Making Every Class Catholic: A Practical Guide, Chapter 1
Introduction: From Theory to Practice
This is the first draft chapter of the sequel to Educating for Eternity: A Teacher’s Companion to Making Every Class Catholic. I will be publishing one chapter of it every month here on Substack to get your feedback and make it the best book it can be. The draft Table of Contents can be found here, in the 4th edition of the MECC Newsletter.
In an otherwise very positive review of Educating for Eternity: A Teacher’s Companion for Making Every Class Catholic, the reviewer noted that the lesson plan and assignment ideas at the end of each chapter in Part II were “of varied worth.” When I got home that evening and told my wife about this comment, she teased me, “He’s got you there, Salkeld!”
Just how to incorporate lesson plans and ideas into that first book was a problem my editor and I never fully solved. We thought about gathering vignettes from teachers we knew, but that proved time consuming and impractical. In addition to actually finding the teachers and lesson plans, there was also the question of content selection, to say nothing of quality control. How do you pick the right lesson plans for a book aimed at teachers across every specialization from K–12? We’d need dozens to make sure there was even one for each teacher.
What we settled on, a single practical suggestion from me at the end of each subject-specific chapter in Part II, worked well enough, but we knew that the basic question remained unanswered. Teachers needed the foundational work that Educating for Eternity provided. Without being grounded in a Catholic vision of the human person, of God, and of creation, plug-and-play Catholic lesson plans would not have the desired impact. Indeed, they could even backfire, feeling awkward or forced and giving students the impression that faith is an artificial tack-on to the real work of education, and not something foundational for how we think about what matters most.
But teachers also need support applying that theory in practice. It’s great that math teaches us about the beauty and order of the universe but how does that translate into lesson plans that teach the curriculum teachers are responsible for?
Since the publication of Educating for Eternity, I have spent nearly 3 years on the road all over North America working with Catholic educators. In that time, I have led dozens, maybe hundreds, of workshops helping teachers to turn the foundational concepts underlying authentic Catholic Academic Integration into practical lesson/unit plans, and assignment ideas. In addition to encountering the hundreds of great ideas teachers have come up with in these workshops—many of which will show up in the following pages—I have also slowly honed a practical, repeatable process to help teachers develop faith-integrated lesson plans in every grade and every subject.
