A fascinating and yet easily misunderstood area of research is cognitive load theory. Our brains are set up with systems to retain and use vast amounts of knowledge, and yet they all have systems to reject as much unnecessary knowledge in order to conserve energy. By understanding brain functions as delineated in cognitive load theory, we can apply certain strategies aimed at effective learning. In this article we will set out the theory in basic terms and provide some practices that you can use in the classroom.

Cognitive Load Theory in a Nutshell

Our brains are high efficiency machines. They consume a lot of calories to do things like see in color, plan for the future and organize complex systems of information. If you’ve ever put in the effort to learn a new language, you can literally feel the energy your brain is consuming. For me, there’s a special kind of tired that goes with learning something new. The brain does a lot of work to manage its energy consumption by doing a lot of work up front to discard much of what it deems unnecessary. And this is what has lead to the conceptualization of cognitive load theory.

John Sweller, an educational psychologist at the University of New South Wales, originally launched his understanding of cognitive load theory in the 1980s. The idea is that instructional design should conform to the contours of the brain’s process of information gathering and information storing. In essence, the brain uses working memory to temporarily store information before moving the information it wants to keep into long-term memory. Studies have shown that working memory is quite limited in terms of the amount of information it can hold at one time. If the goal is to get the highest value information into long-term memory, then one has to deal with the limitations of working memory.

Alongside the model of information processing is the idea of perceived mental effort. The amount of effort it takes to get pieces of information into the working memory slots can tax the energy of the learner. For instance, if a student has, say, five slots available in their working memory and the teacher intends to have the class learn five pieces of information, there’s a good match between the effort it will take to get those pieces of information into the working memory slots. However, if there are other stimuli vying for attention, this can interfere with the slots available in the learner’s working memory. Obviously, a distracting environment with stimulating colors and noisy classmates can cause this kind of interference. Yet, even accounting for this, there are other kinds of interference based simply on the way the information is presented. If a learner has to expend energy just to sort out the information from the context it is embedded in, the energy stores of the learner may be depleted before ever putting the information into the working memory slots.

This kind of information gathering effort is referred to as cognitive load. Theorists break cognitive load into three categories: intrinsic, extraneous and germane. Intrinsic load pertains to the level of challenge associated with any given subject being learned. For instance, a math problem has its own intrinsic cognitive load due to the effort it takes to calculate each step. Extraneous cognitive load amounts to any aspects that are irrelevant to the thing being learned. Factors that contribute to extraneous load are poor layout of information, confusing explanations, distracting environments, topics that are tangential, and so forth. Some of these factors are unavoidable, but a teacher who can identify causes of extraneous load can help navigate a student towards the most pertinent topic at hand. Germane cognitive load has to do with the process of moving information into long-term memory by way of the working memory slots available. We could think of this as the neurons at work inside the brain.

There are two take aways from this very basic overview of cognitive load theory. First, when we are working with learners, the more we understand the pathway to long-term memory by way of working memory, we can begin to work with the brain instead of fighting against it. Simply knowing that working memory only has a few slots available makes us that much more aware of what it is we are trying to get into the young person’s brain.

Second, we need to come to grips with different kinds of effort. We should not be afraid of effort or challenge. In fact, as we will see below, we ought to be challenging our students because this is the pathway to growth. Instead, we need to be choosy about what kinds of effort we place in front of our students. It’s the old adage that we need to work smarter, not harder. Some educators who get fixated on the concept of “rigor” have difficulty with this. The perception that students are working hard meets the criteria of “rigor,” but we need to evaluate whether we are accepting wasted effort under the guise of “hard work.”

Reducing Effort through Chunking

The mind can only hold a few pieces of information at once in working memory. Some people with extremely adept working memory can hold up to seven pieces of information, but most people can only hold on average four pieces of information. In Uncommon Sense Teaching, the authors advise using “chunking” to compensate for the limitation of working memory:

“Most students can hold a maximum of four pieces of information in working memory at a time. When working memory can’t keep up, students shut down and tune out. Instead, break your content and skills into bite-size, digestible chunks.” (243)

Let’s illustrate this with a diagram. In the following diagram, the number of blocks is difficult to apprehend.

