Linda O’Hara, one of the lead teachers at Coláiste Iognáid shares a reflection after the school’s staff training day on Ignatian Pedagogy.

Our Ignatian Pedagogy training day consisted of three distinct parts: an address and Q & A with a guest speaker, staff discussions in smaller groups and subject department group meetings. The day closed with a whole-staff plenary session.

We were delighted to welcome Fr. Johnny Go as our guest for the morning session. He posed two probing questions which set the tone for a stimulating day of dialogue and reflection.

1. What makes a Jesuit school Jesuit?

2. Why even bother?

Fr. Johnny’s address was refreshingly frank. He invited us to reflect on whether we perhaps consider successful implementation of IPP to be unattainable, or even as a “four-letter word” (as it has become in some parts of the world because of the difficulty of implementing it). This challenged us to confront our own current attitudes and behaviours, as these are the inevitable starting point for any future action.

The reality is that there is no one-size-fits-all version of Ignatian Pedagogy. While on the one hand, this presents challenges, it is also a blessing that we may design and adjust according to our own personal context. We were a ready audience, as we know only too well that modern classrooms in an ever-changing world need precisely this bespoke approach. Fr. Johnny’s insights, accompanied by top-quality slides and visuals, stimulated a range of questions from our staff.

One particularly interesting exchange took place around how different contexts within a school lend themselves differently to application of an Ignatian approach. The specific contrast was made between a retreat experience or something in the formation domain as opposed to a Mathematics class. Colleagues also expressed an awareness of the importance of the opportunities we have access to on a daily basis, e.g. really listening to each other while sharing our classroom experiences, and creating powerful learning opportunities by observing each other’s classroom practice.

Staff group facilitation

The midday session drew heavily on Fr. Johnny’s outline of the benefits of using an Ignatian approach:

• Ignatian Pedagogy can help strengthen our identity and deepen our culture as Jesuit institutions.
• Ignatian Pedagogy enables us to promote 21st-century learning in a systematic way.
• Ignatian Pedagogy can help us to better educate our post-millennial students.

One of the goals of Ignatian pedagogy is to promote reflection and action.  These processes need to go together.  Fr. Johnny states that truly good education is a process of continuous renewal, innovation, reinvention and reinterpretation.  This is a challenge to us as a school community, and we embraced it by engaging in professional dialogue around the 6 Es of Learning by Refraction: Expertise and Enthusiasm, Empathy and Empowerment, Engagement and Excellence. In using this checklist, we were looking carefully at precisely what it is we are doing at Coláiste Iognáid every day.

The richness of our thinking was evident in what emerged.

Expertise and Enthusiasm revealed a view of the teacher as a whole person by taking well-being factors such as sleep into account. Similarly, the importance of teachers receiving positive feedback on their efforts featured. Fr. Johnny made the point that ‘it makes sense to trust your teachers’, and an extension of that is keeping teachers energized via acknowledgement of their efforts. More predictably perhaps, key features of an Irish teacher’s professional development were noted, e.g. correcting State Exams, membership of professional subject associations.

Empathy and Empowerment play critical roles in any young person’s 21st-century learning experience. The challenge for the teacher is to build a relationship which achieves these in optimal proportions. We must reach our students where they are and connect with them effectively while the teachings are shared and explored. Empowerment is fully showcased when the teacher recognises that their presence is no longer required.

Engagement and Excellence lent itself to rich discussion around the teacher’s role in setting up an independent learning experience. It can seem counter-intuitive to a hardworking teacher to step back, and yet that is precisely what we must do in order for our students to truly shine on their own learning journeys. A clear picture emerged of the learner embracing and applying the learning far beyond the classroom context, and it is this we must strive for.

These discussions brought us very much in touch with both the essence of what makes a Jesuit school Jesuit and the multitude of reasons why we bother.

Subject department meetings in the afternoon narrowed our focus to improving our learner experience. As a school we had previously identified potential areas for improvement in terms of learner experience. Using our shared learning from the sessions on the 6Es, each department agreed on an area of strength and a potential area for growth within that subject area. An action plan around an area of growth to be achieved within a specific timeframe and with an identified year group makes up the middle layer of our school’s threefold response to the questions posed by Fr. Johnny.

The surrounding layers of follow-up to this introduction to Ignatian Pedagogy are individual teachers engaging in reflection and appropriate action on their own approach, and a whole school response whereby school management actively supports the development of an Ignatian approach here at Coláiste Iognáid.

Our considered response is inspired by a quotation from Fr. Johnny:

“Paying lip service to the words will not make things real.”