Welcome Summer Conference Attendees to Educational Renaissance

The major classical Christian education conferences are now upon us. We begin with the Society for Classical Learning conference with the theme Recovering Beauty in Education June 15-18. This is quickly followed by the ACCS Repairing the Ruins conference June 22-25. Both conferences are in Dallas, and, if you are planning to attend in person, we would love to see you!

UPDATE: We’re podcasting every day this week during the SCL Conference. Listen to our Reflections from the Pre-Conference:

Here is a rundown of who is speaking when:

• Kolby Atchison, “Equipped to Learn: Practical Strategies to Promote Self-Education in the Classroom,” 11:00-12:00 (Central) on Friday, June 17^th (learn more at the SCL Conference site).
• Patrick Egan, “In Pursuit of Arete: Connecting Deliberate Practice and the Growth Mindset to Classical Virtue,” 11:00-12:00 (Central) on Saturday, June 18^th (learn more at the SCL Conference site).
• Jason Barney, “Narration as a Progymnasmata: Turning a Text into a Student Speech,” 4:10-5:10 (Central) on Thursday, June 23^rd (learn more at the ACCS Conference site).

UPDATE: If you would like to gain virtual access to the SCL Conference, you can still register at https://societyforclassicallearning.org/events/2022-summer-conference/. The cost is $190. If you would like to access the ACCS Conference online, you can still register at https://repairingtheruins.org/registration/. The cost is $175.

Whether you are a long-time follower of Educational Renaissance, or have just learned about us, we would like to welcome you to Educational Renaissance and make you aware of some of the great materials available to you.

Weekly Articles

We invite you to read through the many articles that have been posted here over the years. We aim to provide a new article every week, linking thoughts from our classical Christian heritage to new ideas emerging in our own day about education, psychology, neurology and philosophy. Here’s a recent sampling:

To Save a Civilization, Part 1: Conditions for a Decline

Recently Kolby Atchison began a series looking at Western civilization with a view to determining how our educational movement can contribute to the rebirth of our declining society. With insights from Augustine and Irish missionaries, learn how we can regain what was lost.

Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 1: Traditions and Divisions

Jason Barney has been exploring the idea of apprenticeship as a model for applying Aristotle’s five intellectual virtues in the classical classroom. The connection between intellectual skill, technical knowledge and moral training come together as we take on the viewpoint of craftsmanship. This article takes you back to the start of a five-part series.

What is a Learner?: Reading Charlotte Mason through Aristotle’s Four Causes

This article by Patrick Egan explores the connection between Charlotte Mason and classicism by applying Aristotle’s four causes to our understanding of the nature and characteristics of a learner.

The Educational Renaissance Podcast

Many people like to get their content on the go. If that’s you, then you might like to subscribe to the Educational Renaissance Podcast. It’s the same great content, but in audio form. Listen to our recent episode, “Reflections on Christian and Pagan Literature,” where we consider the relationship between cultivating a Christian worldview and reading pagan literature. It strikes at the heart of what our educational renewal movement is all about, both the classical and the Christian components.

On-Demand Webinars

You can take your training to the next level with Educational Renaissance webinars. Find topics from all of the Educational Renaissance authors from narration to habit training to implementing Teach Like a Champion all with a view to practical skills you can apply in your classroom or school.

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Educational Renaissance Books

Our new Educational Renaissance Bookstore carries a select list of recommended reading from titles you regularly find in our articles and talks. Among the titles you will find are books published by our Educational Renaissance authors. This year’s highlight is Jason Barney’s new book A Short History of Narration available now on Amazon.

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It’s time once again for the summer conferences. Whether you attended in person or remotely, many of you will have discovered Educational Renaissance for the first time during either the ACCS Repairing the Ruins conference last week or the Society for Classical Learning conference this week. We welcome you summer conference attendees to explore the resources available here at Educational Renaissance. You can learn more about our past and future projects below.

You may have navigated to our site to download Jason’s eBook on implementing Charlotte Mason’s practice of narration, Patrick’s eBook on implementing Charlotte Mason’s practice of habit training, or Kolby’s eBook on applying Teach like a Champion 2.0 in the classical classroom. Thank you so much for you continued interest in our content offers. In an effort to serve you better, would you consider filling out a quick survey?

We invite you to read through the many articles that have been posted here over the years. We aim to provide a new article every week, linking thoughts from our classical Christian heritage to new ideas emerging in our own day about education, psychology, neurology and philosophy. We also have a new podcast. Look for The Educational Renaissance podcast on whatever platform you listen to. Here’s our link on Spotify.

