The book of Proverbs provides the perfect illustration of this. In it we find not only programmatic statements of value like “Better is a little with righteousness than great revenues with injustice” (16:8 ESV), but also observations about human nature like “A worker’s appetite works for him; his mouth urges him on” (16:26). As we explained last time, these are truthful opinions worthy of being shared with the young to help them learn to understand the world around them and to value things rightly. 

Early education should be packed with content of this sort, both directly from the mouths of teachers, but across all the subjects of study. Reading and writing instruction should not merely train in skills but should be rich in moral wisdom. In this way, we can sow the seeds of virtue and wisdom in the young. We have already had occasion to remark on the intimate connection between the moral virtues and practical wisdom. They are two sides of the same coin. As Aristotle says, “the function of man is achieved only in accordance with practical wisdom as well as with moral excellence; for excellence makes the aim right, and practical wisdom the things leading to it” (Nicomachean Ethics VI.12; rev. Oxford trans., 1807). And again, “it is not possible to be good in the strict sense without practical wisdom, nor practically wise without moral excellence” (VI.13, 1808). 

We had to go somewhat far afield, with both John Amos Comenius, the great Czech educational reformer of the 17th century, and Aristotle as our guides, during the last article, in order to establish the necessity of laying this foundation of virtue and prudence in early education. In this article, we will put some flesh on the bones of this “good instruction” by teachers of the young through delineating the role of principles and practice, examples and discipline. 

Principles and Practice

First of all, we can pick up again and dust off the analogy between artistry and morality that we explored while introducing our series on Apprenticeship in the Arts. “Excellences we get by first exercising them,” Aristotle asserts, speaking of the moral virtues which are inextricably tied to prudence, “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” (Nicomachean Ethics II.1, 1743). Practice, in line with the correct principles, will form a person toward either artistry or morality. 

As in apprenticeship in the arts then, laying the appropriate foundation for prudence involves both moral practice and principles. John Amos Comenius emphasized the preliminary role of practice in craftsmanship, and he does the same for each of the other cardinal virtues. Regarding temperance, he says, in his Great Didactic,

“Boys should be taught to observe temperance in eating and in drinking, in sleeping and in waking, in work and in play, in talking and in keeping silence, throughout the whole period of their instruction.

“In this relation the golden rule, ‘Nothing in excess,’ should be dinned into their ears, that they may learn on all occasions to leave off before satiety sets in.” (212)

Temperance constitutes a guiding principle for the ordering of students’ days that parents and teachers should heed. Notice how Comenius draws from traditional wisdom for a principle that should be actively, rather than passively “dinned into their ears.” 

As modernists and postmodernists we are apt to recoil at such tough love, but we would do well to question our assumptions. Either we order their days, emotions, and minds with an open door to intemperance (e.g., playing video games all day, eating unhealthy foods, staying up late into the night, etc.), or we hold the line and cause them to practice temperance day in and day out. Intemperate habituation is no small issue to worry about; as Aristotle said, “It makes no small difference, then, whether we form habits of one kind or of another from our very youth; it makes a very great difference, or rather, all the difference” (Nic Ethics II.1, 1743). 

Apparently moral subtlety is not a virtue for an early education in prudence. Instead Comenius envisions a type of moral catechism with answers drawn from scripture and wise men to provide rules for life (answering questions like “Why should we strive against envy?” “With what arms should we fortify ourselves against the sorrows and chances of life?” “How should we observe moderation in joy?” “How should anger be controlled?” “How should illicit love be driven out?”; 216). These provide the guiding principles to accompany the practice of daily life.

Comenius goes on to delineate the reason for this habituation according to the cardinal virtues. It lies in the rational nature of a human being and therefore develops the proper connection between moral habits and the principled deliberation of prudence:

The principle which underlies this is that we should accustom boys to do everything by reason, and nothing under the guidance of impulse. For man is a rational animal, and should therefore be led by reason, and, before action, ought to deliberate how each operation should be performed, so that he may really be master of his own actions. Now since boys are not quite capable of such a deliberate and rational mode of procedure, it will be a great advance towards teaching them fortitude and self-control if they be forced to acquire the habit of performing the will of another in preference to their own, that is to say, to obey their superiors promptly in everything. (212-213)

For Comenius, obedience to a prudent parent or teacher acts as a preliminary stage in a person’s development of prudential wisdom. Since children cannot be entirely rational in consulting about which operation or act to perform, they should obey their elders, who at the same time explain to them the reasons for why one course of action should be preferred to another. 

Children thus act as moral apprentices through the habit of prompt obedience, practicing the very thing that they will do in later life when they must subordinate the impulsive and emotional part of them to their rational and deliberate mind. Again it must be reiterated that this is not the possession of prudence itself, but it is, in Comenius’ mind, “a great advance” toward it. A development of his playful analogy, sowing the seeds of virtue, helps him explain why:

“Virtue must be inculcated at a very early stage before vice gets possession of the mind.

“For if you do not sow a field with good seed it will produce nothing but weeds of the worst kind. But if you wish to subdue it, you will do so more easily and with a better hope of success if you plough it, sow it, and harrow it in early spring. Indeed, it is of the greatest importance that children be well trained in early youth, since a jar preserves for a long time the odour with which it has been imbued when new.” (215)

For this reason, we can see as injurious the inclination of many parents and teachers, to say of some vice a young child is displaying, “Oh, he’ll grow out of it.” Weeds do not disappear of their own accord but grow and infest the field. The diligent labor of bringing up children involves, first, sowing well the field, but then, harrowing it, as well, breaking up the ground and tearing up the weeds through proper discipline. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Examples and Discipline

So far we have explained the importance of providing principles alongside practice to prepare the hearts and minds of students for moral virtue and intellectual prudence. In his Great Didactic Comenius reiterates this Aristotelian emphasis on ‘practice, practice, practice’ as he transitions to a discussion of examples: 

We have seen in chaps. xx. and xxi. that it is by learning that we find out what we ought to learn, and by acting that we learn to act as we should. So then, as boys easily learn to walk by walking, to talk by talking, and to write by writing, in the same way they will learn obedience by obeying, abstinence by abstaining, truth by speaking the truth, and constancy by being constant. But it is necessary that the child be helped by advice and example at the same time. (215)

Just as in other skills and arts, practice according to good principles provides the foundation for prudence. In a similar way to training in artistry, where theory should not crowd out the importance of examples and models, so also in prudence moral exemplars hold a crucial role.

