Category: Modern Research
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4 Tips to Optimize Effort in the Classroom: A Classical Education Take on Cognitive Load Theory
The process of learning anything is quite complex. And yet there is an intuitive sense most people have of what learning looks like, even if one struggles to explain all the components and mechanisms at play in the mind of the learner. Neuroscience and psychology attempt to address some of these components and mechanisms by…
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3 Practices to Help Classical Educators Make the Most of Positive Psychology
Among the modern areas of research we at Educational Renaissance work on is the area of positive psychology. While it is not a recent development in psychology, it differs in many ways from earlier developments in psychology that most people are familiar with, especially those who have taken general psychology in their high school or…
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Slow Productivity in School: Part 4, Obsess Over Quality
In this series on Slow Productivity in School, we’ve been exploring the paradox of festina lente (“hasten slowly”). When it comes to the work of learning, sometimes you must go slow to go fast. Or, perhaps more accurately, you must slow down to be truly productive. Taking our cues from Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity: The…
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Slow Productivity in School: Part 3, Work at a Natural Pace
In this series, I am taking my cue from Cal Newport’s helpful book Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout and applying his insights to our expectations for student work in classical Christian schools. Like the modern office, forms of pseudo-productivity dominate the modern school system–a fact that explains how children can spend…
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Slow Productivity in School, Part 2: Do Fewer Things
In my last article we discussed the problem of pseudo-productivity in school. Popularly called busywork, this pseudo-productivity of the factory model of education presents a fairly straightforward analogy to the pseudo-productivity of the office. In his book Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, Cal Newport diagnosed the problem of our crazy busy…
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Slow Productivity in School, Part 1: The Problem of Pseudo-Productivity
Classical educators can often be found touting the Latin phrase multum, non multa, in favor of various revolutionary proposals to adopt quality over quantity, depth over breadth, much over many things. (See for instance this article on Memoria Press by Andrew Campbell, or Christopher Perron’s lecture on Classical Academic Press.) The phrase comes from a…
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College-bound Superstars: How Classical School Students Can Cultivate Interesting Lives
Student at classical Christian schools are already on their life journey. The temptation is to think that life only begins once the student goes off to college or enters their career. A student in sixth grade feels like college is so far off that it’s not even worth talking about college. While it is true…
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Are You Ready to Become a Phone-free School?
The latest catchphrase sweeping the nation is “phone-free school.” In an age where smartphones have become ubiquitous, more and more schools are adopting policies to remove phones from the hands of students. In this article, we will look at the reasons behind this move to create distraction-free environments. Even though many classical schools are already…
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The Search for Great Teaching: A Comparison of Teach Like a Champion 3.0 and Christopher Perrin’s Pedogogical Principles
One interesting addition to Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion series in his third edition (Teach Like a Champion 3.0) is his notion of a mental model. He introduces the idea like this: “In a typical lesson you decide, often quickly. Then you decide, decide, and decide again. You are a batter facing a hundred…
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Three Key Skills to Develop during High School
For high school students, college looms large in the mind. Frequently, the focus is on grades and graduation requirements. But the most effective way to become optimally prepared for college is to delve into concepts surrounding human learning. In particular, students who gain a sense of themselves as learners who can manage their own learning…