We’re glad you found us, and we look forward to providing you with content that will inspire you and help you to grow in the craft of teaching. You’ll find a plethora of materials that draw upon the ancient wisdom that is the hallmark of our educational renewal movement, but also delves into recent research from experts in the fields of brain science and psychology. You clearly care about your craft since you attended a summer conference, now you can take your skill to the next level by learning from the resources we’ve made available.

What’s Next for Educational Renaissance?

We are entering our fourth academic year as an organization. Every year we try to enhance what we can offer to our audience. And to that end, we are already planning webinars that will enable our listeners to go deeper on a wide array of topics. We think this will enable us to engage more teachers, school leaders and homeschool parents who want a deeper level of training and coaching. To that end, if you haven’t done so yet, take a moment to fill out the survey above to let us know what kinds of materials we could produce that would most serve you.

Highlights from the Past Year

Patrick wrote a six-part series on “Training the Prophetic Voice” which explores concepts of discipleship and rhetoric. You can listen to our podcast on the Prophetic Voice on Spotify. This was followed by a three-part series exploring “Human Cognitive Development.”

After writing a series on Teach Like a Champion 2.0 and producing his eBook, Kolby has written several articles exploring theology in the classroom. Check out his articles “Three Premises for Teaching Theology” and “Educating for a Christian Worldview in a Secular Age.” Recently Kolby has started a new series reading through Plato’s Republic. Begin with his first reflections on justice in Book 1.

Jason had the opportunity last fall to produce a class for ClassicalU with Classical Academic Press. In preparation for that he shared a sneak peak on his class about narration. In conjunction with this, he wrote a multi-part series on the “History of Narration.” More recently Jason has been developing a thoughtful interaction with Bloom’s taxonomy, proposing an alternative informed by Aristotle’s intellectual virtues. You can get started with the first article in the series.

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Bill & Maryellen St. Cyr

The first people you should listen to in 2021 are a husband and wife team, Bill and Maryellen St. Cyr. Together they founded Ambleside Schools International in 1999 to promote the educational approach of Charlotte Mason. There are quite a number of Ambleside schools throughout the US as well as in Africa, India and Austria.

Written about in the recent book Rare Leadership by Marcus Warner and Jim Wilder, the St. Cyrs exemplified an approach to educational leadership that is worthy of consideration. Bill explains that maturity is essential to the success of a school. Therefore he calls for emotional-relational maturity as the mission of schools, which often gets swept aside by performance goals. Warner and Wilder quote Bill:

“While efficient management of resources is essential, it is secondary to maintaining an optimal school atmosphere and ensuring teachers and students are thriving. Management must serve mission and the mission is maturity. Persons cannot be managed into maturity.”

Warner and Wilder, Rare Leadership (Chicago: Moody, 2016), p. 97.

Bill and Maryellen excel at teacher training, providing inspiration and motivation. Jason and I first met Bill and Maryellen in August 2009 when they provided teacher training on site at Clapham School in Wheaton. Their mentorship of teachers has had a lasting effect on us personally. Over the years, their teachings on the Charlotte Mason method has transformed my parenting, teaching and school leadership. Here at Educational Renaissance we’ve written extensively on Charlotte Mason’s educational principles.

The St. Cyrs started their podcast in 2018, and I have found it to be a great source of knowledge and inspiration. Episodes are compact and easy to listen to during a morning commute. If you are new to Charlotte Mason, I recommend listening to the episode on “The Method of a Lesson.” I also found Bill’s seminar “Educating with the Brain in Mind” a great expression of the ancient and modern synthesis that we are going for here at Educational Renaissance.

Jocko Willink

The next person you should be listening to in 2021 is retired Navy Seal Jocko Willink. The Jocko Podcast began at the end of 2015 and has been released weekly ever since. Jocko is a highly decorated veteran who fought in Iraq during the battle of Ramadi. After retiring from the Teams in 2010, Jocko started teaching the leadership principles he learned on the battlefield to business leaders.

I first accessed Jocko’s ideas in his book Extreme Ownership. There he lays out several essential principles of leadership, exemplifying them with stories from battle and then translating those principles to the civilian sector. As a school administrator, I find myself repeating and rehearsing these principles. At some point I plan to do a full exploration of these principles for the educational environment in a blog series. For now you can read Kolby’s article on educational leadership in which he explores principles by Brene Brown.

