The ACE Blog

Photo by Nathan Solis, courtesy of the Eastsider LA. Originally appeared in Students learn about love, death & Dia de los Muertos at an East L.A. cemetery, October 30, 2014. For Catholic school teachers, celebrating Día de los Muertos can be a magnificent way to encourage students to pray for and remember their deceased family and friends. It can also be an opportunity to celebrate, honor, and learn from students and families of Mexican and Central American descent and the richness of their cultural heritage.

Like Halloween, Día de los Muertos is a holiday linked to the Feasts of All Saints and All Souls in the Catholic liturgical calendar. But, unlike Halloween, which has become mostly about candy and costumes for the sake of entertainment, Día de los Muertos is a holiday that celebrates the lives of loved ones who have died and the generations of ancestors who have gone before us.

From family picnics at grave sites, to lavishly decorated home altars, to the aroma of marigolds and pan de muerto, the celebration of Día de los Muertos is as beautiful as it is profound. Here are some ways to help children young and old learn about this important holiday.

A couple weeks ago, we were lucky enough to hear from Dr. Ernest Morrell, a professor of English Education at Columbia University’s Teachers College, on how we can make education socially, culturally, and digitally relevant to our students. While he was teeming with ideas for how to better walk and connect with students (everything from auto-ethnography projects to science rap battles, parent mentoring programs to new titles in multicultural literature), Morell devoted a portion of his talk to this stark reality: that “we compete with the media for students’ values.”

Like many people, I sometimes have trouble sleeping on airplanes. The best solution to this is some reading. Usually, after a few pages or so of an innocuous novel or article my eyelids will get heavy and I’ll knock my head back, mouth agape, and be out for the flight.

That was the plan as I paged through Catholic School Renaissance: A Wise Giver’s Guide to Strengthening a National Asset on a flight to Denver a few days ago.

But much to my surprise, I didn’t doze. In fact, I was riveted. For the whole two-hour flight, I sat in my middle seat, forearms pulled in close like a T-Rex, flipped through the pages, underlined, and made marginalia.

We are all to some degree familiar with the phenomenon whereby a word or term is used so often that it ceases to have real meaning. If not, you need only listen to a sports talk show immediately following a championship (regardless of the sport) and pay attention to the number of times a particular team or athlete from the game is referred to as “the greatest of all time” to get a sense for this dynamic.

In the context of K-12 education, the term “reform” often feels as if it is approaching such a point. On some level, this makes sense. In the abstract, reform is something that is quite easy to be for and very difficult to be against. The challenge, of course, is to move past abstraction and get a sense for the particular contours of the reform we’re discussing.

There are some things that are just distinctly October. Flannel shirts, pumpkin spiced lattes, the changing leaves . . . and the Chicago Cubs.

What’s that, you say? The Cubs haven’t been to the NLCS in twelve years? The Cubs, infamous for having not won a World Series since 1908, have long been written off by baseball fans as being “cursed.” So while Cubs fans might still associate October more with Steve Bartman than with success, there’s no question that in addition to a crisp breeze, there’s a buzz in the air. The Cubs are rolling.

And that made us think — since baseball is the mother of all metaphors, we in the Catholic school world realized there might actually be a few similarities between the Cubbies and Catholic schools. Here are some thoughts:

If asked to “draw an engineer,” you might, perhaps, draw a man with glasses, sitting alone at his desk. If you did, your picture would match up with those drawn by many students when asked to do the same, even in their early elementary school years.

To combat this, and to promote engineering as a profession and vocation for people from all walks of life, many new science standards incorporate engineering concepts as early as first grade. I spoke with Gina Svarovsky, Assistant Professor of Practice in Engineering Education for the Notre Dame Center for STEM Education, about the reasons for and benefits of incorporating engineering lessons into an elementary curriculum.

Many educators talk about the “engineering pipeline,” the hope that if students are introduced early to engineering, many will enter college knowing about and considering a calling to be an engineer. Svarovsky prefers to see it somewhat differently.