But with a simple reorganization of the blocks, we can chunk the information so that it is easy to know how many blocks there are.

You can easily see four groups of three blocks plus a group of two blocks to make fourteen blocks in total. The number of blocks didn’t change, but our ability to easily see a pattern did change. You may have felt the difference in mental effort trying to count the first disorganized set and the relative ease with which the “chunked” set could be counted.

Now think about other areas of knowledge from foreign language vocabulary words to scientific terms. If a student perceives these things as a disorganized set of random factoids, they have to spend an inordinate amount of mental effort to “push” this information into their heads. There is no “hook” to hang these things on. It feels arbitrary and that some amount of luck goes into retaining certain pieces of information. But if the student can have the information reorganized or “chunked” so that related concepts are linked together and attached to already known concepts, then there is far less organizational effort, and therefore all the brain effort can be allocated to assimilating the information.

There are two approaches to consider with chunking. The first approach is the teacher-chunked delivery method. This is particularly helpful when something is accessed for the first time. For those using a narration-based lesson plan, the “first little talk” is an excellent time to chunk concepts, lowering the barrier to access for what is about to be read and narrated. The second approach is the student-chunked receiving method. Here we teach students how to break things down. Helping students take something that might seem disorganized and reorganize it for themselves helps them to practice a skill that will enhance their future learning.

Good Effort, Bad Effort

One of the common misconceptions about cognitive load theory is that learners should not experience cognitive effort. This could not be further from the truth. Instead, we should think about how to maximize the effort of learning, distinguishing good effort from bad effort. We might think to ourselves after assigning fifty new vocabulary words that the effort being put in is automatically worthwhile because we want our students to learn how to meet rigorous challenges. However, if we haven’t put in the work ourselves to differentiate the types of effort that need to be put into the task of learning, then we might have just assigned a lot of bad effort, creating massive inefficiencies in student learning.

To get at this, we need to think about our goals. What is the aim we are looking for in learning this set of new vocabulary words? We might say it is to have good recall of the meaning of these words with the ability to use them regularly in the activities we will be doing over the next several weeks. Notice that the goal is not to spend hours pouring over a list of random words. If student effort is devoted to this latter goal, the student puts in maximal effort reading and rereading a list of words with low retention and usefulness. They experience frustration because they don’t have a sense of what this all means in the grand scheme of things. A wise teacher, though, understands that the goal is good recall and usefulness. So she puts in some initial work on behalf of the students to help group vocabulary words by way of synonyms, antonyms, common parts of speech, cognates, etc. The initial work that organizes the raw list into comprehensible units paves the pathway for students to put in more effective work when they review their vocabulary. In the coming classes, the teacher builds in practice not through rote memorization of the words, but by cuing these word groups, by asking for mnemonic devices, or by having them illustrate and act out the new vocabulary words. Their effort is directed towards the goal, making the effort highly productive and therefore more satisfying to the learner.

So, we are not talking about learning without effort. We are talking about learning with the best possible effort while eliminating as much as possible non-productive effort. Think of this as finding the pathway to cognitive efficiency. With this in mind, we can borrow from the world of high performance to consider what effective practice looks like. We could think of athletics or music in this sphere. When an athlete practices their running stride, free throw, or golf swing, doing lots and lots of practice without consideration of technique and correct form will only reinforce bad habits. The same goes for a musician working on the fingering of a difficult passage. Careful, slow progression on the most difficult sequences is how top musicians improve. It’s all about focused practice to improve the weakest areas and then deliberate concentration on high quality repetitions. This is challenging, but notice how it is efficient effort.

Effort-full Learning

Top athletes and musicians are able to perform actions marked by beauty, grace and elegance. It looks effortless. Behind these performances are hours of effort-full practice. Returning to the learning environment, we can model cognitive effort on insights gained from the world of high performance. We actually want our students to engage in effort-full activities that grow their capacity to know and think. Let’s explore a four approaches that can be used in the classical classroom.

