans. I am not doing this to exclude other Pagans. Rather, my personal experience is more “Wicca-centric,” so many of my examples and anecdotes will be about experiences with Wicca, and I don't want to assume that they necessarily apply to all Pagans. They might, or they might not. Wicca and Paganism aren't the same thing, but the techniques in this book will work for both groups. Non-Wiccan Pagans might need to do a little extrapolating from my examples in some cases, however.

A Word about Children and Teens

This book is about teaching adults. I have never taught children Paganism, and I don't have children of my own, so I will leave teaching children to people who have them. There are some good books, websites, and email lists specifically on that subject, and about raising Pagan children, for people who are interested.

And although this book isn't geared toward teenagers, it could still be very useful for teens who end up teaching each other. Some teens step up and teach their peers simply because they can't get any adult help. Many adult Wiccan and Pagan groups don't accept teens, either because they feel that teens aren't old enough or they are worried that the teens' families might not want their children learning Wicca or Paganism, and they don't want to deal with the backlash from angry parents. These concerns are understandable, especially in an environment where Wicca and Paganism aren't seen as valid spiritual paths and can even be viewed as evil or satanic. But since so many adult groups won't accept teens, there are a lot of teens out there struggling to learn Paganism without any adult guidance. I don't have a solution to that problem, but teenagers teaching their peers should find that much of the information in this book can be applied to teens and adults alike.

You Are Not Alone

As with many experiences in life, when you start to teach, it helps to know that there are other people out there in the same situation. It helps so much, in fact, that I've included quotations from other Pagan teachers of various paths and traditions—some famous, some not—so you can learn from their experiences as well as mine. For example, my friend Anne Marie Forrester, a Wiccan high priestess and artist, has a story about being thrown immediately into the deep end of teaching:

I got my initiation, and at the end of the evening they dumped me off at home and said, “Good luck.” I said, “What do you mean, ‘good luck'? What do I do now?” And they said, “Well, now you start teaching other people.” And I went, “What do you mean I start teaching other people? I don't know anything yet!” And they said, “Sure you do. You're initiated. You're a witch!” I knew I wasn't ready to teach yet, so I redid the year-and-a-day training as something in between a student and a teacher in order to feel more prepared. There's nothing quite like teaching to make you learn, so that just threw me right in, but I still didn't really feel ready to teach on my own for many, many years afterward.

I didn't want to limit my interviewees to teachers with years of teaching under their belts. To make sure I captured the “newbie” experience, I interviewed Brian Rowe and Sarah Davies, who are just starting out as Wiccan teachers:

Sarah: It's kind of by the seat of your pants. I mean, that's sort of how you learn the tradition anyway. It was just, “Here's some hot water; we're gonna throw you in it.” And that's where we are, and it's kind of fun. We feel like we fail a lot. Once, our only student left, and we thought, “Oh my god, we look like complete idiots.”

Brian: That happens occasionally. I would like to see us failing forward.

Sarah: Failing forward into the future.

When you're reading the interviewees' stories, remember this: as smooth and accomplished as they are now, all of these teachers were new once, and they made mistakes—some of which you'll read about in this book. Here is a quick list of my interviewees (you can read their full bios on
page 289
):

• T. Thorn Coyle, author and teacher
  
• Sarah Davies and Brian Rowe, first-time Wiccan teachers
  
• Pete “Pathfinder” Davis, archpriest of the Aquarian Tabernacle Church
  
• Holli Emore, executive director of Cherry Hill Seminary
  
• Anne Marie Forrester, artist, author, and high priestess
  
• Melanie Henry, high priestess and editor of a Pagan newspaper
  
• Ellen Evert Hopman, Druid, master herbalist, and author
  
• Sylva Markson, high priestess and author
  
• Patrick McCollum, Wiccan chaplain in the California Department of Corrections and coordinator for the Lady Liberty League
  
• Christopher Penczak, author, teacher, and healing practitioner
  
• Stephanie Raymond, co-founder of Our Lady of the Earth and Sky (OLOTEAS), a Pagan organization
  
• Oberon Zell-Ravenheart, Pagan elder, author, and founder of the online Grey School of Wizardry
  

I hope that the information in this book will make it easier for Pagan teachers to get started or deepen their practice if they've already begun, and maybe even help them avoid making some of the mistakes I did. I actually thought about titling it
Learn from My Mistakes So You Don't Repeat Them: Go Out and Make Glorious Mistakes of Your Own Instead
, but that doesn't do much to inspire confidence, and it won't fit very well on a book spine. I can't tell you that you won't make glorious mistakes of your own—you absolutely will—but I can tell you that the risk is worth taking. There are few things in the world more rewarding than teaching, especially if you love your path or tradition and want to see it grow and its members thrive. As a Pagan teacher, you can change the world. I hope this book will help you take your first step.