For example, the habit of timeliness is indispensable for a life of ease. Imagine how difficult life is for the person who struggles with timeliness. He is constantly behind–missing meetings here, chasing deadlines there–and feels the constant pressure to keep up and keep calm despite the ever-present burden of the clock. On the contrary, imagine the person who has mastered timeliness. He is able to go about his day with an exceptional disposition of nonchalance. He effortlessly moves from task to task, allowing his habit of timeliness to pave the way for peaceful relationships and productive outcomes to emerge.

Charlotte Mason famously taught that the most effortful aspect of being a teacher is not the teaching itself. It is the habit training that goes on behind the scenes. If teachers equip students with good habits, then the lessons, provided they are of the right sort, will take care of themselves (Towards a Philosophy of Education, p. 99). Students will gain a newfound ability to focus, concentrate, follow instructions, and engage the ideas of the lesson with an exceptional degree of independence.

More recently, modern research has confirmed the fascinating neuroscience behind the formation of good habits. It has also confirmed that the formation of habits geared toward strengthening the will are the most reliable indicator for achievement. Modern researchers have given a name for this special bundle of will-power habits: Grit. 

In this article, I will explore how teachers can help foster grit in their students in the classroom through guidance from Charlotte Mason on habit training. The concept that comes closest to grit for the British educator is perfect, or thorough, execution. Perfect execution is the act of completing a task as well as one can within a reasonable amount of time. Cultivating this habit takes strategy and effort to be sure, but the reward is worth it. Over time, children develop habits of perseverance, responsibility, and care for one’s work, all leading to a unique strength of will: grit. 

What is Perfect Execution?

Have you ever wondered why some children write with remarkably elegant penmanship and others rush? Or why some children complete fitness exercises with perfect form all the way to completion while others struggle? 

While it is tempting to attribute these feats to natural talent or even gender differences, the truth is that both tasks were carried to completion through habits of perfect execution. By “perfect” I do not mean literally perfect, but the repeated act of aiming for perfection through giving a thorough effort each and every time. 

For children who complete tasks with thoroughness, two factors are at play: First, they care about their work. They have come to believe that the tasks they execute to some extent matter.

Second, they work with a resolved commitment to do their best. They do not settle for half-measures or shortcuts. They have the perseverance and fortitude to carry out a task to completion. This willpower did not appear over night. It came as the result of deliberate practice and usually, but not necessarily, the encouragement of a supportive mentor. 

Training the Habit of Perfect Execution

We tend to assume students will grow more proficient in a task over time simply through repetition. After all, we are told, practice makes perfect. What we fail to realize is that imperfect practice yields precisely that: imperfection. Admiring the German and French schools of her day, Charlotte Mason observes, “…if children get the habit of turning out imperfect work, the men and women will undoubtedly keep that habit up” (Home Education, p. 159).

To train the habit of perfect execution, Charlotte Mason taught that parents and teachers should hold high yet realistic expectations of children as they work. She writes, “No work should be given to a child that he cannot execute perfectly, and then perfection should be required from him as a matter of course” (Home Education, p. 159). The key to growing in perfect execution is to prioritize quality over quantity, and to expect and support the highest quality the child is capable of each and every time.

When it comes to teaching penmanship, for example, it is tempting to think that a great quantity of practice is the surest way to learn to form letters. But Charlotte Mason cautions that it not so much how many letters are written, but the quality of the letters:

For instance, he is set to do a copy of strokes, and is allowed to show a slateful at all sorts of slopes and all sorts of intervals; his moral sense is vitiated, his eye is injured. Set him six strokes to copy; let him, not bring a slateful, but six perfect strokes, at regular distances and at regular slopes. If he produces a faulty pair, get him to point out the fault, and persevere until he has produced his task; if he does not do it to-day, let him go on to-morrow and the next day, and when the six perfect strokes appear, let it be an occasion of triumph.

Home Education, p. 160

In the quotation above, Mason is clear to emphasize that perseverance and perfect execution matter most in habit formation. Likewise with other activities, teachers should always expect the child to give her very best: “So with the little tasks of painting, drawing, or construction he sets himself––let everything he does be well done. An unsteady house of cards is a thing to be ashamed of. Closely connected with this habit of ‘perfect work’ is that of finishing whatever is taken in hand. The child should rarely be allowed to set his hand to a new undertaking until the last is finished” (Home Education, p. 160).

So often in our modern world we feel the pressure to be efficient and useful. In a block of time, we would rather perform ten tasks poorly than one task exceptionally. But here we see the secret for setting up children for long-term flourishing. The solution is not to pile on hours of homework each night after a full day of school. It is not to assign endless loads of busy work to keep students occupied. It is to assist students in approaching each and every task with the discipline to do their very best. This is how we as educators train the habit of perfect execution.

The Power of Grit

In her New York Times bestseller Grit (Scribner, 2016), psychologist Angela Duckworth shares her findings on the power of grit to drive achievement. She defines grit as the unique combination of passion and perseverance, determination and direction (8). People with grit are resilient and hardworking, propelled by some deeply held belief. They are convinced that whatever they are doggedly pursuing matters.

Central to Duckworth’s research findings is the notion that in examining cases of achievement we tend to be distracted by talent. That is, when we encounter a person who has achieved great things, we often chalk it up to raw ability. While there is certainly something to be said for God-given strengths and abilities, too often we let  natural ability overshadow the dedicated work ethic an achiever cultivated to get there.

To reconcile natural talent and the power of grit, Duckworth argues that “effort counts twice” (35). Rather than drawing a direct line from talent to achievement, the psychologist suggests there is more to the equation. For achievement to occur there are two instances of calculus. First, the achiever invests effort into his or her natural talent to develop a particular skill. Then, the achiever builds on that skill through more effort to reach the level of exceptional achievement. Effort counts twice.

More Important than Grit

It is important to note here that grit in and of itself is not equivalent to character in the moral sense. It is possible to have a lot of grit, and therefore to be a high achiever, but to be a very bad person. In Duckworth’s own social science parlance she distinguishes between strengths of will, heart, and mind (273). Strength of will, or willpower, includes attributes like self-control, delayed gratification, grit, and the growth mindset. Strength of heart includes what we would classically describe as moral virtues: gratitude, honesty, empathy, and kindness. And strength of mind includes curiosity and creative thinking.

In a 2018 interview with the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, Duckworth acknowledges that strength of heart does not lead to the same levels of achievement as strength of will, but it is more important. She admits that she would rather her own daughters be good before they are great.

This is an important word for classical educators, including Charlotte Mason followers. All this talk about perfect execution, grit, and achievement can quickly get our minds churning about how we harness this power for, say, elevating standardized test results. We would do well to remember, as Duckworth does in her own secular way, that “while man looks at the outward appearance, God looks at the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7). At the end of the day, more than achievement, we will be judged not by what we accomplished, but how we lived.