When the classicists among us think of moral exemplars, we might imagine Plutarch’s Lives or Aesop’s fables, the well-known figures of history and literature who demonstrate for us right and wrong behavior in the vivid color of a narrative. And this is right, but Comenius reminds us of the even more living curriculum of the lives of people in the school community: “Examples of well-ordered lives, in the persons of their parents, nurses, tutors, and school-fellows, must continually be set before children” (215). Comenius seems to suggest highlighting virtuous and wise individuals in the community through public praise and story-telling. We could imagine this being done in the classroom or assembly-hall, formally and informally. 

Comenius’ reason for valuing living examples resonates with modern research on mirror neurons and our imitative nature as human beings: 

For boys are like apes, and love to imitate whatever they see, whether good or bad, even though not bidden to do so; and on this account they learn to imitate before they learn to use their minds. By ‘examples,’ I mean living ones as well as those taken from books; in fact, living ones are the more important because they make a stronger impression. And therefore, if parents are worthy and careful guardians of domestic discipline, and if tutors are chosen with the greatest possible care, and are men of exceptional virtue, a great advance will have been made towards the proper training of the young in morals. (215)

We might supplement Comenius statement about children “learning to imitate before they learn to use their minds” with reference to the recent research that links imitation to the foundational emotional and artistic skills, say in mirroring the emotions of another through facial expressions or the hand-grasping movements of another simply by observing (see Patrick’s article The Imitation Brain). This monkey-see, monkey-do (or monkey-feel) may be less than the fully blossomed rationality of prudence, but it is a fundamental and therefore necessary step along the way. 

Parents and teachers must remember that their example and influence will have a real and overarching effect on the moral development of the children under their care. This is not an area where “Do as I say, not as I do” is going to be effective (if there is any domain where that works…). Ironically, it is this personal lack of prudence that contributes to parents’ lack of perseverance in discipline. Did you notice how in the block quote above Comenius transitioned immediately from living examples to the necessity of parents as “worthy and careful guardians of domestic discipline”? In his mind these are connected, because the faithful administration of discipline in the little things of the home functions as an overflow of a prudent and godly life.

In our modern cultural imagination we picture the pickiness of a hot-tempered and unpredictable parent when we think of domestic discipline: e.g., the surly father who corrects his son’s eating habits or messy room when he himself is in a bad mood from work. But for Comenius and the Christian tradition (“Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.” -Ephesians 6:4), “domestic discipline” involves consistency, emotional warmth, and a sensitivity to the child’s needs and abilities. In another counter cultural move (for us anyway), Comenius agrees with Charlotte Mason that children should “be very carefully guarded from bad society, lest they be infected by it” (216). Apparently, the idea that “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with” has a deeper moral point to it. Comenius also believes that ‘idleness is the devil’s playground’ for the young, who are apt to “be led to evil deeds or contract a tendency to indolence” through it (216). They should therefore “be kept continually employed either with work or with play” (216). 

It is important to note the Christian coloring that Comenius has given discipline in its role in developing prudence, at the same time as we consider the tradition’s questioning of corporal punishment in school. Quintilian, the famous Roman rhetorical teacher, for instance, had ruled against the use of corporal punishment in his Education of an Orator as tending toward a slavish disposition in students and abusiveness on the part of the tutor (I.3.14). Comenius, likewise, seems to have a lighter approach, remarking famously on the natural curiosity of children and the easiness of the way he recommends. However, when it comes to moral and spiritual matters he has a Christian seriousness that we must reckon with. He begins by noting the inevitability of discipline: “Since it is impossible for us to be so watchful that nothing evil can find an entrance, stern discipline is necessary to keep evil tendencies in check” (216). 

The whole work of sowing the seeds of prudence is for Comenius elevated to the spiritual plane of reference, when we view it from a Christian worldview–a fact that increases the need for watchfulness and careful treatment of moral maladies through timely discipline:

For our enemy Satan is on the watch not only while we sleep, but also while we wake, and as we sow good seed into the minds of our pupils he contrives to plant his own weeds there as well, and sometimes a corrupt nature brings forth weeds of its own accord, so that these evil dispositions must be kept in check by force. We must therefore strive against them by means of discipline, that is to say, by using blame or punishment, words or blows, as the occasion demands. This punishment should always be administered on the spot, that the vice may be choked as soon as it shows itself, or may be, as far as is possible, torn up by the roots. Discipline, therefore, should ever be watchful, not with the view of enforcing application to study (for learning is always attractive to the mind, if it be treated by the right method), but to ensure cleanly morals. (216-217)

Comenius’ measured approach stands between the extreme positions of our time and his, where the sterner forms of punishment (and even the name of punishment) is either neglected or over-used. His little phrase, “as the occasion demands,” endorses the prudential use of varied types of rebuke or consequence in a way that fits the students’ moral misstep.

If we are to recover the Aristotelian goal of prudence, we must reconsider the details of discipline as a part of a moral education. Principles and practice, examples and discipline form the appropriate web of “good instruction” that functions as a preliminary training in prudence, with the ultimate goal that students internalize right and wrong and a true sense of the value of things in the moral and spiritual universe from a God’s-eye perspective.

The post Counsels of the Wise, Part 5: Principles and Practice, Examples and Discipline appeared first on .

The instructions on shampoo bottles and Pop Tarts boxes seem silly. The inclusion of the word “repeat” on shampoo bottles adds a metaphysical quandary. Have we just entered an infinite loop? How do we know when we’ve finished washing our hair? Instructions on consumer products and bits from comedians have much in common. Both are attempting to be extremely precise in their use of language. The economy of words on the shampoo bottle is almost elegant.

Did you watch the Brian Regan video? He gets lots of laughs. It looks almost effortless. Comedy also requires precision with language. But behind Regan’s bit stands hours of work honing words and sentences to optimize humor. Now I want you to watch another video. This is Jerry Seinfeld describing his writing process. (I linked to his Pop Tart video above if you want to see the finished product.) Again, I will wait.

Previously I wrote about the aims of writing. Students should learn to write for an interested audience and to produce perspective. I think we hear both of these at work in Jerry Seinfeld’s writing process. But in today’s article, I want to dive deeper into the nuts and bolts of writing. If my previous article addressed the why question, this article lays out the how.

