How do we explain Quaker Meeting for Worship?

It's a new school year here on the East Coast of the United States and we have welcomed a new group of students, learners, educators, families, and caregivers to our school community. Some members of our community have Friends school experience and many are experiencing this way of growing, learning, and reflecting together for the first time. As the faculty and staff gather to plan and set our course for the year, the question always arises, "what is Meeting for Worship and how do I teach it?"

Here is some language that we use in our community as a beginning or an opening...

Meeting for Worship at Sidwell Friends Lower School

Sidwell Friends School has Meeting for Worship as a part of its curriculum, believing in its important contribution to the school community. Even the youngest students are taught how to use moments of silence effectively.

 

Quaker Meeting for Worship is silent.  No one leads the group in ceremony.  Quakers believe people can guide themselves toward their own truth, and that silence is the context in which this process can occur.  A first-time observer of an adult Quaker Meeting for Worship might say, “Nothing is happening. They just sit there.” Likewise, a visitor to a Lower School Meeting for Worship might say, “The children are wiggling. They can’t possibly be getting anything out of this.”  Is there more happening than meets the eye?  Is the effort one must make to reach silence worth it?  We believe it is.

 

On e morning each week, the entire Lower School is engaged in meeting for worship for a period of about twenty minutes (the Middle and Upper School also have their dedicated time for Meeting for Worship weekly, for 45 - 60 minutes). During the Meeting for Worship, the teachers or a student clerk will read a current query.  Queries are open-ended questions which are stated simply and have many possible answers. Classes take turns carefully formulating a query for the entire school to consider and reflect upon.  Sometimes the teacher may choose to read a story or poem to their class before or during the silence in order to give the children an idea to focus on.  But the silence is also cherished for its own power. We learn that sometimes the silence is the message.

 

In addition to the weekly Meeting for Worship, each class begins each day with a period of silence.  During these times teachers help children become comfortable with silence and encourage them to make good use of it.  Simply establishing silence for a few moments is quite a powerful accomplishment for any class of 4 -10 year olds. Central to the purpose of a meeting for worship is an acceptance of what another individual believes is important. This idea has a powerful trickle over (trickle on... trickle through... ) effect into other areas of teaching and learning for our students and faculty. Meeting for Worship ends when a previously selected member of the group (student clerk) turns to a neighbor, puts their hand to their chest and then waves at or shakes their hand. We strive to make a purposeful moment of eye contact with our neighbor in order to re-connect ourselves joyfully and with a stronger sense of community.

 

A few details about our Faith & Practice:

 

As Robert Smith describes in The Quaker Book of Wisdom: 

 

“Friends believe that each individual has access to God through the powerful illumination of the light within, they worship in silence, joined in waiting for God to speak to them directly…”  

 

Meeting for Worship is a time for listening to that still small voice for vocal ministry, as opposed to sharing “whatever is on your mind". Quakers are waiting for messages from God that might give the Meeting something to learn or grow from. What aspect of your faith identity might be your still small voice? We hold a long silence between messages to give them (the message) time to “settle.”

  

Notes around our expectations for and of Meeting for Worship:

*Meeting begins as soon as the first person sits down – silence should grow from that.

*We are sharing active silence and expectant waiting as we wait to receive a message that is appropriate for the group – something we can all connect with or learn from.

*The reason we face inwardly is so that no one member of the group is the teacher/minister – we are in community together – we are all potential teachers/ministers.

*Someone will serve as clerk to close the Meeting with the transfer from heart to hand, indicating to others that they should also wave, smile, make purposeful eye contact with each other.

Lunar New Year - Interfaith Education

Photo by Maud Beauregard on Unsplash

We are in the midst of the Lunar New Year!

At my school, we have had all manner of learning, sharing, and celebrating.

My hope for my students is that they learn to approach every new opportunity with curiosity and openness. Rather than notice differences or ideas of shock or strangeness, imagine holding space for wonder! 

