Schools rethink pedagogical leadership

The Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm (IPP) is always under continuous renewal. In the current context, in a post-pandemic era, with energy crisis, wars and other global challenges, it is a good time to consider how it serves to educate our students in this unstable world. This was one of the aims of the "Pedagogical Leadership" conference held in Madrid on 14 October, led by education experts Johnny Go SJ and Rita Atienza. It also sought to provoke the 150 SJ school principals gathered and invite them to ask themselves many questions about their own schools and ways of teaching. This workshop concluded the two educational experts' tour of Spain, following their time in Alicante for a JECSE training and the training of school principals in Madrid.   

Johnny Go SJ, who holds a doctorate in education from University College London and the National Institute of Education in Singapore, is the education secretary for Jesuit primary and secondary schools throughout the Asia-Pacific region. He is also the director of the Science and Art of Learning and Teaching Institute (SALT) of the Ateneo de Manila University. In his speech, he summarised the method that he and his colleague Rita propose in the book "Learning by refraction", which is synthesised in connecting with the context and provoking in the student not only learning but also a subsequent construction through it (refracting). 

For Go, leadership in an Ignatian school is not only administrative, but of the community and of the Mission, and involves encouraging an integral formation that unites the academic with the other personal skills of leadership, and among the most important of these is the relationship of the community itself with the Mission so that it becomes involved in it. In summary, Go said that learning by refraction, "must help students to build on the ideas we give them, it is a learning process in continuous revision in which teachers must be designers". He invited those present to think also about the way in which Ignatian identity permeates the centres, whether spontaneously or in a directed way, whether inserted in the academic or in the extra-academic. 

Rita Atienza is a Master of Education from Ateneo de Manila University, an expert in the Understanding by Design (UbD) curriculum design framework and coordinator of Teacher Education and Professional Development at the SALT Institute in Manila and co-author of the above-mentioned book.  

Why do we need to make changes? Why these reforms now? -she invited the audience to think. Content is now available on You tube, Instagram, Tik-tok... Those are the sources of information, "but other skills that you need to learn such as critical thinking, communication skills, compassion, cooperative, resilience... things you need to generate solutions. In his opinion, we need to speak the language of the Alpha Generation sitting in the sj classrooms, applying elements that manage to ground IPP, which is very universal and classical. 

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From Jesuits in Europe: jesuits.eu/news/2228-principals-of-sj-schools-rethink-pedagogical-leadership