As an English major, I always enjoyed planning and organizing my thoughts onto paper – creatively and argumentatively. As a teacher, one of my passions was helping students learn about the writing process – prewriting, writing, and revising. “It’s recursive, not linear,” was my challenge to students at the start of each new academic year. Then the fun would begin! It was gratifying to see each student make progress on his writing, as the year unfolded. I revel in the process myself, laboring to create and continuously revise meaningful pieces of poetry and professional essays. Often, I find myself happily caught in the tension of realizing I’m never really finished with a piece, never quite at a stopping point – I’m always returning to my writing to tweak, revise, and clarify. The tension has served me well in how I approach other endeavors. As a participant in a series of leadership seminars in the mid-nineties, I was introduced to the reflective exercise of writing case studies, then role playing the case studies during our seminar weeks together. Writing these case studies provided us time to reflect - creating brief fictional stories taken from our real-life experiences. During our seminars, we role played the case studies we created – using them as platforms to allow important issues to surface (in a non-threatening context) and to then wonder about solving moral, ethical, and leadership challenges that surfaced during the cases. Through this exercise, I began seeing how the written word has the potential of playing a formative role in helping leaders visualize real situations and real challenges couched in fictional scenarios. For me today, as an educational consultant, the case study continues to be an important tool I create and use in setting the context for same job conferences I help plan and implement – a tool that continues to challenge conference participants in much the same ways I was challenged. Below are some qualities of case studies our leadership teams develop and use as context-setting pieces for many of our regional leadership conferences: Conference Outcomes, Themes, and Topics: before writing a case study to be used at a conference, our leadership planning team carefully creates, reviews and revises participant outcomes, themes, and conference topics – making a specific list of items, which will be later weaved into the case study. It is not until after we finalize the agenda and schedule of activities that support the outcomes, themes, and topics, that we write the case study – which will be one of the first conference activities. A Day in the Life: as we write the narrative, we visualize one work day of one leader. The narrative unfolds as the leader’s day unfolds, and it typically begins when the leader is driving to work and parking in the parking lot of his or her school. Here’s an example of how a typical case study begins. This particular case study was created and used with educational technologists: “It is early Tuesday morning, and Xavier heads to Jesuit High School. He is especially tired today because he was up most of the night successfully retrieving some school network files that failed to back up after the school’s file systems crashed because the tech host space overheated again. When he arrives on campus, Xavier heads into school, noting the many students who are there early – their heads buried in their laptops.” Mission-Specific Language and Theory: as we write the case, in addition to including items from our list of outcomes, themes, and conference topics, we include key components of mission and vision. Here’s an example: “As Xavier leaves the meeting, he reflects. Approaching his work in his first year as director of Jesuit’s educational technology department – a growing department in the school – Xavier was excited about new leadership responsibilities. Though often these days, he prays for the understanding explicit in The First Principle and Foundation, ‘For everything has the potential of calling forth in us a deeper response to our life in God.’ What does that mean?” Here, the highlighted words (above) are foundational ideas for the organization we were working with. So, not only does the case address conference outcomes, themes, and topics, but also it is explicitly tied to the organization’s mission and vision. A Basic Introduction: after we draft the case study content, we add an introductory prompt that describes how we will use the case study during the conference. Here’s an example: “This case study is fiction. As you follow along during the morning’s reading, you may recognize some of your own responsibilities, challenges, qualities, and struggles. Some content may be familiar to you. Other content might be strange and new territory. This case study is the foundational platform upon which our work will evolve this week, in that it presents a variety of issues, topics, responsibilities, qualities, challenges, and questions as they relate to educational technology in our schools. It is intended to be a prompt to allow us to think about important issues. As you listen to and follow along in the case study reading this morning, write down key words or phrases, key ideas or questions, important concepts or buzz words that surface for you. Maybe what you hear makes you think of an issue you are having back at your school. Maybe it sparks you to ask a question. Jot down notes. Maybe what you write comes directly from something in the case. Maybe what you write was prompted by a thought that went through your head when you were listening. Maybe you make connections to last night’s opening presentation. Write notes. Note, readers will read slowly and pause often to allow you to notice words and write them down during the reading. When we finish the reading, we will talk about our reactions, our notes, and we will have a larger group conversation around the case study – as a pre-lection to today and the rest of the cohort gathering.” We set expectations and give directions. Guiding Questions: toward the end of the narrative, we pose questions for reflection and small or larger group conversation. Here are some examples:
Guiding questions help us in our post-reading conversation. We newsprint conversation responses, allowing participants to visual trends and refer to them as the conference continues. Finally, after we write, review, and revise the study, we break it into digestible pieces, and assign reading parts to conference participants. This activity during a conference is context-setting, allowing participants to explore issues, while reflecting and having conversations. We continuously return to the case study narrative as the conference unfolds. In the coming weeks I will upload various conference case studies for you to reference as samples that might prompt your own creative thinking.