First, we want to read the best books possible. Most of the best books have certain challenges in them, whether it is the complexity of the plot, density of language or philosophical ideas that require deep thinking. Charlotte Mason suggests that these books should be a feast of ideas that delight the reader and are deeply interesting. And yet there ought to be some heavy lifting involved as well. Think of the weightlifter who needs to consider how to maximize intensity by choosing a heavier load or additional reps. When thinking about cognitive load theory, we actually want there to be a good dose of intrinsic load in order to enhance the brain effort that will help the learner’s mind grow. And yet, we must clear away any extraneous load that would get in the way of the reader accessing the rich ideas in the text. Here I think of the “little talk” we train teachers to use in a narration-based lesson. The little talk is there to increase interest as well as clear any hurdles that might hinder the reader from making full use of the text. It is not about no-effort reading, but instead reading that is optimizing quality effort.

Second, coach students in what effective learning looks like. This gets into concepts of metacognition, where the learner understands for themselves how they learn. They can be introduced to effective strategies so that they choose for themselves processes that they find most effective in knowing and using what they learn in class. Take the idea of chunking in this article. This is a skill that can be learned and coached. Help students find patterns for themselves. Give them feedback and do debriefs where they work towards mastery in learning strategies.

Third, deliberate practice is a necessary condition of high performance. Therefore, we need to not be afraid of effort and challenge in our classrooms. Yes, we want to eliminate as much extraneous cognitive load as possible. However, our minds and bodies respond positively to challenging stimulus. The authors of Make It Stick spell this out beautifully when they write, “The effort and persistence of deliberate practice remodel the brain and physiology to accommodate higher performance” (184). In fact, what they advise is devising particular kinds of challenge to force the brain to encounter effort to enhance learning. These practices can be summarized with the phrases spaced practice, interleaved practice and retrieval practice. Each of these practices gives the brain a challenge to overcome the mechanism of dropping information out of working memory. By connecting to material in these ways, you are giving your brain opportunities to move information from working memory to long term memory. The authors of Make It Stick conclude their chapter where they introduce deliberate practice by stating, “It comes down to the simple but not less profound truth that effortful learning changes the brain, building new connections and capability” (199).

Finally, narration as a deliberate practice is one of the most effective and efficient ways to maximize attention and effort. A narration lesson is structured to eliminate extraneous cognitive load through the “first little talk” by simultaneously stimulating interest and by clearing any hurdles in what is about to be read. Then the reading of the text occurs in a manageable amount, what Mason called “an episode”—the ideal amount to pay attention well while also having some amount of challenge involved. Then the learner retells without looking, recalling what has just been read. This kind of challenge exercises working memory and gives an initial stimulus to start moving that knowledge into long-term memory storage. Narration is a pedagogical instrument that works well across the curriculum and can be utilized as an operating system to stimulate the effortful learning described in Make It Stick.

Bring the practice of narration to your school by having one of our trainers work with your faculty. Visit our consultation page to learn more and schedule your free 90-minute meeting to discuss how we can help your school achieve excellence.

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The Brain as a Learning Machine

During the high school years, or even earlier in the middle school years, students should gain an understanding of the human body, whether that be in biology, life science, human anatomy or otherwise. As with anything we learn, the objectives for learning systems in the body should not simply be for achieving good scores on tests, but to gain highly practical and actionable understanding for living well. For instance, a student learning how the Krebs cycle is the way the body generates energy at a cellular level through a series of chemical reactions that release energy from the oxidation of acetate that comes from carbohydrates, fats and proteins. The Krebs cycle is way more complex than the sentence I just wrote. But even in this sentence, one can hear highly practical insights a student can gain about nutrition (understanding macronutrients), breathing (injecting oxygen into the system), and exercise (aerobic efficiency).

When it comes to the brain, a student learning how neurons send electrical information along axons within systems of circuits can begin to understand that the human brain hungers to gather as much of this electrical information as possible in order to reason, plan and solve problems. Feeding our brains good “food” enables it to process this electrical information more efficiently and in more reliable ways. In other words, the brain is a learning machine. A student who conceptualizes this has actually captured the central idea of lifelong learning.