At the end of August my Professional Learning Community conducted our first video chat. Through the wonders of the interwebs, it was delightful to see the smiling faces of our small group of Remick Leaders, now scattered across the nation. Mike Zelenka, a great principal at Incarnation Catholic School in Tampa, FL, thoughtfully led our meeting and reflected on his own experience of coming to Notre Dame for a couple days this summer. Mike spent time in classes and said the conversations about “root beliefs” got him thinking about his own root beliefs. He listed and explained some of the ones he came up with.

Lemme just tell you, they are really good.

What an awesome week to work for American Catholic schools.

For the last decade, every story I’ve seen about Catholic schools in the mainstream media has been a tale of decline and demise, a sad story about a once vibrant system of schools that has entered a phase of decline and is heading toward certain death. Just last month The Atlantic published “The Demise of Private Schools.” In 2013, the New York Times published, “A Lifelines for Minorities, Catholic Schools Retrench.” Time, 2009: “Looking for Solutions to the Catholic-School Crisis.” Education Week, 2012: “Catholic Schools Feeling Squeeze from Charters.” Education Next, 2007: “Can Catholic Schools Be Saved?.” Philadelphia Magazine, 2013: “Will Philadelphia’s Catholic school’s Be Resurrected?.” 

You get the idea.

A solid week has gone by since Pope Francis’s historic visit to Our Lady Queen of Angels School in East Harlem, and the dust has finally settled. The pope is back in Rome, kids are back in school, and public transit in the cities is back to normal.

What did Pope Francis really leave us with? What was the essential question of his lesson to the students (and, by extension, kids everywhere)?

If only we had...a lesson plan!

Well, lucky for you, ACE has received exclusive access to Pope Francis’ actual, totally real, not-at-all-made-up lesson plan from his visit to Our Lady Queen of Angels. When you really think about it, is it any surprise that Pope Francis, a former high school teacher and professor wrote out a lesson plan?

Here it is, reprinted in its entirety for your enjoyment and edification:

As the school year moves out of launch phase and picks up steam, it’s all too easy for us as teachers and leaders to get caught up in planning, programming, and logistics – the nuts and bolts of school. As we build relationships within the context of the school community, we also naturally begin to form opinions about the people around us. School can be beautiful in terms of relationship formation, but by the same token, school can sometimes feel as if it is the great clash of humanity.

For some of us, the combination of all of these factors can lead us down a path in which we begin to get caught up in the “daily grind,” completing tasks and fulfilling responsibilities as a definition of success within our day.

As September draws to a close, many school leaders are looking for ways to best allocate their Title II funds for the year. For educators who, like my first-year teacher self, didn’t know Catholic schools got this kind of funding, now is a great time to see if you can attend that conference you’ve been salivating over.

We asked some of our faculty members to tell us about their favorite conferences and professional development (PD) opportunities, making them promise to remain unswayed by where they took place or what free swag they received. Here is a list of what they recommended:

Fr. Nuzzi with Congressman Tim Ryan. Fr. Nuzzi is Mr. Ryan's Confirmation sponsor.Thousands of Catholics and non-Catholics tuned into Pope Francis' historic speech to Congress this afternoon, but precious few were actually there to see it in person. Lucky for us, Fr. Ron Nuzzi, ACE's Senior Director, Renewing Identity Strengthening Education, was there on the floor.

I spoke for a few minutes with Fr. Nuzzi as he waited to catch his flight back to South Bend. In the following podcast interview, he gives his impressions of the pope's speech and speaks a bit on what it was like to witness history:

 Listen to their conversation below:

One of the most important responsibilities for a school leader is building a strong community among the students, their parents, and the school’s faculty and staff. While there are many ways to help foster a great community, a principal’s morning interaction with his or her students can help set the right tone for the day that keeps the school community motivated and believing in themselves.