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As a teacher in a Jesuit high school, I was given the gift of participating in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius – powerful faith experiences challenging me to a daily routine of prayer and meditation, along with weekly conversations with a spiritual director. The Spiritual Exercises continue to be the central lens through which I see my current work, gifts, and challenges – allowing me to re-imagine my place in the world as a servant leader and helping me to strengthen my friendship with God. My experiences with discernment during the Exercises led me to where I am today, working as an educational consultant for a network of schools. The Exercises also helped me build a solid classroom teaching pedagogy with students and they contribute to a working framework for the way I proceed as an educational, servant leader. In the Classroom . . . I use the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm (IPP) in the classroom because it comes directly from the specific and identifiable qualities attributed to the relationship I developed with my spiritual director, during the Spiritual Exercises. I am challenged, as a teacher (with my students) in the classroom to imitate the type of relationship that I developed with my retreat director, while moving through the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. This classroom teaching model, based on the Exercises, includes five general components – context, experience, reflection, action, and evaluation. When I moved through the Spiritual Exercises with my Jesuit spiritual director, we met weekly in my office for conversations – reviewing my week of my prayer and meditation, as well as previewing the week of prayer ahead. My retreat director typically began our conversation with three simple questions:
These questions set the context for our conversation, while focusing on me, the retreatant. As teachers, when we try to imitate the Spiritual Exercises in our classrooms, we might theoretically wonder, “How do we begin with a focus on students?” As we plan our student-centered lessons and work, perhaps we fall into the trap of thinking more about ourselves, our preferences, and our own individual excitements and fears as they relate to the lesson or the day? Of course I bring my own baggage – my own dispositions – into class with me. Maybe I had a bad night of sleep, or my son was irritable, causing me to be irritable. I come to class, and my bad mood surely rubs off on students. Or maybe I dislike a part of a book we are reading or a protagonist in that book, and my distain colors our discussion. Maybe I am upset at the school principal or a colleague, and I take it out on students? Using the IPP setting the context at the start of a class challenges me to move away from the focus on self, instead focusing on students and the material for the day:
These are introductory questions we can think about and reflect on with our students. And remember, they are similar to questions posed during the interaction of the retreatant and retreat director during the Spiritual Exercises:
After my spiritual director and I set the context for the weekly conversation during the Spiritual Exercises, he challenged me to talk about my experience with prayer that week, by asking, “What struck you during prayer and why?” Most times there would be a long pause – time for me to reflect and respond, drawing on my notes from my experiences of the past week. Most times my responses were supplemented by his offering his own experiences with the material and his interpretation of the biblical passages we read over the past week. We often toggled back and forth between our experiences and reflections – components of the IPP – arriving at clarity on content and our responses to that content. I recall one exchange my retreat director and I had, when he asked me, “Pete, how’s your daily meditation going?” Frustrated, I replied, “I can’t meditate every day for thirty minutes, it takes way too much time during my day!” Calmly, he smiled and challenged me to, “Talk about the routine of your regular day.” As I reflected on my day, two items caught his attention. “In the very early morning you walk your dog for fifteen minutes. Then, after dinner, you said you also walk your dog for fifteen minutes.” After listening to my routine, he asked, “Pete, how about you do your mediation and prayer while you walk your dog?” Ah-ha! Simple enough. His suggestion came directly from listening to my reflections about my concrete experiences. And it worked. We both used experience and reflection successfully, to help me grow as a retreatant. But what does using IPP experience and reflection look like in our classes? We look at content – whatever it is – and think about content through the lens our own experiences – ours and our students. We provide