Delving deeper into the intricate workings of the human brain can shed light on the mechanisms that underpin the learning process. As we’ve already seen, neural activity consists of specialized cells transmitting electrical signals throughout the body. Learning occurs as neurons fire together, forming the circuits where information gets stored. The authors of Make It Stick describe how neurocircuitry develops in humans:

“Our neural circuitry does not mature as early as our physical development and instead continues to change and grow through our forties, fifties and sixties. Part of the maturation of these connections is the gradual thickening of the myelin coating of the axons. Myelination generally starts at the backs of our brains and moves towards the front, reaching the frontal lobes as we grow into adulthood.”

Peter Brown, Henry Roediger & Mark McDaniel, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (Belknap, 2014), 170.

This means that the insulation provided by myelin sheaths surrounding neurons plays a crucial role in the learning process not only for students in their teens, but throughout their lives. They mention the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for higher-order cognitive functions, including problem-solving, decision-making, and the ability to adapt to novel situations. This area of the brain is still in development throughout the teen years. This goes some way towards explaining why the adolescent years are associated with a lack of impulse control and, at times, poor decision making.

The hippocampus, often referred to as the “memory center” of the brain, is instrumental in the formation of new memories and the consolidation of learned information. Again, the authors of Make It Stick give us wonderful news about this brain center:

“The hippocampus, where we consolidate learning and memory, is able to generate new neurons throughout life. The phenomenon, called neurogenesis, is thought to play a central role in the brain’s ability to recover from physical injury and in humans’ lifelong ability to learn. . . . Already scientists have shown that the activity of associative learning (that is, of learning and remembering the relationship between unrelated items, such as names and faces) stimulates an increase in the creation of new neurons in the hippocampus.”

Make it Stick, 172.

Neurogenesis, or the creation of new neurons, is still an emerging area of brain study in human subjects. But there is evidence that the hippocampus produces new neurons throughout the lifespan of healthy adults. These new neurons enable learners to continue to maintain and create neural connections, supporting the notion that we can and do learn throughout our lives. These new neuros contribute to what is known as neuroplasticity, the brain’s remarkable capacity to reorganize and form new connections between neurons. This dynamic process allows the brain to continuously adapt and evolve in response to new experiences and environmental stimuli, facilitating the acquisition of knowledge and the development of new skills.

Understanding the neuroscience behind learning can inform educational practices and help individuals optimize their cognitive abilities, ultimately empowering learners to reach their full potential. Here we’ll explore a few practical objectives that should become part of how all high schoolers are coached. These are the key skills that should be learned before leaving for college.

Three Essential Skills for College-Bound High Schoolers

From the first semester of freshman year and throughout their high school career, both teachers and students should talk about and highlight strategies related to three key skills that should operate in all subject areas. Too often we focus on content knowledge, grade-point average, or meeting college entrance requirements. While these are necessary and in some ways decent measures of core competencies, they don’t actually get at the transferable skills that enable students to manage their learning and take stock of themselves along the way as learners. In other words, these skills provide a feedback loop for students to learn how to manage their learning and eventually set goals in their learning.

The first skill is deliberate practice. This is a systematic approach to learning that has been shown to promote significant improvements in performance across a wide range of domains. At its core, deliberate practice involves focused, effortful activities designed to target specific weaknesses and push the limits of one’s current abilities.

From a neurological perspective, deliberate practice triggers key changes in the brain that facilitate learning. Repeated engagement in challenging tasks leads to the strengthening of neural pathways and the formation of new connections between neurons. This process allows the brain to adapt and improve performance over time.

Importantly, deliberate practice is distinguished from mere repetition or passive learning. It requires a high degree of concentration, feedback from a skilled coach, and a willingness to make mistakes and learn from them. By embracing this approach, individuals can systematically enhance their skills and expertise in a given area, ultimately achieving a level of mastery that would be difficult to attain through more casual or unfocused learning methods.

One of the leading voices advocating deliberate practice is Cal Newport. His thesis that “the ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable” is founded on the notion that one learns how to perform deep work through deliberate practice. The core components of deliberate practice consist of:

“(1) your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill you’re trying to improve or an idea you’re trying to master; (2) you receive feedback so you can correct your approach to keep your attention exactly where it’s most productive.”

Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (Grand Central, 2016), 35.

Consider how a student in math or writing can be coached in specific skills and given feedback to improve their competency. This entails an atmosphere of intentional effort while also celebrating mistakes and errors so that there is ample materials with which to coach students.

The next skill is metacognition. This consists in the ability to think about one’s own learning. By monitoring their own cognitive activities, individuals can develop a deeper understanding of how they learn best and make adjustments to their study strategies accordingly. When individuals actively reflect on their learning, they are able to identify their strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement, allowing them to allocate their cognitive resources more efficiently.

Metacognition is actually a bundle of skills. These include planning, self-monitoring, and reflection, among others. With planning, students approach a problem – a math problem or an essay prompt – by formulating a plan for how to solve the problem. Notice that this is a shift in focus away from the specific answer towards the approach that is most appropriate for the kind of problem it is. In other words, students will often get fixated on producing correct answers, but not step back to consider strategies that help them think about their thinking. With self-monitoring, students can ask themselves questions like, “Do I understand what I have just read?” Then, they can answer this question by providing a narration or producing information from the reading. This moves a student away from reading a text and then assuming that by reading it, they understand it. Finally, by reflecting, students can consider whether they grew in skill during an exercise set, or they can evaluate sticking points in their writing process, or they can articulate skills that helped them complete the assignment.

Metacognitive practices get students to think about what they are learning. They need practice shifting into a mode where they become active learners, instead of passively taking in information. These practices can lead to enhanced long-term retention and the ability to transfer knowledge to new contexts. By cultivating metacognitive skills, learners can become more self-directed, adaptable, and ultimately, more successful in their academic and professional pursuits.

The last skill is self-advocacy. This skill promotes deeper learning and skill development through the process of actively identifying one’s needs and communicating them effectively. Most often this occurs by the student connecting with the teacher to address an area where there’s a lack of understanding or the need for support in project management. For example, a student might struggle to recall formulas in a physics class. They know how to do the math work. They simply never remember which formula goes with which problem. This student could approach the teacher to ask for help in knowing better the best way to remember how to associate formulas with problems. In a different scenario, a student has to manage a long-term essay assignment. They are struggling to break it down into manageable steps. So this student emails her teacher to schedule an appointment during office hours to map out the project in logical steps. In both of these examples, the student is advocating for themselves by articulating the issue they are facing and drawing upon the teacher to assist them in solving the issue.

When we advocate for ourselves, we activate executive function skills like planning, organization, and self-monitoring. This skills goes hand in hand with metacognition. A student who is grasping their self-understanding as a learner can begin to equip themselves by reaching out to others for help. The effort required to self-advocate cultivates a growth mindset. Individuals who take responsibility for their learning demonstrate an understanding that improvement requires sustained work. This perspective enables them to persist through challenges and maximize the benefits of educational opportunities. Ironically, by getting help from a parent or teacher, the student actually finds that effort can be matched by support. They receive the coaching and encouragement to continue on an effortful pathway.

High schoolers need practice self-advocating. It does not come naturally to most students to seek out help. So, one policy you can put in place is to require every student to ask a self-advocacy question. Or you can require a certain number of office visits per semester. By making self-advocacy an assignment, you give students the practice they need to learn how to formulate a question and how to approach a grown up for help. It can be intimidating to reach out to a teacher, so by making it an assignment, you are forcing the student to overcome their barriers to accessing help.

Imagine how a student equipped with these skills will feel when stepping onto a college campus after graduating from high school. A student who has learned what it takes to engage in deliberate practice will be able to tackle their coursework with diligence. A student who has learned to think about their thinking will be able to assess the kinds of study skills that will most effectively work in different kinds of courses. A student who has learned to self-advocate with their high school teachers will be better prepared to approach their college professors with their questions and issues.