The Jocko Podcast explores principles of leadership through reading books. Many of the books Jocko reads through are military works, either memoirs of past wars or military field manuals. I thoroughly enjoy learning some of the military history as someone who has taught history previously. From time to time, Jocko will cover a book from our classical curriculum. For instance, you might find his take on Shakespeare’s Henry V (Episode 15) insightful. Jocko also reads Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince (Episode 161) with some interesting approaches to leadership you could use in the classroom.

At various points Jocko discusses education and learning. Perhaps one of the most important episode that fully explores education is Episode 227 “Learning for Ultimate Winning.” Here he reads Marine Core doctrinal publication MCDP 7 on learning. It’s fascinating to consider how the military views and values learning. As Jocko interacts with this manual, he develops ideas about problem solving, critical thinking, analysis, mental imaging, synthesis, reasoning and creativity.

Seth Godin

The third person on my list is an entrepreneur and author who has massively influenced the way we think about marketing over the past decades. Godin originally made his mark during the dot com boom in the 1990s, but has since focused on writing and speaking. Godin has been particularly helpful in disseminating ideas like telling the difference between early adopters and the mass market, finding the smallest viable audience, and differentiating oneself by being remarkable. We’ll return to some of these ideas on marketing in a moment.

I first accessed Godin’s ideas through his book Linchpin. I delved into this book to learn more about business leadership and was inspired with his idea that the more value you create for your company makes you more indispensable. What really struck me though was his take on education. Godin is no fan of mass marketing, instead preferring what he terms permission marketing. What I found fascinating was how he connected the idea of the mass market to what we might call mass education. He does not have a high view of what he calls the factory model of education:

“The launch of universal (public and free) education was a profound change in the way our society works, and it was a deliberate attempt to transform our culture. And it worked. We trained millions of factory workers.”

Seth Godin, Linchpin (Penguin, 2010)

The factory model of education created a consumer culture and a workforce that is good at following instructions. Education pursued a race to the bottom, providing minimum standards to produce a proficient population at minimal cost. Godin’s critique of modern education resonates with our educational renewal movement, making him an interesting person to listen to.

Back to marketing for a moment. Small schools need marketing. I was originally resistant to marketing, feeling that the effort to market was futile and would erode the organic qualities of the grassroots educational renewal movement. Godin helped me reconsider my views on marketing, especially when I saw a marketing expert critiquing the ills of mass marketing. As an educator, he helped me frame marketing as teaching the wider community about what schooling can be when you care about quality learning environments. Godin trusts that if you provide your community with valuable content, you will be granted permission by that community to share more about your company or school.

So, in 2021 I encourage you to listen to what Seth Godin has to say. I was an early adopter of his podcast Akimbo, which started in 2018. Episodes are compact, usually centering on a key idea, and then concluding with Godin’s answers to listener questions. You might like one of his early episodes on Game Theory and the Infinite Game (Episode 7). I found his episodes on Solving Interesting Problems (S5E9)  and Organized Learning (S7E5) stimulating. You might not find yourself agreeing with all his conclusions, but here is someone who is problematizing several of the issues our educational renewal movement has with mass education.

Bonus Recommendation: The Educational Renaissance Podcast

This year Jason, Kolby and I started podcasting. We wanted to find a convenient way to provide our audience with high quality, long form content that augmented our weekly articles. So far the feedback has been positive, and we’ve enjoyed collaborating in this new format. 

This past fall we released the first several episodes of our podcast, tracing important themes we’ve written about in our blog articles, but in a conversational format, delving into more detail. You can find each of our episodes on our website or you can subscribe in any podcast app, such as iTunes or Spotify. 

Like some of the other recommended voices mentioned above, we aim to provide excellent content to support our educational renewal movement. We reach into the past to glean classical models of education while also making connections with recent discoveries in psychology, neuroscience, philosophy and theology. Our greatest desire is to provide you with meaningful content to help you in the craft of teaching.

So with these recommendations in mind, hopefully 2021 will be a year of learning, inspiration and educational renewal for you, your students and your schools.

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Knowing what I know about the importance of practice for developing skill, I decided to set my hand to the task of practicing my video lectures. Of course, just developing the material fully for these two courses has filled up the vast majority of my available time. But still, I’ve tried to set myself a training regimen for improving my game in video lecturing. Most of all, it’s been my goal to prepare to give my lectures with only a basic outline and the text of key passages I intend to quote from and interact with.