Fostering Grit Through Habit Training

So how do we help our students become more gritty, not for the sake of worldly achievement, but for true human flourishing? A great place to start is by cultivating the habit of perfect execution in the classroom. Commit to having your students only work on tasks they can complete with excellence and then hold them to it. 

Briefly, here are three steps for cultivating this habit:

1. Clarify your expectations. 
2. Cast vision for the worthiness of the work. 
3. Support them throughout.

By clarifying your expectations, you are making it unmistakably clear what your students are to do and how they are to do it. They should have a good sense of “the final product” so they know what to aim for. And they should understand that process and format matters: the “how” is just as important as the “what.”

When you cast vision for the worthiness of the work, you are giving your students a picture of why this work matters. This is what Charlotte Mason would call “sowing the idea.” If they are working on a map of Asia, for example, you could emphasize the beauty and variety we observe across the globe. Highlight some unique cultural artifacts from the region to help them form a concrete relationship with it. In order for the habit of perfect execution to take, student care is a necessary precondition. High teacher expectations without student ownership and care devolves into micro-management all too quickly.

Once they begin their work, teachers must support students throughout the assignment. There is a reason why the habit of perfect execution is so rare. It is hard work! As humans, our wills often fail us and we take the path of least resistance. We need wise and supportive mentors around us to hold us to the standard we set out to meet. This is the indispensable work of the teacher, and as Charlotte Mason warned, it takes the most effort!

Conclusion

As classical educators, we seek to form humans holistically as virtuous young men and women. We believe that school is not reserved exclusively for the cognitive domain, but that there is work to be done in the moral and spiritual domains as well. Through helping students develop the habit of perfect execution, we are helping students forge wills of perseverance and grit. As we do so let us keep our motivations in check. It is not ultimately to propel our students to chase after worldly achievement or to elevate their will-power over others. It is to help them grow as workers in the field, reaping the harvest the Lord has prepared for His people, as we wait for His return. Habits of perfect execution and grit, I believe, can only aid them in this worthiest of work.

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But it should not be thought that I plan wholly to neglect moral and spiritual virtues in the rest of this series on Aristotle’s Five Intellectual Virtues. After all, a main point of my previous article was that the moral, intellectual and spiritual categories are overlapping and interpenetrating categories, at least for the apostle Paul. For Aristotle as well, the moral and intellectual categories interact and intermingle in unique ways. This in fact is what makes Aristotle the proper antidote to Bloom and his cognitive taxonomy: breaking down the rigid separation between the heart and the head, let alone the hands.

In this article we continue laying the foundation for a taxonomy of Aristotle’s intellectual virtues by exploring the unique relationship between Aristotle’s conception of moral virtues and one particular intellectual virtue, techne, which I prefer to translate as artistry or craftsmanship, though many translators use the English term ‘art’. Modern English speakers will find this confusing and unhelpful, because the term ‘art’ is almost exclusively used nowadays to refer to particular fine arts, like drawing, painting and sculpture. But the Latin root had a similar range and meaning to the Greek techne, which could refer to any craft or productive skill. (In a similar way the modern English term ‘science’ was narrowed to refer to only natural science, or the knowledge that we have discovered about the natural world, when it had previously referred to knowledge in general, as in the Latin scientia or Greek episteme. See the article “The Classical Distinction between the Liberal Arts and Sciences”.)

According to Aristotle, moral virtue and artistry are allies and analogues to one another, because they both are cultivated by means of habit or custom. It will therefore be helpful to our broader purpose to explore this relationship between the body, the heart and the mind, summed up in what we call habits, in order to pave the way for a full explication of the educational goal of techne or craftsmanship in a classical Christian paradigm. Our primary text for this exploration comes from book II of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, though we will bring Charlotte Mason’s thought and modern neuroscience into the dialogue as well.

Excellence Comes by Habit… or At Least Some Excellences

The well-known quotation from Aristotle, “Excellence comes by habit…” is at least partially a misquotation, since arete, virtue or excellence, in Aristotle is divided into two types, moral and intellectual. To only one of these does the power of habit apply as the main method of cultivating virtue. The full quotation from the opening of Book II of the Nicomachean Ethics reads as follows:

Excellence, then, being of two kinds, intellectual and moral, intellectual excellence in the main owes both its birth and its growth to teaching (for which reason it requires experience and time), while moral excellence comes about as a result of habit, whence also its name [ethike for “moral”] is one that is formed by a slight variation from the word for ‘habit’ [ethos].

Nicomachean Ethics, 1103a.14-19, rev. Oxford trans. vol. II (Princeton, 1984), p. 1742

The word translated ‘teaching’, didaskalia, is the common term for ‘instruction’ used in the New Testament as well, and means exactly what we would think: the work of an instructor in teaching truths and skills, whether in a formal or informal setting. It will not do its work in a moment, but will involve time and a host of experiences in which the student’s mind is formed for whatever intellectual virtue is being cultivated. 

This bare statement puts the lie to some extreme modern versions of Rousseau, like unschooling, that deny the need for a teacher or instructor, and posit that a child has enough resources in himself to cultivate his own intellect and grow and develop the intellectual virtues needed for life. It is true that books can serve as teachers to the disciplined and curious mind, and so the supposed exceptions to this—the self-taught geniuses of the world—are really the exceptions that prove the rule, since they invariably relied on the instruction of others, even though through more independent means like books. On the other hand, people certainly can learn things through their own experience. Otherwise how would the human race have ever learned anything? But learning from personal experience is in general a horribly inefficient process; therefore, the systematic and thoughtful instruction of a teacher is the regular and normal route to intellectual excellence.

It is also worth noting here that the cultivation of habits is not the primary method for the development of intellectual virtue, but only of moral virtue for Aristotle. We will see later that techne or artistry is an exception to that, in a way. But for the time being it is worth sitting with this idea and comparing it with other thinkers like Charlotte Mason or Maria Montessori. In emphasizing the personhood of the child, Mason, for one, is sometimes heard by moderns as endorsing the unschooling extreme just mentioned. In reality, she regularly called attention to the primacy of God-given authority and children’s need for intellectual food, primarily in the form of the best books of the best minds. Like most moderns, she makes a firmer distinction between curriculum and instruction than Aristotle, in order to claim that teachers should use living books, rather than provide their own worked-up lectures. This idea might have been lost on Aristotle because of his different context. In the ancient world books were not regularly read silently, and were not easily and cheaply procured. But it is this book-based process of instruction that allows Mason to endorse what she calls “self-education” as the only true education, and not a Rousseauian anti-civilization, anti-authority stance on human development. 

Mason also believes that the formation of habits, both intellectual and moral, is a third part of education. We should note that, for Mason, habits are intellectual as well as moral. Outward customs have moved inward to cover what we can call today habitual “trains of thought”, an idiom that evokes Mason’s favorite metaphor for habits as the railways of life. Is this then, perhaps, an area of disagreement between Charlotte Mason and the great philosopher Aristotle? That, for her, habits are intellectual as well as moral? Let’s look closer at what she says in her discussion of education as a discipline from her 6th volume:

By this formula we mean the discipline of habits formed definitely and thoughtfully whether habits of mind or of body. Physiologists tell us of the adaptation of brain structure to habitual lines of thought, i.e., to our habits.