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Arising about the same time as our educational renewal movement have been seismic shifts in a host of technologies that dramatically changed the landscape for most individuals, whether they realize it or not. Today individuals have access to more levers of wealth creation than have ever been available before in history. Many call this the “New Economy.” Just like classical education harkens back to ancient wisdom previously deemed outdated and inconsequential to industrial educationists, the new economy champions such “outdated” concepts as artisanal craftsmanship, decentralized ownership of capital, and shared resources. The statement, “it’s more complicated than that,” holds true for both classical education and the new economy. To that end, this article will explore some of what we mean by the new economy, particularly as it relates to the economic world graduates from our school will be facing in the marketplace. But we will also reflect on how classical education seems to be well positioned to be a leading force in the new economy.

What is the New Economy?

In the new economy, the structures of the industrial age are being reshaped by innovation and technology. You can see the irony that the industrial age with its penchant for innovation and technology have created the new economy. In many regards, the new economy is situated within the industrial age, even though it has challenged many of the assumptions of the industrial age. For instance, industrialism promotes compliance and automaticity. To work in a factory, one must adhere to the procedures of the job at hand. The factory model does not require an individual to become a creative genius. Quite the opposite. Check your creativity at the door, just do the job as you are told. This is not to say that there is no room for creative genius, but that is reserved for the few that get to engineer the products and the way the factory is set up. The many work robotically, the few get to make the robots work.

The new economy, however, is defined by adaptability and creativity. We are witnessing a shift towards innovative business models and technological advancements that have transformed various sectors of the economy. Some have called this the gig economy, where individuals can leverage platforms to offer their skills and services on a freelance basis. Seth Godin is a proponent of this freelance approach to business today. In his book Linchpin, he repackages “gig” economy as “gift” economy. He writes:

“At first, gifts you can give live in a tiny realm. You do something for yourself, or for a friend or two. Soon, though, the circle of the gift gets bigger. The Internet gives you leverage. A hundred people read your blog, or fifty subscribe to your podcast. There’s no economy here, but there is an audience, a chance to share your gift.”

Seth Godin, Linchpin, 134.

What he is saying is that in the new economy, there is value in the unique voice an individual has. Finding the gift that you can give to the world means that you can utilize a host of tools to reach an audience in ways that were never possible in the old economy. There were too many gatekeepers that closed the doors to new voices. Now those gates are thrown wide open.

We could call this the sharing economy. Many traditional sectors have been disrupted by people who are willing to share personal resources through the connectivity available through the internet. Consider transportation and accommodation. Companies like Uber and Airbnb have revolutionized how people commute and find lodging. When we think about education, the internet has enabled organizations like Khan Academy to revolutionize who has access to quality education.

The emergence of e-commerce platforms has enabled businesses to reach a global audience without physical storefronts. This has leveled the playing field for small entrepreneurs and opened up new possibilities for growth and expansion. Consider a middle school student who has already started her own business by selling hand-made knitted objects through Etsy. This is a student who might be making a modest amount of spending money, but learning huge lessons in marketing, sales, production, and a host of other business skills.

These examples illustrate how the new economy has reshaped the industrial paradigm and has created opportunities for innovation, creativity, and collaboration. Embracing these changes can lead to exciting possibilities for both businesses and individuals alike. Understanding the new economy ought to influence how we approach educating the next generation. We are sending graduates into something that conventional education is not well equipped to serve. In order to grapple with this idea, let’s delve further into the kinds of skills that are important in the new economy.

What Skills are Required for the New Economy?

The new economy values skills like problem-solving, critical thinking, and collaboration. It rewards those who are willing to embrace change and continuously learn in order to stay relevant in a rapidly evolving landscape. The factory model of education produced students who could be workers with the factory system, compliant and productive. As Godin points out, this had wide-reaching implications even for non-factory jobs, such as the traditional professions like law, medicine and engineering. He lists a number of skills taught in the factory system:

“Fit in

Follow instructions

Use #2 pencils

Take good notes

Show up every day

Cram for tests and don’t miss deadlines

Have good handwriting

Punctuate

Buy the things the other kids are buying

Don’t ask questions

Don’t challenge authority

Do the minimum amount required so you’ll have time to work on another subject

Get into college

Have a good resume

Don’t fail

Don’t say anything that might embarrass you

Be passably good at sports, or perhaps extremely good at being a quarterback

Participate in a large number of extracurricular activities

Be a generalist

Try not to have the other kids talk about you

Once you learn a topic, move on.”