Only that sort of lecture will allow the type of eye contact and natural development of thought that I think is most appropriate for video. I certainly can’t claim to have mastered the medium, but I’m trying to have an Aristotelian growth-mindset and see this opportunity as a chance to aim for excellence even if I’m not there yet. Perhaps this will serve as an explanation (and perhaps an apology) for sharing with you one of my rehearsal lectures for the course A Classical Guide to Narration which aims to share the insights of my recent book of the same name in a video format. (By the way, if you haven’t yet pre-ordered it with the CiRCE Institute, you still have a chance to get in the first printing.)

So for the EdRen blog today, I’ve decided to share a rehearsal part 1 of Lecture 7 from A Classical Guide to Narration, as a sort of preview or sneak peek of some of the content coming out with ClassicalU in the new year.

If you are interested in going further with this content, you can download the free eBook “Charlotte Mason and the Trivium: Planning Lessons with Narration” on the narration page. Also, if you haven’t yet downloaded our new podcast, episode three is on narration and episode four is about classical education. Just search for Educational Renaissance on your favorite podcast app.

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It’s a busy summer . . . of staying home. In previous years you may have traveled to take in several of the summer conferences that are part of our classical Christian schooling movement. This summer everyone’s staying home and attending conferences virtually. Many of you will have discovered Educational Renaissance for the first time through one of Jason’s talks at either the ACCS Repairing the Ruins conference last week or the Society for Classical Learning conference this week. We welcome you summer conference attendees to explore the resources available here at Educational Renaissance. You can learn more about our past and future projects below.

You may have navigated to our site to download Jason’s eBook on implementing Charlotte Mason’s practice of narration. You can click on the banner above and find it under the Charlotte Mason heading. Perhaps you came here having read Patrick’s recent three-part series on the Circe Institute’s blog. You can find his eBook on implementing Charlotte Mason’s practice of habit training, also under the Charlotte Mason heading above.

We invite you to read through the many articles that have been posted here over the past two years. We aim to provide a new article every week, linking thoughts from our classical Christian heritage to new ideas emerging in our own day about education, psychology, neurology and philosophy. If you appreciate this approach to linking the best of the past and the present, you might like delving into Jason’s new book, available on Amazon about flow entitled, The Joy of Learning: Finding Flow through Classical Education.

We’re glad you found us and we look forward to providing you with content that will inspire you and help you to grow in the craft of teaching. You clearly care about your craft since you attended a summer conference, now you can take your skill to the next level by learning from the resources we’ve made available.

What’s Next for Educational Renaissance?

We are entering our third academic year as an organization. Every year we try to enhance what we can offer to our audience. And to that end, we have already begun recording audio for the Educational Renaissance podcast. We think this will enable us to reach more people with high quality content for teachers, school leaders and homeschool parents about education.

We plan to continue writing in-depth articles every week and to publish books and ebooks on a regular basis. We are also exploring ways that we can provide training online through webinars and lessons.

As social distancing requirements start to go away, you may want to have a more personalized training experience at your school. If you are interested in scheduling a speaking engagement, consultation or teacher training event, you can email us through our contact page.

Highlights from the Past Year

One of the biggest highlights for the academic year was the addition of Kolby Atchison. It was great to add an energetic, thoughtful and godly man to the team. Like Jason and Patrick, he’s been deeply impacted by Charlotte Mason’s pedagogy and how it enhances the aims of the classical Christian movement. He produced a great two-part series exploring the relationship between Charlotte Mason and classical education. You can read the series “Charlotte Mason and the Liberal Arts Tradition” here: Mapping a Harmony and Educating the Whole Person. You might also like his brief series on happiness and virtues with these articles: The Road of Virtue and The Way of Wisdom, renditions of which were published on the CLT blog. Currently he is working on a series of articles on the integration of classical education with techniques from Teach Like a Champion 2.0.

Patrick produced the eBook “A Guide to Implementing Habit Training” earlier this Spring, which you can download for free here. If you’d like to read more about habit training, he wrote some further articles on spiritual habit training, habit training in the internet age, and habit training during online distance learning. You might also like his exploration of teaching the writing process with these articles: Writing on Purpose and The Writing Process.

Jason produced both “How to Implement Narration in the Classical Classroom” an eBook available for you to download for free here, and The Joy of Learning: Finding Flow Through Classical Education available for purchase from Amazon. You can learn more about his book here. You might also like some of the articles Jason has written, such as his article on Teaching in the Arts vs. Teaching Science, or his most recent thoughts on problems in conventional education whether it be technicism or scientism.

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