Education is not after all to either teacher or child the fine careless rapture we appear to have figured it. We who teach and they who learn are alike constrained; there is always effort to be made in certain directions; yet we face our tasks from a new point of view. We need not labour to get children to learn their lessons; that, if we would believe it, is a matter which nature takes care of. Let the lessons be of the right sort and children will learn them with delight. The call for strenuousness comes with the necessity of forming habits; but here again we are relieved. The intellectual habits of the good life form themselves in the following out of the due curriculum in the right way. As we have already urged, there is but one right way, that is, children must do the work for themselves. They must read the given pages and tell what they have read, they must perform, that is, what we may call the act of knowing. We are all aware, alas, what a monstrous quantity of printed matter has gone into the dustbin of our memories, because we have failed to perform that quite natural and spontaneous ‘act of knowing,’ as easy to a child as breathing and, if we would believe it, comparatively easy to ourselves. The reward is two-fold: no intellectual habit is so valuable as that of attention; it is a mere habit but it is also the hall-mark of an educated person. Use is second nature, we are told; it is not too much to say that ‘habit is ten natures,’ and we can all imagine how our work would be eased if our subordinates listened to instructions with the full attention which implies recollection––Attention is not the only habit that follows due self-education. The habits of fitting and ready expression, of obedience, of good-will, and of an impersonal outlook are spontaneous bye-products of education in this sort. So, too, are the habits of right thinking and right judging; while physical habits of neatness and order attend upon the self-respect which follows an education which respects the personality of children. (vol. 6, pp. 99-100)

Interestingly, Mason makes a distinction between “habits of mind and habits of body”. Of course, she knows very well that all habits make a “mark upon the brain substance” from the latest science of her day (vol. 6 p. 100). And so, in a way it is redundant to call any habit a habit of mind or of body, since a habit is in its very essence, bodily, or physical, as well as mental, i.e. registering in the brain. These reflections challenge again the simplistic divisions made by Bloom and his colleagues in proposing a division of educational goals into a cognitive domain, an affective domain and a psychomotor domain. If the brain registers in all of these, and they all have outward bodily expressions, then we have perhaps hit up against the limits of our traditional metaphors for the nature of the human person. Head, heart and hands are irreducibly intertwined through the human nervous system. Aristotle was most certainly not aware of these insights about the brain and other vital organs, even if he did more than his fair share to advance science and human physiology in his time.

On the other hand, Charlotte Mason does seem to share with Aristotle this conception that “intellectual habits” come from instruction, if we view curriculum and proper teaching methods as a specification of Aristotle’s didaskalia or instruction. As she says, the “intellectual habits of the good life form themselves in the following out of the due curriculum in the right way.” She cites attention and the act of knowing, perhaps chiefly embodied in her teaching method of narration, as “the right way”. Mason’s “self-education”, then, does not resolve itself into a call for unschooling, but for a more rigorous adherence to the right books and the right methods by which a child’s own intellectual powers will grow and find their full development.

Her concern coheres broadly with Aristotle’s focus on intellectual virtues generally, since arete involves the active engagement of the individual in means and ends. It may owe “its birth and growth to teaching,” but it has a life of its own; it is not something that a teacher can mechanistically instill in a person, as a waitress pours water into a glass. The organic metaphors used by Mason find their expression in Aristotle as well. 

In addition, it is the nature of the human person that habit training and teaching are meant to develop. As he goes on to say at the beginning of Book II following the passage quoted above:

From this it is also plain that none of the moral excellences arises in us by nature; for nothing that exists by nature can form a habit contrary to its nature. For instance the stone which by nature moves downwards cannot be habituated to move upwards, not even if one tries to train it by throwing it up ten thousand times; nor can fire be habituated to move downwards, nor can anything else that by nature behaves in one way be trained to behave in another. Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do excellences arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit. 

Nicomachean Ethics, 1103a.19-25, pp. 1742-1743

Modern science might cause us to stumble over Aristotle’s examples here, because the discovery of gravity and chemical reactions like combustion throw a wrench in his system. But for Aristotle, things move downward because it is in their nature to do so; they have an internal telos or goal toward which they head of their own accord. For stones this telos is down, but for fire it is up. The point of the examples is that human beings too have a telos and this is excellence, but we do not have excellence “by nature”, otherwise no training would be necessary or even possible. You can’t habituate a stone to fly upwards of its own accord. But you can habituate a human person to act justly or eat temperately. 

But I ask again, is this only true of moral virtues and not also of intellectual ones? Can’t we be habituated to think in a certain way?

The Analogy between Morality and Artistry

For Aristotle it is important to distinguish between abilities we have by nature and those that are developed by practice. In a way, this devolves into the age-old debate between the relative importance of nature and nurture. As he says,

Again, of all the things that come to us by nature we first acquire the potentiality and later exhibit the activity (this is plain in the case of the senses; for it was not by often seeing or often hearing that we got these senses, but on the contrary we had them before we used them, and did not come to have them by using them); but excellences we get by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of the arts as well. For the things we have to learn before we can do, we learn by doing, e.g. men become builders by building and lyre-players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts. (p. 1743)

Aristotle’s point is that sight is an ability we have by nature. The potential to see is formed in the very nature of a human person (from pupil and retina to optic nerve and brain structure); seeing, therefore, comes without any practice. The first time a baby opens its eyes it sees. (Perhaps we shouldn’t rabbit-trail into how distinguishing between objects and developing facial recognition, for instance, are extremely complex skills that the brain is practically hardwired to develop on its own, for which it nevertheless requires significant time, experience and practice, and which is influenced by the development of habits….) 

Both morality and artistry, however, do not come by nature but by exercise or practice. As the saying goes, “One swallow does not a summer make.” One just act does not make a man just. Nor does constructing one building make a man an architect. Through deliberate or purposeful practice of particular activities, the habit of doing them is elevated to the level of excellence. Excellence in morality and artistry then comes by habit… but not by a habit that is thoughtless. As my gymnastic coach drilled into me as a youth, “Practice does not make perfect. Practice makes permanent. Perfect practice makes perfect.” Aristotle further details the point in his ongoing analogy between moral excellence and craftsmanship:

Again, it is from the same causes and by the same means that every excellence is both produced and destroyed, and similarly every art; for it is from playing the lyre that both good and bad lyre-players are produced. And the corresponding statement is true of builders and of all the rest; men will be good or bad builders as a result of building well or badly. For if this were not so, there would have been no need of a teacher, but all men would have been born good or bad at their craft. This, then, is the case with the excellences also; by doing the acts that we do in our transactions with other men we become just or unjust, and by doing the acts that we do in the presence of danger, and being habituated to feel fear or confidence, we become brave or cowardly. The same is true of appetites and feelings of anger; some men become temperate and good-tempered, others self-indulgent and irascible, by behaving in one way or the other in the appropriate circumstances. Thus, in one word, states arise out of like activities. This is why the activities we exhibit must be of a certain kind; it is because the states correspond to the differences between these. It makes no small difference, then, whether we form habits of one kind or of another from our very youth; it makes a great difference, or rather all the difference. (p. 1743)

In this passage Aristotle comes full circle and justifies the need of a teacher for artistry (even though he hasn’t yet listed it among his five intellectual virtues). It is possible to build many buildings, and only confirm the builder in mediocrity, or worse, poor quality or shoddy building. In the same way, I needed a coach to become a gymnast, to correct my poor form on various exercises, to instruct me to point my toes, keep my legs straight and tuck my head in during handstands. Otherwise, I would develop bad habits early on that would make advancement in good gymnastics impossible. 