prompts and time during class that challenge students to reflect on how the lesson’s content might enter into their lives in real and concrete ways. If we are talking about a novel, we ask, “How does this theme resonate with us today, in our world?” We always provide examples and challenge students to do the same. If we are taking about a mathematical equation, we ask, “How is this lived out in the world beyond our classroom?” We always tie math work to practical applications that students can identify with – so they can see the math applied to the world in which we live. If we are studying the causes of conflict in social studies, we challenge ourselves to see current social and political similarities at work in our society today. We always encourage students – through the lens of the things we learn in class – to be engaged in the world and in social justice experiences. We allow time to ask questions and reflect on/about content based upon our experiences, to think or act differently. Upon the conclusion of the weekly conversation with my retreat director during the Spiritual Exercises, we look ahead to the coming week – the prayers, the readings, the challenges, and the work assigned to me – all action items. I ask for advice from my spiritual director, and we pray together to conclude our meeting. Similarly, in my classroom, IPP action is concrete. I assign meaningful homework providing students with practice and challenging them to integrate lesson content into their lives in concrete ways. We have meaningful class discussions and small groups where I set the expectation that every student participate during every class period. We move through hands-on activities reinforcing lesson content, such as debates, art projects, and roles plays. IPP action, too, is future-oriented. “How do we think and act differently because of our experiences today?” I recently had a conversation with a teacher about a reading he intended to use in his English class. We talked about the IPP action component and how this might play out in his classroom (and beyond), related specifically to that reading. Then, during his class, he challenged his students: “After this class through the day today and into tonight, try to live out the reading’s lesson. Journal and note through the next 24 hours about how you do this. Then, come back tomorrow to tell us about it.” Action challenges us all not only to think but also to act differently, during or after a lesson or content piece. Finally, at the end of our weekly meeting about the Spiritual Exercises, my spiritual advisor and I conclude by asking each other, “How did we do? How did this conversation go?” This is evaluation. My spiritual director challenges me to assess, and he uses my input and assessment to improve the next time we meet. Evaluation during a lesson perhaps happens toward end of a class, when we ask students:
During evaluation, we not only check for student understanding, but also assess how the class went. At the end of a unit or lesson, perhaps we quiz or test. Often, we challenge students through performance assessments. Informal evaluation occurs during class, “Let’s stop. Thumbs up or thumbs down – who gets this?” Or, “What could I do differently as your teacher?” These are forms of IPP evaluation in class with students. Formal and informal IPP evaluation (both summative and formative) happens frequently and through a variety of tools and methods. In Leadership . . . As leaders in our schools, we can also approach our work using components of the IPP. It can be a framework for every day. For example, during agenda-driven meetings we facilitate, difficult conversations with colleagues, and during strategic planning, we always begin with context – remembering who we are, what we are about, our mission/vision, and trying to listen to understand those whom we serve and serve with. Making important decisions, setting priorities, and interacting with stakeholders, doing class observations, we use our previous experiences and those of others to help inform how we proceed. During the daily grind, when items on our to-do list pile high and the pace of events in school accelerates, we find it helpful to take time for reflection – stepping back to ask questions and challenge ourselves and those around us to think in new and different ways. Finally, as leaders we are never afraid of informed action and continuous evaluation. The IPP includes a set of recursive components based upon the qualities of a relationship that is built over time between a retreatant and a retreat director during the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola. Therefore, it is a useful framework of our way of proceeding in both the classroom and as institutional, servant leaders. |
Pete MussoAssistant Principal, Curriculum & Instruction Archives
May 2022
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