As a way to encourage this approach, I have created an extended thinking routine of sorts. It is our interfaith dialog and education thinking routine. We use this routine throughout the year with each new observance or tradition, each new opportunity for interfaith exploration and wonder. Teachers are free to adapt, simplify, or chunk the thinking moves in the routine in any way that makes sense for their learners. Our hope is that teachers will settle on a version that they can use again and again, making this interfaith routine, routine.

We often begin with a story. It may be a story that is read by a member of the community or the teacher. It may be a story that a member of our community shares from their own personal history or identity.

You might use this story Bringing in the New Year by Grace Lin

:

Grace Lin

Exploring the Lunar New Year, a thinking routine:

As you reflect upon the Lunar New Year story…

What is important to know about the Lunar New Year?

What feels familiar?

What surprises you? What is unexpected?

 

Further thinking about a point of view and the connectedness to our Quaker identity/the faith or non-faith based elements of our community’s identity:

Whose perspectives are being represented? How do you know? 

Whose perspective might be missing? 

In what ways might this connect to Quaker ideas or practices?

In what ways might this connect to your own story?

Further thinking about the relevance of all of this in the larger community or in our world:

Why might hearing these stories or learning about these traditions be important?

What role do these ideas play in our families? In our community? In our world? (Why might learning about this be important?)

 

Always great questions to ask:

What connections can you make?

What do you wonder?

How does the idea of light connect to the Lunar New Year? To our Quaker identity? To each of us?

What do you do with this thinking routine? Some options...

• use the queries to guide a conversation
• write about your thinking in response to the queries
• paint or draw or create an artful representation in response to these queries (painted reflection journals)
• use a query as a chalk talk prompt

Want to learn more?

• Read about thinking routines.
• Read about interfaith dialogs/education.
• I highly recommend reading Out of Many Faiths by Eboo Patel.

This interfaith thinking routine is adapted from the See Familiar Surprise Wonder routine.

Communicating about Meeting for Worship with attention...

At Lower School, we recently found ourselves with a schedule conflict and a need to adjust our Meeting for Worship time and focus for one day. 

We have decided to celebrate Diwali and follow it with a special Meeting for Worship with an attention to culture and identity. 

Below is our plan for our Meeting in November that falls on Diwali:

We will enjoy a Diwali celebration assembly in the Multipurpose Room. In order to maintain our faith and practice, we will still have Meeting for Worship - we will have a Meeting for Worship with an attention to celebrating culture and identity! 

Each class will have Meeting on its own, at a time that makes the most sense to you.

We are shifting the attention of Meeting for this Tuesday to one of considering the connections, influences, similarities, and wonderful differences between our Diwali experience and our own individual identities and that of our Quaker (school) community. 

In preparation for this Meeting, you might consider the following questions:

What stood out for you at the Diwali celebration?

What was familiar?

What was surprising?

In what ways might this connect to Quaker ideas or practices?

What do you wonder?

The Quaker Curriculum at Lower School

This is not an exhaustive list of what we do, rather a list of highlights from our school year.

Monthly committee meetings: We meet with at least one teacher from each grade level along with any other interested faculty/staff member once a month. In the past, we have included parent representatives and members from Bethesda Friends Meeting 3-4 times each year. This year we began including those members of our community, along with teachers from Friends Community School, at each of our monthly meetings. Meeting topics range from clerking course (which we feel everyone should attend, not just those who serve as clerks), monthly queries, Experiment with Light, brainstorming goals, and sharing new course material.

Speaking Into the Silence: Every student and classroom teacher attends an interactive course with the Quaker Education Clerks during the first week of school. Special teachers are invited and attend as their schedules allow. This course is a refresher on what Meeting for Worship is, why it is, what our expectations are, and (most importantly) how to speak at meeting if you have a message to share. This is really a discernment course. We teach it by grade level so we can tailor it to the age and experience. We act out a meeting and have audience members share prepared messages and then we all share our thinking about whether the message is “just for me” “already been shared” or “right for meeting.” 

