Playbook Deep Dive
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March 3, 2025The Catholic Education Playbook and Mission Outcomes document is the framework for understanding how the school can animate the Church’s mission ever more deeply for this age the Lord has placed us in. Specifically, the Playbook and Mission Outcomes give details on what Archbishop Sample means by “Mission Passionate Catholic Education” in the Archdiocese of Portland.Each month, this section of the Mission Monthly will examine one section of the Mission Indicators (starting on p. 5 of the document linked above), giving explanations and examples of what that Mission Indicator could look like in the life of the school. We began in January unpacking Spiritual Formation of Disciples.This month, we’ll dive into the defining characteristics of Rigorous Catholic Intellectual Formation and Scholarship. Practically, what does this look like in our schools?We all know that the instructional moves in the classroom are really important! The word "pedagogy" comes from two Greek words that mean “to lead a child”. Our pedagogy should lead our children to the truth we want them to consider in the lesson – the truth that numbers can be added to make larger numbers, or the truth that we shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition. Teachers lead children to the truth through the moves in the classroom – asking great questions, asking children to do activities to engage with the idea, and so on.Archbishop Sample, through the playbook invites us to make sure our instructional moves are forming children in what is most human. The Catechism (paragraphs 31-38) tells us there are ways the human person comes to know that are necessary not only to know facts, but to know God. The ways a human person comes to know well are through imitation, attention, deliberation, inquiry, memory, and calculation.Let’s expand on three of these faculties:- Imitation: Humans are creatures who imitate. The words "imitate" and "image" are related because they both come from the Latin word imitare, which means "to copy" or "to imitate". So when we say we are all made in God’s image, it means we are made to copy or imitate! Sometimes in our culture, we are told it’s bad to imitate: our culture says, “Be your own person!” overemphasizing a breaking out of a mold and defining one's own way of being. But it’s good to imitate things which are worthy of imitation. Think about how a baby learns to smile by imitating the face of the person smiling at the baby. Beautiful. We even learn languages through imitation. Think about how proud our students are in art class when they perfectly imitate Van Gogh’s The Starry Night painting. So, contrary to our culture saying, “Be your own person!”, we really value imitation in the Catholic school. After all, we want our students to imitate Jesus, Mary, and the saints. So, we should practice imitation in the classroom.
- Observe in your classrooms. Are students imitating good writing? Are they imitating good artists? Are they imitating the teachers’ pronunciation of words or phonograms or handwriting?
- Attention: We all know that today students’ attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, and are threatened by cell phones and screens. And we all know anecdotally and through research that this is a tremendous challenge, to the point of crisis for our young people. But we also all know that this is an area worthy of reclaiming which would offer our students a very tangible freedom-- freedom from addiction to screens, and freedom from inability to attend to something. The Bible includes many verses that encourage paying attention. Ultimately, we want our students to pay attention in prayer and pay attention at Mass. So, we can work in the classroom to form their abilities in attention. Are our classrooms relatively simple without a lot of clutter or things on the wall or flashing on a Smartboard to cause inattention? Do we ask students to do sustained reading? Do we ask students to, on their own, attend to long math problems?
- Memory: we are often taught in our training as teachers to shun memorization, that memorization is a lower-ordered skill and not enough. We agree. We don’t think students who memorize facts and figures only are educated. But, we can all recognize that memorizing some things is good. In fact, deeply good. Have you ever been in a difficult time, and a scripture verse came to your mind and helped you get through the difficulty? You had that scripture verse memorized. It was memorized in your mind, for sure, but also remembered in your heart. We can build that skill in our classrooms. We can ask students to memorize poetry by heart, scripture by heart, even stories by heart. The distinction is that we don’t just want them to have disconnected, fragmented facts, but rather a store of memory in their hearts that they can draw from for the rest of their lives. Choose things worthy of being set deep in their heart to be memorized!
- Imitation: Humans are creatures who imitate. The words "imitate" and "image" are related because they both come from the Latin word imitare, which means "to copy" or "to imitate". So when we say we are all made in God’s image, it means we are made to copy or imitate! Sometimes in our culture, we are told it’s bad to imitate: our culture says, “Be your own person!” overemphasizing a breaking out of a mold and defining one's own way of being. But it’s good to imitate things which are worthy of imitation. Think about how a baby learns to smile by imitating the face of the person smiling at the baby. Beautiful. We even learn languages through imitation. Think about how proud our students are in art class when they perfectly imitate Van Gogh’s The Starry Night painting. So, contrary to our culture saying, “Be your own person!”, we really value imitation in the Catholic school. After all, we want our students to imitate Jesus, Mary, and the saints. So, we should practice imitation in the classroom.