Seth Godin, Linchpin, 39-40.

Very few of these skills properly equip someone for the new economy. Contrast this with the talents needed in the new economy. The skills that stand out in the new economy are open-mindedness, creativity, proactivity, independence, ability to learn new skills, problem-solving, and making meaning out of raw information. Suffice it to say that the cram-test-forget process associated with the factory-model of education does not tend to cultivate these skills. When businesses can be run at the kitchen table, the factory model becomes insufficient to support creative, new enterprises.

It is interesting to note the extent to which new economy skills have taken over the job market. While technical expertise remains relevant to various industries, it is fascinating to find that places such as Microsoft and Apple are looking to hire individuals who show problem-solving, leadership and communication skills. Warren Buffet, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, highlighted integrity as the key skill he values for his employees. JP Morgan looks for employees who can forge good relationships with clients and business partners. Across traditional business sectors, numerous “soft” skills are highly sought after in the market place, showing the extent to which factory-model skills such as compliance and rule-following simply are not relevant any longer.

The new economy is driven by new technologies that continue to disrupt the ways we do things. One of the downsides of the new economy is that it promotes distraction and overconsumption of digital entertainment. Thus, the insight provided by Cal Newport helps us to further elaborate the skills that are highly sought after in the new economy. The winners in the new economy are not simply those who can use the new technology proficiently, even though that is an important skill. Really, the winners will be those who can overcome distraction, accomplish work without digital tools, and can focus their attention adeptly. Newport articulates a stunning thesis:

“The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.”

Cal Newport, Deep Work, 14.

This idea of deep work, then, becomes the single-most important skill that drives all other valuable skills in the new economy. Central to Newport’s argument is the concept of deliberate practice. Having written about deliberate practice elsewhere, I found his summary a really helpful encapsulation:

“Its components are usually identified as follows: (1) your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill you’re trying to improve or an idea you’re trying to master; (2) you receive feedback so you can correct your approach to keep your attention exactly where it’s most productive.”

Cal Newport, Deep Work, 35.

Deliberate practice, then, becomes a master tool that unlocks an individual’s potential in the new economy. Tight focus and continuous improvement enable someone to achieve rapid improvements in specific areas. It also allows someone to produce something meaningful and then deliver that to others who care utilizing the technologies underpinning the new economy.

How does Classical Christian Education Equip Students for the New Economy?

It is striking that the new economy and classical Christian education emerged almost simultaneously. The question, then, is whether there is anything inherent in classical education that is uniquely associated with the new economy. My contention is that classical education, by championing a vision that education is for moral formation and lifelong learning, the disposition of classical schools matches in many respects the values of the new economy. What I mean by this is that in a world where we are glutted with information, people are hungry for meaning. Yet it is difficult for people to cut through the noise and distraction to make meaning of the raw informational materials. I think that’s where classical education truly serves the new economy most adeptly. Let’s explore a few of the ways this occurs.

Before diving in, I think it is also important to recognize some of the incongruencies between classical education and the new economy. For one, the new economy is driven by new technologies. By and large, the classical school movement has tended to be a low-tech schooling environment. That being said, it is interesting to see how there are new models of schooling that utilizing the platforms of the new economy. For instance, the Classic Learning Test (CLT) has provided a new type of college entrance testing by using an online testing platform. There are numerous classical schools that use online courses where remove video platforms enable rich discussion despite physically being in diverse locations. A second incongruity is that the new economy as an economy is not have at its core a moral value. So it is not as though this new economy is in some way morally superior to the previous economy. There are likely ways where workers and consumers are taken advantage of or manipulated. In addition, there are new dangers that have emerged in the new economy associated with internet security, disinformation, and lack of regulation. It behooves us to be aware of the risks of entering into the new and emerging marketplace.