Notice how coaching in artistry requires a competent teacher who is sufficiently advanced in the craft to pass along the basic principles of proper form or good quality, along with the judgment to correct errors and mistakes. As I advanced in gymnastics, I could practice more and more on my own, because I had developed the mental architecture for quality gymnastics and had internalized the basic principles of the craft. Watching and imitating Olympic gymnasts as they demonstrate exquisite form might also spur my growth and development of excellence. 

Aristotle argues that it is much the same with moral virtues. While he doesn’t explicitly mention parents and tutors, his final appeal that it makes all the difference what habits we form from our youth seems targeted to raise the bar for those who have charge of the young. Early habit training is the determining factor in the later development of moral character. But this should not be construed in such a way as to remove the value of thinking and deliberating over moral choices. For Aristotle one cannot have the moral virtues without also attaining the intellectual virtue of phronesis, practical wisdom or prudence. And we dare not undervalue the importance of artistry or craftsmanship of all types, which involves the development of cultivated habits as well as a true course of reasoning. 

Resolving the Nature-Nurture Debate: Myelin, Habits and Skill

From the perspective of modern research the nature-nurture debate for both skill and moral action seems to have been substantively resolved. The key is not exactly neurons and synapses, but myelin, a white fatty substance that is wrapped around neural networks after they are repeatedly fired. As Dr. George Bartzokis, professor of neurobiology at UCLA said, myelin is “the key to talking, reading, learning skills, being human” (As quoted in Daniel Coyle, The Talent Code [Bantam, 2009], 32). Neuroscientists claim that “the traditional neuron-centric worldview is being fundamentally altered by a Copernican-style revolution” based on three basic facts:

1. Every human movement, thought, or feeling is a precisely timed electric signal traveling through a chain of neurons—a circuit of nerve fibers. 
2. Myelin is the insulation that wraps these nerve fibers and increases signal strength, speed, and accuracy. 
3. The more we fire a particular circuit, the more myelin optimizes that circuit, and the stronger, faster and more fluent our movements and thoughts become. (Coyle, The Talent Code, 32)

Notice that what we call body, heart and head are equally susceptible to the neural network process. In addition, the repetition of particular acts, thoughts or feelings in a certain context creates what we call a ‘habit’, a propensity for or ease of repeating that same act, thought or feeling again. Deep or focused practice tends to wrap myelin more quickly and efficiently. 

As Aristotle claimed more than 2,000 years ago, “Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do excellences arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit.” We cannot make a habit or skill of doing something physically impossible. But if we have the ability to do something, we can get better and better and better at it through practice, until even our original abilities have been fundamentally altered and developed. Nature provides the hardware for the myelin wrapping process, while nurture (including all our choices, actions, thoughts and feelings) actually wraps the myelin. As Daniel Coyle explains, 

Instead of prewiring for specific skills, what if the genes dealt with the skill issue by building millions of tiny broadband installers [i.e. myelin-wrapping oligodendrocytes] and distributing them throughout the circuits of the brain? The broadband installers wouldn’t be particularly complicated—in fact, they’d all be identical, wrapping wires with insulation to make the circuits work faster and smoother. They would work according to a single rule: whatever circuits are fired most, and most urgently, are the ones where the installers will go. Skill circuits that are fired often will receive more broadband; skills that are fired less often, with less urgency, will receive less broadband.

Coyle, The Talent Code, 71-72.

Memory, habits, skill development, all of human educational goals, in fact, seem to have this process at their root, even if they cannot ultimately be reduced to it.

As Christians, we may get nervous at all this talk of the brain and neurons, because of the real and present danger of reducing the mind or spirit to the matter and electrical signals of the brain. So we would do well to put a stake in the ground with Charlotte Mason on this point and clarify that we believe the mind is more than the brain. We are not evolutionary materialists. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Shakespeare’s Hamlet I.5). But having clarified our spiritual frame of reference, perhaps these findings of neuroscience are precisely what we should have expected: God has made us as trifold beings, body, soul and spirit, situated between heaven and earth:

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,

The moon and the stars, which you have set in place,

What is man that you are mindful of him,

And the son of man that you care for him?

Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings

And crowned him with glory and honor.

You have given him dominion over the works of your hands;

You have put all things under his feet…. (Psalm 8:3-6 ESV)

Our glory as human beings is our middle placement, our intertwined nature, participating in the intellectual nature of the angels and the physical nature of beasts. Flesh and spirit intermingle and interact, and the nervous system gives us a glimmer of insight into how. Our habits, practice and skill development involve fleshly acquirements in body and brain, but they are nonetheless spiritual. Moral and intellectual virtues can be trained by practice. As the author of Hebrews says, “But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil” (Heb 5:14 ESV). Discernment is an important Christian intellectual virtue mentioned frequently in the New Testament. And according to Hebrews it, too, is “trained by practice”.

In the next article we will explore the differences between moral training and training in techne or craftsmanship, introducing the modern concepts of deliberate practice, coaching and the apprenticeship model.

Earlier Articles in this series:

Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Purpose of Education

Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Importance of Objectives: 3 Blessings of Bloom’s

Breaking Down the Bad of Bloom’s: The False Objectivity of Education as a Modern Social Science

When Bloom’s Gets Ugly: Cutting the Heart Out of Education

What Bloom’s Left Out: A Comparison with Aristotle’s Intellectual Virtues

Aristotle’s Virtue Theory and a Christian Purpose of Education

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As a result, for many young people today, it remains an open question whether character actually counts, and if so, to what degree. Today’s sports stars don’t exactly illustrate this truth during their excessive victory celebrations. Nor do the upper echelon of celebrities and business moguls as they seek to outdo each other in the clothes they wear and cars they drive.

In The Road to Character, New York Times columnist David Brooks observes that part of the problem is that our culture has come to value “resume virtues” over “eulogy virtues.” Resume virtues are the skills you list on your resume, the ones that contribute to external success, especially your career profile. Eulogy virtues, on the other hand, are the deeper qualities of character that are remembered at funerals–humility, kindness, faithfulness, and the like. We live in a culture, and by extension, within an educational system, that nurtures career-oriented, ambitious, self-promoters and all but ignores meek, others-oriented, self-sacrificing servants. 