Defeat the Internal Editor

The hardest part of writing is staring at a blank page. The biggest hurdle is putting pen to paper or fingers to the keyboard. Making the cursor move forward is a major victory. What is it that keeps us from starting? It is the internal editor. Before we’ve even begun writing, our internal editor is already criticizing our work.

Young students can also get locked up with the mechanical effort of writing. Their hands get tired. Some students find the effort of thinking tiresome as well. Other students find it difficult to convert their thoughts from speech to writing. For each of these situations, doing small and frequent writing sessions will help build up strength and stamina. Transcription can help a child with weak fingers. Go for well formed letters done with sufficient speed, so that when it comes to writing their thoughts down, they aren’t hindered by a slow hand. You can record a student speaking his thoughts, and then have them listen back and write those thoughts out. The goal here is to establish the link between thought and writing.

Once students get past these more mechanical problems, they will eventually have to confront the real dragon. The editor that exists in all our minds wants to review and revise our words whenever we speak or write. Effective writing, though, best occurs when we turn off that internal editor. We should teach our students to put words down on the page, any words, even if the words don’t represent our best work. I think this is best done in the classroom, but only if the proper atmosphere has been established.

We can build a writing atmosphere by doing several things regularly. First, students should learn in an environment in which discussions occur. Being able to put ideas out through speech builds a sense that the environment is suitable for expressing and exploring ideas. Discussion transfers to the written word. Putting ideas on the blank page is really not different than putting ideas out into the classroom. Second, writing should be a part of everyday life. Being called upon to write shouldn’t be a new and daunting event. If students feel like writing is an everyday thing, it becomes more and more natural to express oneself in writing.

Writing is such a vital tool for life, we need to bravely challenge students to cultivate this mode of expression. Writing enables us to see thought. Writing words on paper forces us to slow down our brains through the act of composing our thoughts. And then once our thoughts are written down, we can actually look at the thoughts our minds have produced. Seeing this written record then enables us to interact with our thoughts. Without this tool, we often spin our wheels never gaining clarity in our minds. We do this with our shopping lists (think about how difficult it is to hold a week’s shopping in our heads). How much more should we do this with great ideas from literature, history, philosophy, science and mathematics?

Resurrecting the Editor

Okay, so we defeated the internal editor so that we can just get words down on the page. Great! But we actually need that editor if we’re going to take our mere words and shape them into something with meaning and purpose. Very few people can write their best during a first draft. Yet, we often allow ourselves and our students to write in first draft mode as if it is final draft mode. Editing has to be part of the writing process. Yet editing doesn’t come naturally for most students; it’s also not always intuitive how best to teach the editing process. Let’s look at two major layers of editing: solidifying sentences and processing paragraphs.

Editing Layer 1: Solidifying Sentences

Sentences should be the first layer of editing. Each sentence should be examined carefully in three units. Begin by identifying the actual subject of the sentence. By actual I mean that we frequently bury the subject in the back part of the sentence. This is quite natural, since when we write in free flow the mind needs some filler words to get going. Editing now takes those loose words and reorganizes them so that the true subject can be placed in the subject slot of the sentence.

A different way of approaching the subject slot of the sentence is to think about the grammatical subject in the most concrete terms possible. Students should learn to avoid vague terms, especially pronouns. A pronoun introduces vagueness, which is the enemy of both clarity and succinctness. The subject slot, by the way, does not have to be the first grammatical element of a sentence. Transition phrases and adjectival qualifiers can add to the quality of a sentence. But a student should be able to reorganize any sentence so that it can begin with the subject phrase, even if there are good reasons to choose a different sentence structure.

A key goal to note thus far is intentionality. A student should learn that there are numerous ways of expressing the thought in a sentence, but that an intentional choice to use one particular way of organizing a sentence is based on sound reasoning. Learning how to make these choices increases the student’s power of expression.

Next we consider the verb. Having secured for ourselves the most concrete form of the true subject, we want to pair the subject with the most active verb possible. Many teachers focus on eliminating passive verbs and linking verbs. Sometimes, though, a linking verb or passive verb best communicates the state of affairs relative to the subject. A better way of approaching what I think these teachers are getting at is the idea that verbs communicate action. Therefore we should devote time to consider the most active verb possible. Notice the difference between these two sentences:

• There is a congress consisting of two chambers in which laws are made.

• The bicameral congress creates laws.

The second sentence both eliminates the vague pronoun, condenses the true subject to a powerful three-word phrase, and finds a more active verb.

Lastly we deal with all the remainder of the sentence. Two decisions need to be made. First, are the predicating words and phrases in their proper order and using their best expression? Much of the back end of a sentence can be rearranged, so play with the arrangement to make sure the flow assists the understanding of the reader. In addition, stylistic flourish and interesting vocabulary are well placed after the subject-verb complex. The reader has been assisted with a clear subject and verb, so the latter part of the sentence can be used to expand upon the topic at hand. This leads to the second decision. Has the sentence become too complicated? A long sentence isn’t necessarily a complicated sentence. But if someone gets lost in the syntax far removed from the subject, clarity is lost. Consider chopping off any unnecessary clutter or divide the complicated sentence into several shorter sentences.

Editing Layer 2: Processing Paragraphs

Students differ greatly in their conception of paragraphs. Some have lots of tiny paragraphs, some produce complete essays without ever breaking it up into paragraphs. Paragraphs are about developing one topic. In academic writing the convention of starting a paragraph with a topic sentence is sound. The structure of assertion and support is another helpful concept.

Jason shared with me a ten-sentence paragraph structure that I find immensely helpful. The paragraph begins with a topic sentence. Three pieces of evidence are used to support the assertion in the topic sentence. Each piece of evidence is introduced with a transition sentence. Then the evidence (most often a quotation) is laid out. The evidence is then followed with an explanation. This rhythm of transition, evidence, explanation should become engrained in students’ minds. Evidence should never be presented as self evident. It always needs explanation, with the explanation driving home the relevance of this evidence to the assertion made in the topic sentence. With three sentences per piece of evidence added to the original topic sentence, we arrive at the ten-sentence paragraph. To this can be added an eleventh concluding sentence.