This course includes practical ideas including what sitting at Meeting might look like, what we might do with our arms, our eyes, our breathing... Why we sit facing the center... Why we have "things" in the center and what they mean...

Meeting for Worship: We meet every Tuesday morning for twenty minutes. The first Tuesday of each month we meet as grade levels, the remaining Tuesdays are mixed up in classroom pairs or with three classes in the Meeting House. Our hope is to add meetings for worship on the faculty meeting schedule for the 2017-18 school year.

Quaker History: Over the course of 8 weeks, the entire kindergarten grade (not all at the same time) hears the history of Quakerism at its early start in a storytelling style. They reflect on what a journey is, they paint about it, they use sketch-noting to share their thinking about the story. This culminates in our sharing why hearing this story might be important and what it might mean for us today – we use the 3 Y’s; why is it important to us individually, why is it important for our school community or our friends at BFM, and why might it be important for the world. This year we were inspired to hike up Pendle Hill too so we walked around the field for the laps equivalent to the height of Pendle Hill – it was a lot of laps!

Query Writing: Every classroom beginning in first grade writes the lower school Query for one month of the year. The process is sometimes shared at faculty meetings so that teachers can have the thinking made visible.

A Quaker Book of Wisdom: The third grade purchases a copy of A Quaker Book of Wisdom by Robert Smith for each student. They use the book in their classrooms as a guide – sometimes for reflection, for reading, for connecting to curricular lessons, etc. 

Making Quakerism Visible: The Quaker Education Committee has produced one new poster reflecting our teaching and thinking about testimonies and a couple of new handouts this year to add to our current inventory. 

Testimonies Rock!: The two Quaker Education Clerks lead each class through an interactive course in the winter about the testimonies. In an effort to move beyond the SPICES and to develop learning and growing in a way more connected to the testimonies, this course shares a brief history of testimonies in Quakerism, why we want to move away from the SPICES acronym, and then provides a context and opportunity for the students and teachers to begin to seek out their own personal testimonies. Classes have taken these back and some have blogged about them, some have used them as a point of reference to write a persuasive letter to themselves, some have painted reflections about them, and some have used them to introduce queries. This course involves actual rocks!

QuakerEd Collaborative: Denise Coffin and Susan Bastian (from Friends Community School in College Park) began a group called the QuakerEd Collaborative. This is an open group for all educators at any Mid-Atlantic Quaker schools. With the support of Friends Council on Education (FCE), we held our first annual gathering at Sidwell Friends School. Head of School Bryan Garman gave opening remarks, Drew Smith, Executive Director of FCE, gave the keynote address, and we offered two courses for participants. 

My Quaker Book of Wisdom: This spring one fourth grade class is piloting a new program called My Quaker Book of Wisdom. We plan to launch the entire lower school next fall. Every student is given a blank book to write, draw, insert, etc., items related to their journey at a Quaker School. They might use the book to work on the query writing process or reflections on a particular query, they might use it to note their personal testimony and how they are working towards growth in that area, they might add inserts from their teachers about curriculum connections… It is ultimately up to the students and to the classroom teachers how they will use the book in a given year. The books will be collected at the end of the school year and will be re-distributed when they return in the fall. At the end of the students’ career at LS they will take home their Quaker Book of Wisdom as an artifact or evidence of their growth at LS in their journey at a Quaker School.

We try to frame our Quaker identity in three areas:

1.       Our Faith and Practice (things like MfW, Silence)

2.       Our Curriculum (making sure that we connect ideas of social justice, equality, etc. to Quakerism)

3.       Our Environment (making Quakerism visible on campus)

This informs our work with the faculty and with students. We’re trying to bolster the comfort level of the faculty so that they can take ownership of these ideas and find their own way in. We do believe that this work needs to be explicit – caught not taught isn’t enough.