As I wrap up my blog series on “Teach Like a Champion for the Classical Classroom,” I want to suggest that character and achievement, or resume and eulogy virtues, needn’t be at odds. Character and excellence can actually go hand in hand. After exploring David Brooks’ ideas about character formation, then examining Paul’s discourse on love, I will look specifically at the fourth and final part of Teach Like a Champion 2.0, which deals with classroom culture. In these chapters, author Doug Lemov lays out several principles for cultivating a positive classroom culture that sustains and drives excellence. What I hope to show is that the sort of high-achieving classroom culture Lemov envisions is best realized when a heart for service and humility is the true driving force. 

Of Mountains and Timber

First, back to Brooks. You may be familiar with the conservative writer and his spiritual journey over the years. In his own words, Brooks has gone through quite the personal transformation. Early on in his career, Brooks fit the prototype of the young and ambitious careerist, focused on making a name for himself. Although raised Jewish, he wasn’t particularly religious or interested in cultivating a strong “inner self,” either spiritually or morally.

But then something changed. The threads of his life began to unravel. The early success he encountered began to lose its shine. He went through a divorce. He experienced loneliness to a degree he had up to this point not encountered. He began to ask himself deeper questions…about faith, morality, and purpose. These reflections led him to reconsider the organizing principle of his life and what makes for real and lasting joy.

These experiences ultimately led to a paradigm shift for Brooks. In his most recent book, The Second Mountain, Brook casts a vision for life as the journey between two mountains. The first mountain is obsessed with personal accomplishments and tackling ambitious goals for self-promoting purposes. All activity on this peak is geared toward cultivating the resume virtues described above. The second mountain, in sharp contrast, focuses on relationships and service to others through the honing of deeper character qualities, that is, the eulogy virtues. His argument is that the good life–the life of joy and flourishing–is found in the journey from the first to the second mountain. The road of this journey takes a person through the valley of humility and brokenness before beginning the ascent.

A journey that calls pilgrims to descend before ascending may feel foreign to our culture today because the virtue of humility is part of a former moral ecology, what Brooks calls the “crooked timber” tradition. This tradition demands humility, not incredulity, in the face of our human limitations. It calls us to “…confront our own weaknesses, tackle our own sins” and confront ourselves to the core (xiv). The result, as men and women pass through this valley, is a life of character, which is well-integrated, and marked by contentment and joy.

A Cultural Shift

Brooks believes that today’s society has replaced the crooked timber tradition with the culture of the Big Me. Young people are raised to view themselves as the center of the universe and destined for fame (7). The self-esteem movement, embodied in the mantra “Be true to yourself,” has created a generation primed for self-centeredness, narcissism, and self-aggrandizement. This moral framework provides few tools for people when they experience rejection, brokenness, and pain. In the culture of the Big Me, the only response to suffering is disbelief, outrage, and eventual despair. 

The culture of the Big Me leaves little room for growth in character because under this scheme, one’s “timber” is perfectly straight. The problem is not the individual, but the world around him. When circumstances take a turn for the worse, which they inevitably will at times, the boy blames the people and power structures that exist, not the human flaws that dwell within.

A More Excellent Way 

Brook’s conclusion is that at the end of the day the good life is the one marked by humility, not pride, and self-effacement, not self-promotion. This is the way of the crooked timber tradition.

Assuming we generally agree with this idea, as educators, we must ask: How can we train students to view the world in this way, while also encouraging them to strive for excellence? Christ himself said it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye a needle than it is for a rich man to inherit the kingdom of heaven. Perhaps something similar can be said of the quest for achievement. Can one seek achievement along the road to character, especially humility?

In his first letter to the Corinthians, I believe the apostle Paul offers some key insights for our question. During his treatment of spiritual gifts, Paul underscores the fact that the gifts of the Spirit ought to unite believers, not divide them. Just as organs within the human body work together in unity for the good of the body, so Christians ought to use their gifts for the good of the church…no matter what the gift is.

And yet, Paul writes, “But earnestly desire the higher gifts…And I will show you a more excellent way” (1 Cor. 12:31 ESV, italics mine). This way, Paul will go on to explain, is love.

We see in this passage that in Paul’s mind, the pursuit of the higher gifts is not in conflict with love, but indeed, love is their ultimate fulfillment.. When building others up is the aim, spiritual gifts reach their highest end. Conversely, when love is absent from achievement, excellence is futile. Paul writes:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

1 Corinthians 13:1-7 ESV

While in this passage Paul is addressing spiritual gifts particularly, I propose we can expand this idea to gifts, accomplishments, and achievements, in general. Love, along with the other virtues, does not prohibit the quest for achievement, but instead, sanctifies it. Through the way of love, men and women can use their gifts in service to others. In a school that takes this vision seriously, students will be trained to give, not take, and serve, not receive.

Now that we have a broad vision for how character and achievement can work together, we need to think about how to apply these ideas in the classroom. We must acknowledge that teachers are on the front lines of character formation: each day they provide students opportunities for both personal accomplishment and humble service. In this way, schools can be the incubators for future culture makers of character if they support teachers to cultivate the right classroom culture. Let’s now turn to Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion 2.0 to consider the core ingredients of this goal. (Note: I won’t have space to make explicit connections between character development as we have been thinking of it and these principles, but I hope to provide some general categories for practitioners to consider on their own.)

Lemov’s Five Principles of Classroom Culture

In the fourth and final part of Teach Like a Champion 2.0, author Doug Lemov lays out five principles of classroom culture: discipline, management, control, influence, and engagement. Admittedly, I’m not the biggest fan of the terms themselves. Most of them contain the conceptual residue of modern education presuppositions. Nevertheless, I was overall impressed with Lemov’s treatment of the five principles and believe that they can serve as effective handholds, when properly defined, for creating a culture geared toward excellence with a foundation of character. Let me walk through them one at a time.

Principle 1: Discipline

The first principle is discipline. Lemov defines discipline as “teaching students the right and successful way to do things” (344). Too often teachers assume that their students understand the nuts and bolts of what it means to be a scholar and, as a result, give abstract commands: “Pay attention” “Give this assignment your full effort” “Read this next paragraph carefully.”

But as Lemov points out, what teachers need to do first is breakdown these commands into individual elements. Instead of “Pay Attention,” say “Sit up straight, eyes on me, and four feet on the floor.” When teachers give concrete instructions and then provide accountability for obedience, students are able to most effectively grow in the discipline of, in this case, attention.

Overtime, the disciplines the teacher focuses on will become habits. Patrick has written at length in his free eBook about the importance of habit training and how the human brain is wired to put certain tasks on auto-pilot. As teachers, we can leverage this useful function of the brain for the student’s benefit. We can teach students how to be students and watch them grow in the habits of a scholar, including exhibiting strong character, over time.