The rule of three is an ancient rhetorical strategy. There’s something about sequencing ideas in groups of three that resonates with people. Pastors learn about the rule of three in homiletics courses. Comedians use the rule of three to create jokes (premise, premise, punchline). The knock, knock joke follows the rule of three. The ten-sentence paragraph operates with the rule of three: three pieces of evidence packaged in a three-sentence structure. The rule of three can now be used to expand an essay by having three paragraphs, each with its own topic sentence and support. Another iteration can be used to create three groups of three paragraphs. Students can start thinking about section headings (for some reason it feels more like academic or professional writing when you can use the heading tool in a word processor).

Once we start building multiple paragraphs, our attention can turn to arrangement. Have students reorder their paragraphs. Ask them how different sequences feel when the order is changed. Once students see that they’re not locked into one way of arranging their ideas, they gain new freedom to revise their work.

Editing becomes less about finding spelling errors and actually becomes part of the creative process. In this article I tried rearranging sections, placing the paragraph section before the sentence section. I decided to stay with the sentence-paragraph order. However, the exercise enabled me to see that there isn’t a strict order here. A teacher may want to work with a class at the paragraph-building level first and then zoom in at the sentence level.

Many Smaller Essays

One insight about the editing process is that smaller writing samples enable students to get practice editing at both the sentence and paragraph levels. The more practice they get free writing and intentionally editing helps them use the tools needed to expand to long form essay writing. One of the detriments to effective learning is writing long essays that become unwieldy for both the teacher and the student. Learning how to edit effectively takes repeated practice.

Short pieces provide more scope for practice on sentences and paragraphs. Long essays hinder the editing process for two reasons. One, the sheer amount to be edited can be overwhelming. Teachers receiving lots of lengthy papers understand the feeling of overwhelm. It takes time and concentration to give substantive feedback. The same holds for students working even on their own written work. If the editing process can’t be applied effectively for lengthy pieces, the students won’t fully learn the process. Two, writing long pieces before editing skill has been cultivated and honed means that students are getting lots and lots of practice writing suboptimal essays. It would be like swimming long distance with bad form. Every swim just reinforces the bad form. and the swimmer never learns the efficiency and freedom of proper swimming form.

An additional benefit to shorter essays is that you as a teacher can be more involved in providing substantive feedback more frequently. In some upper level classes where a lengthy essay is assigned the amount of feedback a teacher can provide is rather limited. Plus the time needed to mark multiple long essays means there’s a significant gap between initial composition on the students’ part and the feedback they receive. One method for solving this problem is to divide the long essay into shorter episodes that accumulate to a full essay over time. I have worked with several teachers now who have overseen senior theses, and each of them approached this massive project by dividing it into bite-sized pieces.

Hopefully this article helps stimulate your thinking about teaching writing in your class. Not everyone will become devoted to their art the way Jerry Seinfeld or Brian Regan have. They are virtuosos in their field. What we can learn from them, though is that writing is a process. We confront the blank page and get our ideas down. Then we hone our work until it really shines.

The post The Writing Process: Sentences, Paragraphs, Edit, Repeat appeared first on .

Now, to be sure, practice is important, especially if it rises to the threshold of “deliberate practice,” an intensive approach which Patrick lucidly explained in a past article. He himself warns, however, that the repeated rehearsal of skills can be futile if the three other components of deliberate practice are not in play. Patrick writes,

“ We need to be careful with this first component. It is all too easy to set up high frequency and think we are accomplishing something, when in fact all we are doing is a long series of empty work.”

Here it is acknowledged that merely bumping up the frequency of practice is not enough to hone a skill or understand a concept, particularly complex ones that are multifaceted and layered.

Applying this to the classroom, what can be done to ensure that the sort of practice our students engage in is not wasted? From differentiating between direct and indirect objects to solving algebraic equations to writing thoughtful, well-developed essays, how can we train our students in such a way that the skills they develop and knowledge they gain remain in their memories long-term? 

The Myth of Massed Practice

In Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, authors Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, and Mark McDaniel propose that one of the keys for long-term, strong and flexible mastery of a skill or concept is to mix up the practice. But first they dispose of the myth of massed practice. Massed practice is the focused, repetitive practice of one thing at a time until it is mastered (47). To be fair, this approach to learning is fairly intuitive and therefore enjoys quite a bit of trust from onlookers and practitioners alike. For example, the common advice for increasing one’s free-throw percentage in basketball is to shoot over and over again from the fifteen-foot mark (the distance from the free-throw line to the hoop). For those of us with basketball experience, we can even testify to the success of this strategy, specifically how quickly we experienced gains by utilizing this method. 

But real learning, insists the authors of Make It Stick, includes more than how quickly the skill is mastered or knowledge is acquired. What matters even more is whether that skill or knowledge is accessible to our memories when it is needed later:

“The rapid gains produced by massed practice are often evident, but the rapid forgetting is often not” (47).

The litmus test for successfully learning a skill, then, is whether this practical knowledge remains in our memory long-term. Scientists call the increased performance during the acquisition phase of a skill “momentary strength” and distinguish it from “underlying habit strength” (63). 

I have experienced this distinction between momentary strength and underlying habit strength too often in my ongoing development as a handyman. Thanks to the internet, when something in my house needs fixing or replacing, I need only search for the relevant video online to find out how to solve the problem. After watching the video (ten times over) and then completing the job myself, I gained momentary strength in the skill. I walked away from the project feeling confidently handy. However, three months later, when the same problem returned, I discovered that in the previous experience I had not actually gained underlying habit strength. As I scanned my memory for knowledge and proficiency of the skill, the search results were clear: no records found. (Note: I suppose I am exaggerating. My memory could recall some bits and pieces of what I had learned previously. But it wasn’t nearly sufficient for what I need to fix the problem again. Too much had been lost.)

Why? I had used massed practice, developing momentary strength, but not underlying habit strength that would serve me well long-term. I watched the video, spent a focused, inordinate amount of time honing the skill, and then neglected to practice it for three-months. Over this duration of time, the practical knowledge I gained was lost. It faded away into the distance, along with other short-term memories, like what I wore to work that day or what I had for breakfast.

So failing to gain long-term retention is one problem with massed practice, but even worse, this approach to learning, according to researchers, generally leads to inflexible, surface-level comprehension that is not amenable for complex cognitive acts like differentiation and application. In other words, it doesn’t lead to true mastery. 

