Abstract
This paper illuminates the beginning steps in learning to teach -- gaining new knowledge and transforming it for purposes of teaching. The authors, while working with people who were not experts in Jewish content or pedagogy, tried to foster substantive understandings and a stance toward teaching that favors engagement of students with texts and serious ideas. The extended examples illustrate some of the understandings, skills, and dispositions avocational teachers needed to develop and the kind of on-site support and guidance they received.