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.
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Pete MussoAssistant Principal, Curriculum & Instruction Archives
May 2022
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