Three Ways to Mix it Up

In order to reach this level of true mastery, mixing up the practice is the way to go. And, according to the latest research, there are three main ways to do so: 

1. Spaced Practice: Instead of intensively focusing on one skill for a single, extended session, space out the practice into multiple sessions. Work on it for a while and then return to it the next day or week. The space allotted between each session allows for the knowledge of the skill to soak into one’s long-term memory and connect to prior knowledge. Revisiting the skill each session certainly takes more effort, but that’s the point:

“The increased effort required to retrieve the learning after a little forgetting has the effect of retriggering consolidation, further strengthening memory” (49).

2. Interleaved Practice: While we experience the quickest gains by focusing on one specific skill or subset of knowledge over a period of time (momentary strength), interleaving, or mixing up the skill or concept you are focusing on in a practice session, leads to stronger understanding and retention (underlying habit strength). It feels sluggish and frustrating at times, for both teachers and students mind you, because it involves moving from skill to skill before full mastery is attained, but it leads to both a depth and durability of knowledge that massed practice does not (50).

3. Varied Practice: Varying practice entails constantly changing up the situation or conditions in which the skill or concept is being applied. It therefore strengthens the ability to transfer learning from one situation and apply it to another, requiring the student to constantly be assessing context and bridging concepts. Because this jump from concept to concept triggers different parts of the brain, it is more cognitively challenging, and therefore encodes the learning “…in a more flexible representation that can be applied more broadly” (52).

Test Case: Mixed Practice in Math Class

Let’s apply this concept of mixed practice to math class. The teacher is explaining to her students how to calculate the volume of geometric figures. The “massed practice” approach would have her teach the formula for calculating the volume of, say, a cube and then release her students to find the volume for ten different sized cubes. By the end of the class period, the majority of her students would be comfortable performing the algorithm, thereby demonstrating ostensible mastery of the skill (at least in the short-term).

Contrast this scenario with the “mixed practice” approach. The teacher might start by teaching the formula for the volume of a cube and then giving her students a couple practice problems to solve. But soon after, she would teach a different formula, say, the formula for finding the volume of a cylinder and, after that, a sphere. Upon giving her students a couple practice problems for each type of figure, she would instruct her students to complete a set of problems, in which various volume problems are interleaved. This problem set would force students to practice discernment: identify the particular figure, recall the relevant algorithm, and then run the numbers. Periodically, over the following days and weeks, the teacher would include various volume problems in the class warm-up and in the daily homework as well as other concepts previously covered.

As you can see from this example from math class, when mixed practice is implemented, underlying habit strength is forged. The order and types of exercises don’t permit a student to fall into mindless, rote practice. Instead, each problem requires higher level thinking skills beyond memorization such as categorization and application. In order to gain true mastery, the research is clear: mix up the practice. 

Mixed Practice and the Liberal Arts

Let me leave readers with one final thought: I’ve been using the modern phrase “true mastery” as shorthand for the sort of breadth and depth of learning we are aiming for at our schools and in our homes. But I could just as easily describe this outcome using language from the liberal arts tradition. When students engage in the challenge and rigor of mixed practice, they are being trained to learn and think for themselves, to engage in a form of self-education, which is a central idea in the classical tradition (as Jason explained so eloquently in his recent article for Circe). Their tools of learning, the liberal arts, are being sharpened, so to speak.

In addition, by providing opportunities for our students to engage in mixed practice, we avoid teaching them bad habits of cramming, that is, surface-level mastery for brief demonstration on an upcoming test. Instead we give them an opportunity to perform dynamic and valuable work, stretching their minds in flexibility, durability, and discernment, all of which is befitting of their God-given intellects and capabilities.

This is the sort of learning I get excited about and hopefully through this blog more parents and teachers can join us at Educational Renaissance in this life-giving work. 

The post True Mastery: The Benefits of Mixed Practice for Learning appeared first on .

What is Procrastination?

Why do today what can be done tomorrow? That is the mantra of procrastination. A popular video by Tim Urban describes the pleasure-seeking monkey and the anxiety monster who vie for the controls of our impulsive minds. When we have projects with deadlines, there is a mounting pressure as the deadline approaches. So delay bumps up against a real sense of impending doom if we miss the deadline. But what if we are delaying something that doesn’t have a deadline? What if our goal is something like traveling overseas someday? Or what if our goal is to become a better person? No deadline triggers forward movement, and we can live eternally in the malaise of perpetual delay.

Tim Pychyl, a professor of psychology at Carleton Univesity in Ottawa and director of the Centre for Initiatives in Education, defines procrastination as “the voluntary delay of an intended action despite the knowledge that this delay may harm the individual in terms of the task performance or even just how the individual feels about the task or him- or herself” (Solving the Procrastination Puzzle, 2) In other words, we know full well that we are not accomplishing the work we’ve set ourselves to do, and so we feel bad about our work and ourselves as a result.

There are plenty of delays, though, that are not our fault. Sometimes we get stuck in traffic. Sometimes we have to wait for other people to accomplish their tasks before we begin our own tasks. Procrastination is different than these kinds of delay in that we actually have the intention to work on something but decide not to. The time and resources are available for us to accomplish the task, we just choose not to do it. Frequently we will choose to do something else, something we did not intend to work on, in place of the task we were intending to work on. How often have we allocated time to do a task, say write a blog post, and then decide to organize the desk drawer? I mean the pens needed to be sorted into blue-ink and black-ink piles, what better time than now, right? Pychyl writes, “we need to understand this reluctance to act when it is in our best interest to act” (Solving the Procrastination Puzzle, 3) This is a key idea, the self-interested aspect of the work we procrastinate on. The accumulation of negative feeling through procrastination occurs because there’s some level of understanding that we are sabotaging ourselves.

Why Do We Procrastinate?

In his book The Productivity Project, Chris Bailey summarizes Pychyl’s work on procrastination. There are numerous reasons why we procrastinate, but Bailey identifies six triggers:

Boring

Frustrating

Difficult

Unstructured or ambiguous

Lacking in personal meaning

Lacking in intrinsic rewards

Productivity Project, 58

These triggers help us understand why a student is delaying their active engagement with an assignment. The work itself might be difficult or fraught with frustration. Much of the work we do in education contains an element of challenge to help our students grow. When we see them procrastinating, we can explore whether the difficulty is shutting them down. Procrastination can occur because the work lacks meaning or excitement. It can be boring to work a full set of math problems. Running through all the major and minor scales on the piano can lack excitement and meaning. The work could be unstructured or ambiguous. Open-ended projects can shut us and our students down simply because there is a lack of clarity about the parameters of the project. Any or all of these triggers can combine to create a perfect storm of procrastination.