Principle 2: Management

Lemov’s second principle for classroom culture is management. In modern educational circles, classroom management systems are par for the course. Teachers are baptized in the behaviorist psychology of Skinner and Pavlov and expected to leverage these insights about human behavior to meet their management objectives. Lemov defines classroom management as “the process of reinforcing behavior through the use of consequences and rewards” (343).

Management systems are attractive, minimally, because they tend to yield visible short-term results. For example, if a student has trouble controlling his urge to run in the hallway and the teacher rolls out a consequence of five minutes off of recess for each illicit dash, this action will likely curb his behavior pretty quickly.

The problem, which Charlotte Mason practitioners, among others, are apt to point out, is that this approach fails to take seriously the heart and will of a child. It aims for behavioral conformity, not personal growth. Lemov himself admits that these sort of management systems work in the short-term, but pay decreasing benefits over time. The more you use a consequence or reward, the less effective it becomes. Management systems, without the other principles, devolve quickly. Students become desensitized to the rewards and consequences, and teachers are forced to dial up the dosages to get the desired effect.

As we think about cultivating classroom culture from a classical perspective, we would do well to leave these management systems out of our approach. A preferred course of action would be to focus our attention on training students in disciplines (principle 1) and habits that will serve them better for the long-term.

Principle 3: Control

Let’s move to the third principle: control. It’s not the most culturally palatable term today, but you’ll soon see what Lemov is getting at. He defines control as “The capacity to cause someone to choose to do what you ask, regardless of consequences” (344). Notice that control operates independently of applying consequences within a management system. The teacher instructs. The students obey. The matter is settled.

Notice also that control here doesn’t negate agency. According to Lemov’s definition, teachers preserve the student’s responsibility to choose to obey. This points to an undergirding truth about control and obedience: it leads to freedom. As students demonstrate over time their strength of will to obey when given instructions, teachers can grant more freedom. Rules move from external fiat to internal mastery.

How can teachers exercise control over their students in a way that moves them to self-mastery? The key is relationship. Lemov writes, “Teachers who have strong control succeed because they understand the power of language and relationships: they ask firmly and confidently, but also with civility, and often kindly” (345). In other words, teachers even as they exercise an appropriate form of control, do so while respecting the personhood of their students. Their students would never doubt that the teacher has their best interest in mind.

Principle 4: Influence

This leads to the fourth principle: influence. Influence is the linchpin for a strong classroom culture. A teacher can provide students with great support in discipline, implement an effective management system, and exhibit high control, and yet be failing in a key way: moving students from “behave” to believe.” A teacher cannot sustain the culture she wants for her classroom on her own. At some point, her students need to buy into the vision themselves. They must believe and trust that the classroom culture was designed for their own benefit and growth.

You are probably beginning to see how each of these principles, with the exception of the management system, work together. As the teacher demonstrates herself to be a person of character, illustrated by her love, care, and expectations for her students, students will voluntarily follow. In some ways, this is Leadership 101. People follow a leader who looks out for them. As teachers cultivate a culture of joy, belonging, and growth, students will believe in the vision the teacher has painted and respond accordingly. And as we think about developing students to be people of character, the vision we articulate is especially important.

Principle 5: Engagement

The final principle for cultivating a strong classroom culture is engagement, specifically intellectually engagement. As I have discussed in previous articles, our students are not mere clay to be formed or tablets to be written on. Students are persons, made in the image of God, created with capacities to engage dynamically with the world God created. Students are hard-wired to explore, grow, think, work, and create.

In the classroom, therefore, it is crucial for students to be engaged intellectually. They need to be exposed to rich content and then expected to chew on this content themselves, for example, through narration. As Lemov puts it, “Students minds are ready to be intellectually engaged. They need to be stimulated. Something to challenge and fascinate them. Great teachers get students busily engaged in important, interesting, and challenging work” (346). 

Conclusion

Through creating the right classroom culture, teachers can lead their students to become the young men and women of character our society needs more than ever. Moreover, through implementing the right principles of classroom culture, teachers don’t have to choose between character and achievement, but instead can see first-hand how character is the driving force behind it all. When teacher and students form an alliance over the idea to strive for excellence in the way of love for the good of others, the result is a dynamic community of servant-learners.

David Brooks describes these people well:

“They radiate a sort of moral joy. They answer softly when challenged hardly. They are silent when unfairly abused. They are dignified when others try to humiliate them, restrained when others try to provoke the. But they get things done.They perform acts of sacrificial service with the same modest everyday spirit they would display if they were just getting the groceries. They are not thinking about what impressive work they are doing. They are not thinking about themselves at all. They just seem delighted by the flawed people around them. They just recognize what needs doing and they do it” (ivi). 

Well said, Mr. Brooks. May this be spoken of both our students and ourselves.

Other articles in this series:

Building Ratio: Training Students to Think and Learn for Themselves

Work, Toil, and the Quest for Academic Rigor

“Teach Like a Champion” for the Classical Classroom, Part 3: Check for Understanding

“Teach Like a Champion” for the Classical Classroom, Part 2: Teacher-Driven Professional Development

“Teach Like a Champion” for the Classical Classroom, Part 1: An Introduction

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I am consciously borrowing from the title of an immensely important book in my life written by Kent Hughes. Pastor Hughes was close to retirement when I had the privilege of joining the pastoral staff at College Church. In the short time I worked with Kent, I gained so much from him in terms of leadership principles, homiletical theory and shepherding a congregation. I pored over Liberating Ministry from the Success Syndrome while serving at College Church, which helped me to see how Kent operated as senior pastor in a deeper light, but also assisted me in my fledgling and brief career as a vocational pastor. The principles from my time at College Church have lived with me beyond my time there and are nicely encapsulated in Kent’s book. I have since spent over a dozen years in education and have found that his principles carry over to schools.

How Do We Measure Success?

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” is a famous dictum of management guru Peter Drucker. Most have taken this to mean that success must be measured in clearly defined terms that are trackable over time. There is tremendous wisdom in Drucker’s phrasing, but as often occurs to great ideas, they become applied in awkward ways. Education has suffered from an unthinking application of this principle. In my March 2019 article covering speeches given at the Education 20/20 series, I brought out the educational policy of the 1990s as Yuval Levin described it. There was a bipartisan coalition that based education policy around standardized tests. Here was something measurable that could be managed.

About the same time that policy setters were promoting standardized testing as the means to educational reform, serious doubts were being raised about the effectiveness of standardized testing. James Popham’s 1999 article “Why Standardized Tests Don’t Measure Education Quality” describes one aspect of the problem:

“The substantial size of the content domain that a standardized achievement test is supposed to represent poses genuine difficulties for the developers of such tests. If a test actually covered all the knowledge and skills in the domain, it would be far too long.”

Standardization of knowledge means chopping off a wide array of knowledge domains. Anything not showing up on the tests receives less funding, credit hours, etc. But even the knowledge domains that do show up on the tests are pared down to the bare essentials.

