Learning Requires Leisure

| This leader reminds us that meaningful, lasting change in schools unfolds gradually and requires space, reflection, and patience from both leaders and teachers.

Recently, as we were preparing a leadership formation program for mid-level school leaders (i.e., department chairs, directors, etc.), a new colleague of mine said one of the most profound things I’ve heard in my nearly two decades in the vocation of Catholic, Jesuit education: “To learn requires leisure.” What he was getting at was this: for growth and learning to take root, professional learning cannot be all churn and burn. Space must be given for downtime and reflection in addition to providing people with new skills and knowledge.

Yet, this is one of the most common mistakes I believe well-intentioned school leaders and those leading professional learning make when it comes to designing and implementing professional learning programming for today’s teachers.

When I reflect on the professional learning experiences that I’ve helped design over the years in collaboration with many talented colleagues, the most successful sessions always included the same characteristics, modeled after the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm (IPP), the hallmark of our approach to professional learning:

• dedicated time for new learning;

• space for dialogue, problem solving, and reflection;

• and application of the new learning to one’s own context.

While each movement of the IPP is significant in its own regard, the emphasis on the reflection component—or the “leisure” piece, if you will—should be really emphasized. If there isn’t sufficient down time for teachers to reflect on their response to a new strategy or how they might implement a new strategy among the busyness of their life as a classroom teacher and a person of modern society, then there is likely no chance that the new technique, strategy, or approach will ever enter the classroom. In other words, if teachers don’t have time to reflect on how they might apply their new learning to their own classroom context, then the new learning might as well have not taken place. And what a loss that is, ultimately, for the students.

The Ignatian approach to learning prioritizes planning intentional spaces for reflection to take place so that the learner—whether they are elementary, high school, college-aged, or even adults—is able to process new knowledge and experiences and consider how they might take this new learning and put it into action. Building dedicated time for individual and group reflection on teaching practice is one of the most significant ways that those leading professional learning can impact the long-term teaching practices of their faculty.

Further, those leading professional learning must be willing to develop the mindset that this is a long game and that teachers are people with important contexts and experiences that we must consider as we continue to form them as professionals. All too often, as is so commonplace in our culture, results are expected immediately. Yet, the wisest among us know that leading lasting and meaningful change takes time and must be done collaboratively.