Meta-Cognition and Prayer


“As a teacher in Catholic schools I often ask my students to reflect on how they can help other people know they are Loved. I challenge my students to think of what words or actions they can do to make another person's day a little bit better. They have to have Faith that their actions will affect another person. My job as a teacher is not to give them that Faith, but to help them realize it has been there all along. When they act on that Faith, they have taken control of their Loving action.”
            Reflection. If there is one skill that we can teach out students, it is the ability to reflect. It is the ability to just sit down long enough to think about what they are learning. To contemplate the words they say and how they affect others. To meditate on the actions they do and how those actions either make other people happier or not. This is actually a skill that can be taught in any classroom, no matter what the subject. “Busy-work”, which all students know is a waste of their time, is the antithesis of reflection. If teachers think we need to keep students ”busy” all the time so they stay out of trouble, we, in fact, are missing the entire point of Catholic education. If we finish the objective, i.e. if we are done preparing them for some sort of an assessment on a particular day, maybe the next thing we should do is train our students how to think about what they have learned and why they have learned it. Instead of keeping their brain in the low-gear of “busy-work” or superficial learning or practice, maybe we can challenge them with some meta-cognition.


"..and his mother kept all these things in her heart." Luke 2:51. Even Mary practiced meta-cognition and reflection. (Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic Church in Atlanta, Georgia (photo P. Smith) 

                I wrote this message to a teacher who was struggling to figure out how they could be more “Catholic” in their science class. The teacher, herself, was Faithful and wanted her students to experience the Love of God, but she struggled to find how she could “teach” that in her class. She was trying to find a way to literally connect her science lessons to Catholicism. This way of thinking is too narrative or literal. It is looking at Catholicism as a collection of ideas or facts to be studied or memorized. But Catholicism is a relationship with God and with His Church…His people. This is something that we have to meditate on. This is something that we have to reflect on. So my response to the question of how Catholicism and science class intersect here…? Maybe we can teach our students to be still long enough to reflect on whatever it is they have learned. Maybe we can practice this meta-cognition as a precursor to deeper, spiritual skills needed to really develop authentic relationships with God and with others. This skill, which can be practiced in any classroom regardless of the subject, is exactly the same skill used in meditation, contemplation, and adoration. All we have to do is create the space for this meta-cognition. Catholics have just been calling it prayer for a long time.

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