Standardization not only reduces knowledge, it emphasizes the average human experience. It proposes to predict future ability and achievement by comparing all test takers to a mean. In their 1998 Journal of Higher Education article “Are Standardized Tests Fair to African Americans?,” Jacqueline Fleming and Nancy Garcia look at SAT data to evaluate whether disadvantaged minorities are evaluated fairly, raising the question of the predictive validity of the test. Human beings are complex creatures and evaluating according to an average standard blunts all the colorful variety every individual possesses.

Yet the standardized test has remained one of the chief measures of success for schools. The stakes are high. College admissions and scholarships are on the line. The standardized test has held a prominent position as the gatekeeper for college and career pathways. The pressure for success has led teachers and administrators to pour time and resources into test preparation. The result can be great scores, a roster of National Merit Scholars, and placements at selective colleges. But have we really measured the success of education in the life of the student?

Student enrollment is yet another measure of success. Over the past decade many schools have struggled with enrollment. A 2017 article in the Wall Street Journal reported that enrollment in private schools had dropped by 14% between 2006 and 2016 (WSJ Dec. 29, 2017). This nationwide struggle continues today as private schools compete against each other as well as against public schools, homeschool coops, and online schools. The recession appears to have been a major factor causing many families to make educational decisions based on cost analysis over other values, such as religious affiliation or academic achievement (see the 2017 study by Lamb and Mbekeani). Is it the case, though, that all schools that have seen a decline in enrollment are unsuccessful? The inverse is equally worthy of consideration. Ought a school with increasing enrollment to be deemed a success?

Whether we look at test scores or enrollment numbers, measures of success that are based solely on numerical data often don’t tell the whole story. For Christian schools, these forms of data might even distract from the measures of success we would actually want to track. Instead of test data and enrollment numbers, we might want to track how biblically literate our students are, how involved in church and service our students are, or whether graduates have remained in the faith during college. Answers to these kinds of questions are hard to come by and rarely provide convenient measurements of yearly trends. But if the true measure of success lies in these domains, we are best served by shifting our focus to key values that are consistent with the school’s mission and vision.

Measure What Really Matters

In Liberating Ministry from the Success Syndrome, Hughes narrates a period in his early ministry where he almost walked away from the pastorate. He experienced the “dark night of the soul” during which he recognized how he had been caught up in the drive for success evaluated along numerical lines. Church growth models of ministry define success based on attendance and membership. The feeling of failure when things don’t go according to plan is palpable. These dark feelings will be familiar with educators who are questioning the success of their schools by similar means. In response to this struggle for success, Kent and Barbara Hughes committed themselves to study the Bible for answers:

“We made a covenant to search the Scriptures and learn what God had to say about success. We fiercely determined to evaluate our success from a biblical point of view.” (31)

Their study of the Bible helped develop key biblical principles that shifted the definition of success to ideas that matter more than numerical factors.

To measure what really matters, one must detach from the game of counting heads or examining test results and reconnect with core values. Hughes reconnected himself with scripture to answer the pressing internal conflict between his passion for ministry and his drive for success. What he found was that there was “no place where it says that God’s servants are called to be successful” (35). Repeatedly in the Bible we can think about times where God worked through apparent failure to accomplish his good plan. Narratives abound along these lines. The murder of Abel, the enslavement of the Israelites, their exile at the hands of the Babylonians, the betrayal and denial of Jesus by the disciples, the sufferings and imprisonment of Paul… all point to apparent failure through which God worked.

God does not depend on human success to carry out his good plan. Instead of success as the key to ministry, Hughes says, “We discovered our call is to be faithful” (35). Faithfulness matters greatly in ministry and in life. For Kent this meant faithfulness to expositing scripture. God’s revealed word is so precious that he devoted his effort to studying and preaching scripture, which later saw him as a principal figure in the establishment of the Simeon Trust that promoted expository preaching. Kent also saw faithfulness as shepherding the people God has brought into your care. Faithfulness to God’s word and faithfulness to God’s people were concepts I learned over and over again during my time with Kent at College Church.

Faithfulness, though, is not easy to measure numerically. You can’t bank faithfulness. It doesn’t show up as a line item on a report. There is no standardized test for faithfulness. Faithfulness is a quality that is measured in time spent being obedient to a calling. Even if my ministry isn’t cranking out eye-catching numbers, I can assess my success based on the number of days I have spent faithfully carrying out the work of ministry. Faithfulness is a key concept in education. A teacher must faithfully adhere to the texts, the truths, the ideas and the wisdom that must be imparted to students. A teacher must also be faithful to the students God grants to him or her, to teach them fully and holistically, without prioritizing students with good scores over those with lower scores.

Measuring What Is Difficult to Measure

Many of the most important values in education are difficult to measure. Returning to Drucker’s notion that we need to be able to measure these core values in order to see growth in them, we must consider the nature of our educational values with a view to articulating what it means to succeed in these areas. In Liberating Ministry from the Success Syndrome, Hughes shows what success looks like in many spiritual areas. Spirituality is hard to measure, but looking at one example will illustrate for us how to apply the proper mindset to growth in our core values.

Prayer is essential to a godly life. But it is difficult to set aside time for prayer in our intensely driven and distracted culture. Huges calls for discipline in our prayer lives, noting that prayer holds a place of primacy in the Christian walk. He quotes Ephesians 6:18, “With all prayer and petition pray at all times in the Spirit…” (77, emphasis his). Prayer is a highly valued practice, but how do we measure something like this? Even asking this question raises a thorny theological issue. If we were to measure our prayer lives, would we fall into the trap of legalism? Hughes addresses this very question.

“There is an eternity of difference between legalism and discipline. Legalism has at its core the thought of becoming better and thus gaining merit through religious exercise. Whereas discipline springs from a desire to please God.”

Liberating Ministry from the Success Syndrome, 78

To grow in prayer, we need to have the right mindset. A mind set on exacting measurement, with the hope that it will meet some divine standard, is prone to legalism. But a mind set on maintaining a consistent, faithful communion with God will reap the benefits of a disciplined lifestyle. I can measure this consistency by setting some parameters. “I’d like to pray every day, so I will check each day I pray, with the goal of never missing more than one day, should I miss a day.” This sets a few rules by which I can track my consistency. It’s focused on a long-term goal of gaining the discipline of daily prayer. The true goal, though, is a deeper communion with God. So one could enter an additional parameter: “At the end of each day I will record a reflection on how prayer has connected me with God for the day.” A review of this daily record will give a sense of whether one is achieving success in the long-term goal of attaining a prayerful life.

Measuring True Educational Success

Many of the tools employed in education, such as standardized tests, report cards, and transcripts, measure specific areas of a student’s education, focusing almost solely on academic achievement in core subjects. Even though these areas are important, they are a very narrow slice of the student’s full education. When we understand the transformative nature of education on the whole person, it becomes clear that academic achievement is not the only area to be measured, nor is it obvious that academic achievement is the best measure of a student’s true education. One of the key reasons academic achievement receives undue focus is because it is simply easy to measure. Here we’ll explore some areas that are equally worthy of measurement, despite the fact that they are difficult to measure.

