Use Assistants
The teacher of [an RC] class should plan on having one or two or more assistant teachers. These will be experienced Co-Counselors when they are available, but even in beginning a class in a new place, the teacher should choose assistants.
For a teacher to acquire an assistant teacher is simple. . . . It requires no official permission from the Community for such appointments to be made. The teacher should choose the individuals whom she feels will quickly respond, will be helpful, and will take an interest in developing their own teaching skills to the point where they can teach classes on their own.
The assistant teacher’s role should be a growing one [that includes] more and more actual teaching as she or he is ready. For example, the assistant teacher can do some of the theory presentations, handle some of the Co-Counseling reports—can begin to actually teach as she becomes ready to try. If it turns out that a person does not grow in the job, that the responsibility is premature for that particular Co-Counselor, embarrassment should not delay the rotation of the opportunity to another promising student.
Besides using assistant teachers, it will be a good idea to find, early in the class, some responsible job that will suit the time and the talents of each person in the class. . . . Interest in the class is greatly enhanced by having a role in the class. Some of the jobs that people can be asked to do are opening the classroom and having it ready, seeing that the room is picked up and the chairs put away afterwards (this probably should be a rotating responsibility, but one person can be responsible for seeing that new people are involved each week). Often finances, the collection of money and issuing of receipts, can be handled by a class member or an assistant teacher. If someone can phone people who have not shown up for a class session—to make sure that they are not being left alone in some crisis or to remind them that they were missed and that the others would like to see them back—this will do a great deal for the affinity and closeness of the class and will give the person doing such a chore (which, again, can be rotated) a feeling of really being a full member and full participant in the class.
From pages 208 to 209 of
“A Fresh Look at the Fundamentals
of Co-Counseling Classes,”
in The Upward Trend