Each of these categories are negative triggers that lead us to delay our work. Note how much they connect to emotional states. If an assignment lacks excitement, I am liable to get bored. My emotional state will seek out something more exciting, overruling my motivation and better judgment. If a task is difficult, it might trigger emotional self-doubt that I have the ability to rise to the challenge. In order to create strategies to overcome procrastination, it is necessary to consider what the negative trigger is for any specific task or project.

How Do We Overcome Procrastination?

Once we have identified the negative trigger, we can position ourselves to overcome procrastination. The idea here is to flip the negative. How can I leverage self-interest to turn a boring assignment into an interesting assignment? How can I convert an ambiguous, unstructured project into one that has a clear roadmap? How do I transform a difficult task into one that is easier to accomplish? Bailey applies this approach of flipping the six negative triggers to doing taxes (Productivity Project, 64-65). But we can also apply the approach to student assignments.

Is the assignment boring? The student can identify a context that is exciting. Maybe doing the homework at Starbucks adds just enough variety to life to break through the perception of the work as being boring. The student could also identify ways to create games out of the work.

Is the assignment difficult? Helping the student break the assignment down into smaller tasks can often help them to see easier steps. The same could be said if they find the assignment ambiguous. Lay out a plan that has clear and doable steps. As a teacher, the steps might be intuitive to you, so doing a little more work at your own planning stage could help make assignment instructions easier for your students to understand.

“Why am I even required to do this assignment?” your student might ask. This in an intrinsic value question. Many times the rewards for finished work are remote. Few children connect their current homework to future career success. Perhaps letting them see how their work is making their minds more powerful will provide intrinsic value. Perhaps enabling them to see the current work as a rite of passage to the privileges older students have will give them a sense of the value of their work. The key is finding a reward that unlocks the intrinsic value of the work. Throwing candy at a child for finishing an assignment may seem like a reward for hard work, but it can undermine the intrinsic value of the assignment. In the face of a culture so ready to replace intrinsic reward with mere trifles, I’ve found the educational philosophy of Charlotte Mason so meaningful. She cautions against the use of prizes, rewards and punishments, since students are already naturally inclined to love knowledge and their attention is drawn to the intrinsic interest a subject holds (Towards a Philosophy of Education, 7). We want a sense of satisfaction and great mastery to propel students to see that hard work can be meaningful and satisfying rather than an obstacle to a trivial reward.

Conclusion

Procrastination shows up when we need to do difficult work. More often than not, work that is meaningful and purposeful is challenging. Students don’t just need to learn the content of our subjects, they also need to learn how to manage their motivation so that they can overcome procrastination to accomplish work that will lead to lives with meaning and purpose. An anti-procrastination program is a worthwhile thing to have our students practice. Talk about these things in the classroom, helping them to identify when procrastination takes places and give them strategies to beat the procrastination monster. Maybe not today, but they might thank you tomorrow.

The post Overcoming Procrastination appeared first on .

We are adults – for many of us, the only adult in the room for long stretches of time. We have a cadre of young people enter the four walls of our classrooms with all their wonderful curiosity, their endearing innocence, but also their deeply vexing immaturity. You would be hard pressed to find a teacher who did not at some point want to pull out her or his hair through sheer annoyance at childish ways of acting and speaking. Our task is to inform their ignorance, to support their weakness, and to challenge their rebellion. Yes, we are the adults in the room, but we often are confronted with our own immaturity, making us feel hypocritical when we need to instill moral fortitude in our fledgling flock. Peterson describes well the paralysis parents feel when it comes to discipline.

“Modern parents are simply paralyzed by the fear that they will no longer be liked or even loved by their children if they chastise them for any reason. They want their children’s friendship above all, and are willing to sacrifice respect to get it.”

Peterson, 12 Rules, 123

This is also true of teachers as well. We want to create a loving and caring environment, and somehow it feels like discipline would be too harsh, killing the rapport we are trying to build with our students. However, this misunderstands discipline for two reasons. First, discipline is a loving action. It is not an expression of love to leave a child wallowing in their immaturity. It is truly loving to challenge that child so that they can become empowered to grow toward maturity. Second, discipline is not something we do to the child, but for the child. It is a good thing to promote the child’s wellbeing. There is a fear lurking in the back of our minds that discipline is brutal and degrading. But when properly considered, true discipline gains for the child something valuable and indispensable. Discipline is correction, bringing a child back from error, so that they can live in harmony with the world around them. Peterson gets at the heart of what correction is.

“Without that correction, no child is going to undergo the effortful process of organizing and regulating their impulses, so that those impulses can coexist, without conflict, within the psyche of the child, and in the broader social world. It is no simple matter to organize a mind.”

Peterson, 12 Rules, 126

The greatest difficulty teachers encounter with discipline is finding proper methods. Physical discipline carries the connotation of abuse. A long talk amounts to a lot of hot air on our part with little impact on the child. I worked with a student once who gave frank and open feedback that all he needed to do was sit through another lecture, and then he could go right back to doing what he always did. When we see a child doing wrong, our own emotions often get involved, clouding our ability to discipline effectively. Peterson is perceptive in his understanding of what our response ought to be.

“It is an act of responsibility to discipline a child. It is not anger at misbehavior. It is not revenge for a misdeed. It is instead a careful combination of mercy and long-term judgment. Proper discipline requires effort – indeed, is virtually synonymous with effort. It is difficult to pay careful attention to children. It is difficult to figure out what is wrong and what is right and why. It is difficult to formulate just and compassionate strategies of discipline, and to negotiate their application with others deeply involved in a child’s care.” (pg. 124)

Peterson, 12 Rules, 124

Despite the difficulties discipline entails, we know we must discipline. Understanding that children aren’t born with an innate sense of how to comport themselves in academic settings helps us to perceive the nature of our task. “They do so,” that is to say, push against the boundaries, says Peterson, “to discover the true limits of permissible behaviour.” (pg. 126) When we push back, we are telling our students that they have gone beyond the limits. They need to hear “no.” It needs to be clear, direct, unflinching and uncompromising. Children should learn how to respond to “no” well, without tantrums, negotiations or deviancy. This is the boundary. Cope and adjust.