I spoke with Rodney Pierre-Antoine, ACE’s Director of the Notre Dame ACE Academies and a veteran school leader, to get his thoughts on the importance of a consistent, positive morning interaction with students.

Morning Assembly

One of the most effective ways for a school leader to connect with his or her community is through a morning assembly. Pierre-Antoine said that, when he was a principal, the most important aspect of his morning assemblies was to keep Christ at the heart of his message and to co-create an atmosphere “animated by the Gospel spirit”. A morning assembly provides the school community a daily opportunity to break open the Word and encounter Christ through communal prayer and fellowship. He leveraged this daily platform to spread the good news to all members of the community (students, parents, faculty, and staff), that God loves them and calls them to love one another.

Another crucial aspect to a successful morning assembly is to celebrate the students for their accomplishments, but also encourage the students to celebrate each other.

“At one of my schools, I would use the Friday assembly to reflect back on the week and recognize those students who modeled Christ-like behavior and embraced the student-learning expectations,” Pierre-Antoine said. “As students became more comfortable with this routine, I would encourage them to celebrate their peers, which helped further strengthen the community as a whole.”

Less Formal Interaction

While morning assemblies are important, not all interaction between a school leader and his or her students is quite as structured. Pierre-Antoine said he made it a point to always be outside at the carpool fifteen minutes before the bell rang to greet students and their parents and grandparents. He would smile, welcome them to school for the day, and make every effort to make the whole family feel as though they were a part of the school community.

This type of morning interaction bled over to other times of the day and the week—at the end of the day when parents were picking up their children, on weekends at sporting events and other extracurriculars.

“I wanted to constantly model that I was trying to build a community in Christ that supports one another and that rallies around the school,” he said.

Why It Matters

Building a strong and positive school community isn’t just about making parents and students feel welcome when they arrive at school for the day, and it isn’t just about setting a positive tone for the day at a morning assembly. By making a concerted effort to do those things, though, a school leader can be responsive to the needs of the community when more significant issues arise.

Pierre-Antoine said it all comes down to a ministry of presence. School leaders should take advantage of the very visible platform they have each day to help model for, direct, and guide their students, parents, faculty and staff. It is this presence, this relationship that separates an administrator from a school leader who truly walks with his or her school community day by day.

“Walking alongside those we serve provides us ample opportunities to bear witness to Christ by our words and actions,” Pierre-Antoine said. “Whether it's a handshake or a hug at carpool; a reflection on Sunday’s gospel; an inspirational video from YouTube; a read-aloud from an old favorite like the Giving Tree; affirming a member of the community for a good deed; a blessing on a group of students like a CYO team before a big game or the eighth graders prior to taking their high school placement test; a prayer intention for someone who is ill or who has recently returned home to heaven; so many different activities can take place during morning assemblies, but there is only one goal, make God known, loved and served.”

The first five minutes a visitor spends in a school can reveal a lot about its students, their teachers, and the broader school community. What impression of you do you want them to walk away with?

As leaders, we sometimes only have a few minutes to convey our passion about our work, ability, and confidence as an instructional leader, and what our root beliefs are. Below are three stories of effective leaders I witnessed on a recent trip to Chicago that hopefully will challenge you to reflect upon the lasting impression you leave others with when they visit your school (note all school and principal names are fictional).

Obviously, we here at ACE are pretty bullish when it comes to Catholic schools. And boy, after the reading the news lately, it shouldn’t be hard to see why. It seems like every outlet has chimed in over the past few weeks on Catholic schools, parishes, and the “state” they’re in.

Pope Francis’ upcoming visit certainly has something to do with that, but the past two weeks have also seen sweeping profiles on Catholic higher education; spotlights on the Cristo Rey network and its students; and the growth, challenge, and promise of Catholic schools writ large.

It’s a lot.

And that’s a good thing! But because time is finite — and I expect many of our readers are busy planning classes and teaching kids themselves — here are the stories that are particularly worth your time this week: