Prayer takes on many forms and has many different functions in our lives. Prayer is integral to a Christian, and so, Catholic way of life. Prayer is not unique to any specific religion it is an aspect of any faith, as is spirituality. As prayer is an almost universal experience it is something that can be learnt, practiced and thus handed on to another generation.
In handing on, we need an involvement that is built on knowledge and understanding. This is where teaching about prayer, and how to pray starts. We need to understand the concepts and uses of prayer for ourselves to be able to communicate them to others.
But how does this relate to student outcomes? It depends on the outcome. The important outcomes we may never see.
Sharing Our Story Stage two outcomes centred on Prayer are these,
“Demonstrate an understanding and appreciation of prayer as having many different forms, and as being intrinsic to the Mass and the celebration of the Liturgical year.”
The key concepts are defined as these,
Prayer is a very important way through which we grow in closeness to God.
Prayer involves rituals, symbols and celebrations.
When we pray God is present and active, especially when the Church celebrates the Eucharist.
Our prayer is inspired by the feasts and seasons of the Liturgical year.
There are various traditional and contemporary cultural forms of devotion to Mary and the Saints.
So, to improve student outcomes in prayer I could teach the children various forms of prayers and many of the church traditional prayers. I could pre-test and post-test giving the children grades of E to A. But have I used web 2 at all and have the children been able to transfer knowledge to experience?
I could use web 2 to provide and promote ways and forms of prayer to the staff and I could use web 2 to stimulate discussion around prayer by finding clips that are thought provoking and by searching out websites and sharing them on a blog site. Once prayer is used it becomes easier to use a second and eventually a thousandth time. A bit like communion, the First Communion is wonderful but what about one’s thousandth? Is that one just as wonderful?
Where to from here? I have started a separate blog on inspiritation and prayer so I am wondering where all this will take me and you.
Margaret
4 comments:
Thanks for your post Margaret,
I remember a Principal I once had, reminding the staff that 'Prayer is not a 'performance'...not a 'spectator' activity...' She was always exploring ways to draw in our school community so that there were a variety of prayer activities/opportunities. The goal was to provide experiences that hopefully allowed for each member to be active participants not merely observers. Funnily enough, on thinking back to those times, it was her personal devotion, her commitment to following Gospel values and her absolute care and consideration for each member of the school community that contributed to the authentic experience of prayer in that community...more than anything else.
Your post reflects on the need for all of us to think about the place of prayer in our lives. I think your idea of a blog is one of a variety of ways we could try to provide opportunities for us all to be active participants. You've started off with some great guiding questions!
Frances
I looked at the website Gary sent us and I think it would be a great way to implement a prayer session in the class. It is another type of prayer session as Frances said -a way of providing a variety of prayer opportunities. This links in with my goal of wanting prayer to be meaningful to those involved. Maybe providing prayer sessions in a range of ways might be the key to getting children to relate more in a personal way. They may enjoy one prayer session over another just as I enjoy mass at some churches more than others. Here is the website:
www.catholicireland.net/talk2god/
I recommend you have a look and check it out for yourself!!!
Thanks to everone for the great conversation and discussion we had ,Wed Week 6. It was great to have everyone together. It appears to me that from the conversation, there was a genuine difficulty in making real and varied prayer a constant in the classroom.
I agree with our discussions that it would be good to have, as the sample pathways suggest, a prayer of some sort at the end of each unit of work.
I also agree that it becomes difficult to make that prayer meaningful to the children as many are unsure of how to run, what to put into a prayer.
I feel the general consesus from the group was that if we are to improve student outcomes, the aim of our professional development, then the group needs to work towards producing prayers for various units of work as a way of testing what works best for the children.
These prayers need to be varied, not just a standard liturgy of the word with a reading and a couple of prayers of Intercession.
The way forward for us it to create a basic pro forma for prayer that would contain the essential elements of prayer but by producing actual prayers for different units of work, we could show many and varied differentiations to the 'standard' prayer.
From this I sense that we would, after having tried the prayers amongst the students, model such prayers for the staff . Our way of taking our learning to the rest of the staff and hopefully then to all the student body.
Any other suggestions from staff that are not part of our focus group would be welcomed.
Thats a great idea to actually test our work out on the children, as essentially these are the ones we are writing the prayers for. Just like in other units where children evaluate their learning, they could evaluate the prayer in terms of whether it was meaningful to them and in what way. Once other staff have the opportunity to look at our prayers, they may have ideas to add too which I am more than happy to hear. Although we have been discussing our experiences with prayer it would be good as Phil suggested to carry out a personal reflection of what we have learnt through this journey at the end of term.
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