Beyond the “no,” children also need to learn how to receive correction. Teachers should begin by giving students specific, honest feedback, without emotion. Teachers should be constantly watching everything their students are doing. Don’t let anything go unnoticed. Even better, be noticed noticing. In other words, tell your students what you are seeing. Note the chair tipping, the slouch in the back row, the line that’s not straight, the knowing glance between the girls, the goofy drawing a student is trying to hide under the math textbook. After only a few callouts, the students will know quickly that nothing gets by you. This is of first priority, far above the content you’ve planned to cover for the day. Clearly set your standards. No tipping in your chairs means absolutely no tipping. Otherwise, don’t make the rule in the first place.

Charlotte Mason teaches about natural consequences, which I think is an idea in concord with Peterson’s thoughts here. Too often we think about meaningless rewards (a sticker on a completed assignment, or candy distributed for good work) and harsh punishments (with visions of Victorian rods in the hands of robed lecturers). Natural consequences, though, provides a means of supporting proper habit acquisition without the pitfalls of the less natural alternatives. Mason writes about discipline, or the dealing out of rewards and punishment.

“[Discipline] has its scientific aspect: there is a law by which all rewards and punishments should be regulated: they should be natural, or, at any rate, the relative consequences of conduct; should imitate, as nearly as may be without injury to the child, the treatment which such and such conduct deserves and receives in after life.”

Charlotte Mason, Home Education, 148

When a child is grown, the adult world doesn’t provide stickers for completed work or strike blows for indolence. The reward for hard work done before deadline is leisure time. The consequence for missed deadlines may be the loss of a sale or the mistrust of a colleague. How do we apply this idea of natural consequences in the life of the student? Mason speaks most often about the loss and gain of free time. A student disrupting class during a lesson would spend time in the classroom while the rest of the class goes out for recess. The child who finishes all exercises in math can now spend time reading their favorite book or drawing. The severest natural consequence is a poorer life due to the inability to take responsibility. But the long view is difficult for a child to take in the immediacy of the present disobedience. So we must think creatively about ways to impress upon the child the consequences of their actions. I recall a time one of my colleagues took a group of boys who couldn’t keep their shoes tied to spend their lunch tying and retying their shoes. Another example is the teacher who expected lines in the hallway to be straight and silent. The consequence? Repeat the journey as many times as it takes to get it right.

Peterson’s rule to not let children do things that cause us to dislike them sounds like it is centered around our preferences and sensibilities. But underlying the rule is the wellbeing of the child. A child in disobedience causes an impulse in us, and we should respond to that impulse by investing time and effort in the correction of that child.

Enabling children to take responsibility for themselves is the basis of rules 2 and 4. There comes a point where they need to supply their own energy for their own improvement. Rule 2 states, “treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping” and rule 4 states, “compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.” How one deals with oneself makes a big difference in gaining confidence and a sense that one’s life has purpose and meaning.

As teachers, we are called upon to help our students. We help them to understand new ideas, we help them to acquire new habits, we help them to bring order to the chaos of their daily routines. But we do them a disservice if they never help themselves. There must always be a transfer of responsibility from us as teachers to them as people developing toward maturity. We help them because it is impossibly complex to acquire all that is to be learned all at once. We map out a course of instruction to help them building on what they know and encounter what they don’t yet know. Peterson explores this idea by contrasting chaos and order.

“You can’t tolerate being swamped and overwhelmed beyond your capacity to cope while you’re learning what you still need to know. Thus, you need to place one foot in what you have mastered and understood, and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering. Then, you have positioned yourself where the terror of existence is under control and you are secure, but where you are also alert and engaged. That is where there is something new to master and some way that you can be improved. That is where meaning is to be found.”

Peterson, 12 Rules, 44

Peterson’s reasoning is sound. It points to an understanding of education as bringing order to chaos – the chaos of human existence. And once students have caught the idea that they are the ones who bear the burden of responsibility to shape the course of their lives, they are able to find meaning in their lives.

This blends into the other rule, to “compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.” Personal, incremental growth is really what matters, not whether I’m better or worse than the person next to me. There will always be someone taller, smarter, or faster than me. Get over it! It doesn’t matter. Whether I have done something – anything – to improve myself is fundamentally my point of comparison. We live in a competitive world, and there is no shortage of data ranking us against others, whether it’s standardized tests or how many “likes” we get on our latest posts on social media. We want to win, and we feel it keenly when we lose. But there are more important things in life than winning.

“I should be winning at everything. But winning at everything might only mean that you’re not doing anything new or difficult. You might be winning, but you’re not growing, and growing might be the most important form of winning.” (pg. 88)

Peterson, 12 Rules, 88

The growth mindset is a superior goal to the static/fixed mindset, according to Carol Dweck. This is exactly what Peterson is pointing to. Effort, consistent and concerted, is what makes a person stronger academically and physically. Unfortunately, most students think of themselves in terms of a fixed self image. “I’m not really a math student.” or “Music is my thing.” These static ideas have underlying them the idea that the person can win at music but not at math. Instead, redirecting students to the idea that you can grow both as a math student and as a musician will benefit the student long term.

I find this idea most hard to implement when handing back tests. As soon as there’s a big red number on a paper, students rank themselves against the numbers their classmates received. Obviously, we all need to learn how to handle competition. There’s no denying that there are winners and losers in all kinds of fields of endeavor. However, helping them to see how their score relates to their personal growth trajectory instead of how they rank against their peers would be a more meaningful piece of feedback.

Obviously, this impacts us as well as teachers. How often do we compare ourselves to our colleagues? I’m reminded of Jason’s post on practicing education. I might find my lesson plans inferior to someone else’s, but are they at least better than they were yesterday? I might be struggling to get the level of discussion out of my class that I see other teachers getting. How do I make a plan for myself, though, the gets some forward movement where tomorrow’s discussion is at least a little better than today? Ultimately, the value of Peterson’s book is that it impacts us as teachers, because we are both modeling what it means to live a meaningful and purposeful life as well as training our students towards these same ends.

The post Rules for Schools?: An Interaction with Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life (Part 2) appeared first on .