As educators, we ought to embrace the growth mindset. What this means for measuring success is that overcoming obstacles and failure is a key component of a student’s education. In mathematics, for instance, I have taught students who intuitively understand new concepts quite easily. They often receive high grades simply because the concepts come easily to them. Compare this to a different student who struggles to learn a new concept. This child has encountered an obstacle. To overcome this obstacle, the student must apply previous skills in creative new ways to assimilate and utilize the new math concept. Eventually the student arrives at the same place as the intuitive learner, but along the way the child has not received the same grades as the intuitive learner. However the student has potentially learned it at a more sophisticated level because the obstacle forces the student to examine the new concept from various alternative angles. Imagine this student struggling in multiple subjects compared to the intuitive learner. One report card shows one student to be superior in academic achievement, but there’s a fuller narrative for the other student that might actually show a more thorough learning has occurred that isn’t reflected on the report card.

One method for measuring this is to allocate a growth narrative assignment in a class. Here a student is given a chance to articulate specific avenues of growth which would then be reflected in the course grade. A method used at the schools I’ve worked at are narrative reports on report cards. This enables the teacher to share information about obstacles overcome. More and more colleges are shifting their focus away from the matrix of GPA and SAT numbers to a more narrative-influenced approach. Student essays and teacher recommendations are great ways to communicate student success in overcoming obstacles.

Difficult educational processes such as narration or discussion can be difficult to measure when compared to tests and quizzes where answers are either right or wrong. It is important, though that students aren’t simply examined on problems that have only one correct answer. Helping them articulate perspectives on complex issues or understand the depth and complexity of an author’s point can be extremely valuable to the student’s true educational growth.

Jason Barney, in his ebook available on our website, describes the art of narration. This is a practice that involves focused attention on a reading and understanding what was perceived by remembering the author’s language, the sequence of ideas and the details of the text. Every component of narration is an area of development for the child. They are called upon to narrate difficult passages and sometimes fail to ascertain all the complexity of the text. And yet through narration, each child assimilates a vast array of knowledge that is not easily tested in a standard format. Narration, then is both an educational tool for assimilating knowledge as well as a means of assessing whether students have acquired knowledge from the text.

Again we are confronted by the fact that narration doesn’t fit neatly into the categories provided by tools such as report cards and standardized tests. Narration is both extremely immediate and also of long-term consequence. By this I mean that in the very moment of learning, a student either shows they’ve assimilated knowledge or they have not fully ascertained the text, perhaps through lack of attention or because the student hasn’t fully grasped it yet. At any given point a student can know fully, partially or not at all as revealed by narration, and this fluctuates based on a variety of factors. Yet, when we look at the long-term impact of narration over the days, weeks and years of the student’s training, there is a deep and lasting impression made on the child’s mind through focused attention and assimilated knowledge. Jason writes,

“Because of this it has all the possibilities of an assessment for informing a teacher’s interventions to promote further learning. For instance, after the narration a teacher could correct a student’s narration at a key point, clarify something the child didn’t understand or ask questions to bring out a deeper understanding of the content. Modern education has called this a formative assessment, because it is intended to form or shape the ongoing process of learning, not simply to judge a student’s accomplishment for the purpose of an abstract symbol system like a grade.”

Educational success, then, should be measured not only by the final letter grade received, but through the formative processes that promote learning. Too often the formative assessment gives way to the final assessment as a measure of success, so we need to be careful that the one informs the other.

Finally, personal character is as much a part of educational formation as the acquisition of subject content knowledge. The means of measurement available to us in report cards and standardized test cannot access the character of the student. Yet if we are helping the student to life lives of meaning and purpose, personal character is tremendously valuable to their success in life. I recently came across the US Marine Corps Fitness Report that evaluates “a Marine’s performance and is the Commandant’s primary tool for the selection of personnel for promotion, augmentation, resident schooling, command, and duty assignments.” (USMC Fitness Report, pg. 1). Each Marine is evaluated according to mission accomplishment, individual character, leadership, intellect and wisdom, and fulfillment of evaluation responsibilities. I was struck by how holistically this tool comprehends an individual Marine. Under individual character, the Fitness Report evaluates courage, effectiveness under stress and initiative. Here is the definition of courage for the Marine:

Moral or physical strength to overcome danger, fear, difficulty or anxiety. Personal acceptance of responsibility and accountability, placing conscience over competing interests regardless of consequences. Conscious, overriding decision to risk bodily harm or death to accomplish the mission or save others. The will to persevere despite uncertainty.

USMC Fitness Report, pg. 2

Several aspects of this definition pertain to the combat soldier who places himself in the field of physical danger, which are beyond what would be expected of a student. But the key idea here is that courage is clearly defined. There are aspects of this definition that I would want to put before students, such as “Moral or physical strength to overcome fear, difficulty or anxiety,” “personal acceptance of responsibility and accountability” and “placing conscience over competing interests regardless of consequences.” Now we are all clear on what is expected when we talk about courage as an area of character to be developed.

The Fitness Report provides a scale to evaluate the Marine’s courage. The baseline is that the Marine would “demonstrate inner strength and acceptance of responsibility.” Here the Marine does what is expected, which is to be brave in the accomplishment of any mission. But beyond this is the second tier where the Marine “exhibits bravery in the face of adversity and uncertainty.” Here the Marine’s courage has been tried and tested, revealing that the inner conscience is guiding actions. The highest tier of the evaluation shows not only a “capacity to overcome obstacles” but also to “inspire others in the face of moral dilemmas.” Here the Marine looks not only to his own situation but guides others to have courage in the face of competing interests. This tool goes a long way toward measuring the success of something that is difficult to measure but is clearly a core value to have for a Marine.

There are many virtues that can be developed along these lines, from intellectual humility to compassion to perseverance. Success in these areas comes only through clearly articulating expectations, paying attention to the concept in various circumstances, and then providing feedback along the way. I might tell a student, “Remember how we talked about having compassion. I noticed that you shared part of your lunch with your classmate who forgot his. That’s exactly what we’re going for here.” Once again, this tends not to show up on the tools we regularly use for measuring educational success. Thus finding a means of reporting on personal character is essential if our goals are to be transformative in the lives of the students given into our care.

In closing, I hope I have helped you to overcome the persistent problem schools have in focusing so much on our typical measures of academic success. When we liberate ourselves from this undue focus, we can start to examine what truly matters as we educate our students. To be faithful to our calling as teachers, we need to identify our core values and then seek to think differently about how we measure success. Most of what we would want to measure is actually quite difficult to measure. But let’s not allow this to simply fall back on what is easy to measure, but instead apply creativity to the problem of how to promote these core values in students’ lives. We’d love to hear more about ways you’ve attempted to shift the focus away from the typical tools that measure educational success in the comments below.

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