One of the biggest lessons I learned from my coach was his frequent saying, which became almost a mantra that he would expect us to repeat: “Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.” For us this meant, at least, that we should make sure to point our toes in every exercise. If we didn’t practice all our exercises and routines with the fundamentals of form and technique, we wouldn’t progress, and we’d certainly get docked for improper form at the next meet.

These early lessons stuck with me and I think that’s part of why I was so attracted to a book I picked up this last summer, entitled Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better. Written by Doug Lemov, the author of Teach Like a Champion and leader of Uncommon Schools, along with two of his colleagues, Erica Woolway and Katie Yezzi, the book challenges us as educators to improve the quality of our practice of education. Actually, the book addresses the use of practice to improve effectiveness in any sphere of business, industry or life. But the authors’ own experience in the field of education shines through many of their examples and challenged my thinking most of all.

In his previous work Doug Lemov had isolated a set of techniques or strategies that effective teachers employed to deal with various challenging situations in the classroom. In workshops where his organization endeavored to teach these techniques, they noticed what they call the “get it/do it gap” where teachers come to understand a technique’s effectiveness, but are unable to reproduce it themselves:

We would analyze and discuss, and then, once our audience understood the technique in all of its nuance and variation, we went on to the next technique. Evaluations were outstanding. Participants told us they had learned useful and valuable methods to apply. But then we noticed something alarming. If we surveyed the same participants three months later, they were not quite as upbeat. They still knew what they wanted their classes to be like, but they were unable to reliably do what it took to get there. When they tried to fix one thing, something else went wrong. It was difficult to concentrate on a technique with so much else going on. Just knowing what they should be doing was not enough to make them successful. (6)

This caused a realization for them that training master teachers would involve more than just passing on information about the right way to teach. It had to involve practice. And just like master tennis players or gymnasts are made not through just any type of practice, in the same way master teachers will be made through perfect practice: high quality practice of exactly the right skills in just the right way.

In the world of education this thought is revolutionary because so much of our professional development for teachers is in direct contradiction to it. Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi cite a policy brief by the Consortium for Policy Research in Education to the effective that between $20 and $30 billion are spent per year on professional development and the upshot is that

Teachers typically spend a few hours listening and, at best, leave with some practical tips or some useful materials. There is seldom any follow-up to the experience and subsequent in-services may address entirely different sets of topics…. On the whole, most researchers agree that local professional development programs typically have weak effects on practice because they lack focus, intensity, follow-up, and continuity. (As quoted in Practice Perfect 8)

There’s probably no stronger indictment of the lack of any unified philosophy of education or methodology than this. Because there is no clear definition of the proper practice of education, there can be no quality practice. Teachers cannot be developed, coached and held to a high standard, where there is no accepted standard to develop them against.

Instead, teachers are given a dizzying array of new and often contradictory ideas without the quality practice necessary to master any particular method or technique. Professional development becomes simply a continuous exposure to new methods without effective implementation or accountability. It’s no wonder that the educational establishment is in a state of crisis. In such an educational milieu, perhaps we need a renaissance or re-birth of a traditional simplicity, embodied in the classical saying multum nōn multa (“much not many things” or as we might say, “less is more”). The dizzying array of educational methods is part of the problem because, when pulled in so many directions, teachers can have trouble attaining mastery at anything.

This call for simplicity reminds me of the legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden, who “led his teams to ten national championships in 12 years, won 88 consecutive games, and achieved the highest winning percentage (.813) of any coach in NCAA basketball history” (Practice Perfect 1). What is so surprising about Wooden’s method is his relentless focus on high quality practice: “old-fashioned practice, efficiently run, well-planned, and intentionally executed” (2). Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi describe it this way:

John Wooden doted on practice to a degree that was legendary. He began—surely to much eye rolling—by practicing things that every other coach would have considered unworthy, if they’d have considered them at all: how to put on socks and sneakers, for example. He timed his practices to the minute, husbanding every second to ensure its precise and careful allocation. He kept a record of every practice on note cards, which he filed away for future reference: what worked; what didn’t; how to do it better next time. Unlike many coaches, he focused not on scrimmaging—playing in a way that replicated the game—but on drilling, that is playing in ways that intentionally distorted the game to emphasize and isolate specific concepts and skills…. He repeated drills until his players achieved mastery and then automaticity, even if it meant not drilling on more sophisticated topics. (2)

Wooden’s example challenges my leadership as an administrator. How should I incorporate quality practice into my endeavors to lead teachers to mastery? What are the fundamental skills and strategies that teachers need to practice to perfection? What would it look like to design professional development opportunities for teachers that included high quality practice as a main feature?

These are questions that I’m still struggling with in response to this book. I’ve embraced modelling of our school’s philosophy and core practices in how I and our other administrators lead teacher training sessions. And this has had a profound impact on our culture and practice. However, one of the main challenges that this book leaves me with is what a practice regimen for teachers should look like. Basketball players practice for hours on a regular basis, and then they play games every once in a while. The average teacher teaches several hours a day, every day. It’s hard to see how a practice session once in a blue moon on a particular skill that’s used occasionally in the classroom in some unique situation is going to transfer with a high degree of value.

But that doesn’t mean I question the importance of the ideas posed by this book. It’s just that part of what teachers need to develop is the wisdom and discernment for how to interact with the human beings they are teaching in all their complexity. It’s worth asking how the value of practice trades off with the development of practical wisdom or the cultivation of a growth mindset, which are more likely attained through extensive reading and discussion of important ideas than isolated practice exercises.

In part, it makes me wonder whether taking on the challenge of practicing education involves simplifying a set of core classroom practices (like applying the trivium arts or deep reading for instance) for teachers to follow and then inspiring and empowering teachers to turn their daily teaching regimen into intentional or deliberate practice. It seems a shame to limit teachers’ practice opportunities to institute days outside of the classroom, if by simplifying a set of practices to follow in the classroom, teachers could amass their 10,000 hours of practice on those core essentials, while actually teaching real students. Feedback from an experienced administrator or fellow teacher is an important part of this process, no doubt. But my hunch is that the average teacher could get better at getting better much more quickly, if she simply reframed her experiences in the classroom as opportunities to practice, learn and improve. Teaching to get through the day is wholly different from teaching to improve one’s teaching.

What do you think? How have you seen practice work effectively both for students and teachers? Do you have any ideas for effective professional development involving practice?

The post Practicing Education: Growing in the Art of Teaching appeared first on .