The great books tradition was the first and most pervasive loss in the industrialization of education. Sure, some of the greats remained on, say, the AP English Lit reading list. However, reading the greats with a view of being formed by the great tradition has been lost in conventional education. They are largely read with a view to the salient information needed to pass tests. The classical renewal movement has celebrated the timeless wisdom and intellectual challenge contained within the great books. They represent a journey through the greatest works of literature, philosophy, poetry, drama and history that have shaped our understanding of the world. The great books tradition allows us to connect with the thoughts and ideas of brilliant minds from different eras. They inspire students to think critically, question assumptions, and expand our perspectives. Students embark on a transformative quest for knowledge and insight. In some ways, the greats books are a renewable resource, as we can continuously turn to them for second and third readings to glean deeper insights. The demonstrate that learning is a lifelong pursuit filled with endless possibilities for growth. When we think about the skills needed in the new economy, the great books tradition cultivates the hearts and minds of students to have a wellspring of wisdom to provide value in the marketplace.

Logic is yet another hallmark of classical education, being one of the three liberal arts or the trivium. Aristotle stands as a giant having tremendous influence over philosophical thought down through the ages. His logical system is founded on propositional truth. In many respects, the type of logic taught in classical schools stems from Aristotelian principles and serves as a way to train students in the art of reasoning. By learning syllogisms, fallacies, inductive and deductive approaches to reasoning, students are able to investigate complex problems and form evaluations of what is true and what is good. Logic is the backbone of critical thinking and reasoning. It allows us to make sense of the world around us, solve problems, and make informed decisions. The classical art of logic guides us in constructing sound arguments, identifying fallacies, and honing our analytical skills. The classical art of logic opens doors to a world of clarity and understanding. It empowers students to think with precision and confidence. In the new economy, logical skills enable thinkers to cut through memes and social media posts that have little substance in order to consider problems and issues in depth. Students trained in logic have the ability to find nuance and consider new avenues that are constructive alternatives to much of the social discourse of our era.

Finally, rhetoric is another hallmark of classical education, moving students beyond simply learning how to write or speak effectively. It champions the transformative power of words, enabling students to convey their convictions with clarity and winsomeness. The classical art of rhetoric is rooted in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. It is the art of using language effectively and persuasively. At its core, rhetoric empowers individuals to craft compelling arguments, sway opinions, and evoke emotions through the principles of ethos, pathos, and logos. As one of the liberal arts, it works with logic to enable the student to understand a problem and then raise one’s voice to help solve that problem. In the Christian tradition, there is an understanding of how the power of words – particularly God’s divine Word – can transform lives. The good news is conveyed through speech, connecting people to God’s grace and uplifting the soul. At other times, Christian rhetoric exhorts and challenges people to repent of sins and reform their ways. Quintilian considered that to be a good orator, one must be a good man (Institutio oratoria, book 12, chapter 1). So, what we have in view here is not some bombastic blowhard who captures people’s attention through sophistry. Instead, we are graduating students who can genuinely tackle the toughest problems of our day with reasonable speech and well-considered words.

The new economy is a market made for students like ours. Through our educational renewal, they are becoming equipped to provide meaning to a growing population that needs guidance and wisdom. It may merely be coincidence that has seen the classical educational renewal emerge at the same time as the new economy. Yet, it seems to me that the skills required at this time are exactly what we are providing.

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A Review of Grit and Growth Mindset

To begin with, let’s spell out what each of these dispositions are. Grit is the concept popularized by the research and publication of Angela Duckworth, professor of psychology and the University of Pennsylvania. In her 2016 book entitled Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, she simply refers to grit as the “combination of passion and perseverance,” (8) a point highlighted in the subtitle. A further definition is “the ability to sustain effort and interest towards long-term goals.” Grit, then, encompasses the ability to engage in effortful work and situate that effort within a long-range trajectory of growth.

A growth mindset is similar to grit in that it incorporates effort and goals. However, it differs from grit by articulating a belief that “your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts, your strategies, and help from others,” so states Carol Dweck in her book Mindset (7). Notice how it brings effort into contact with strategies and help. As teachers, we fit into the growth mindset framework by being individuals who can help students grow and discover new strategies where their effort can lead to accomplishing their goals. The opposite of a growth mindset is a fixed mindset, the understanding of oneself as incapable of change.

Let’s dig a little deeper by considering an illustration. There are many high performers who exemplify grit and growth mindset. For example, an athlete like Michael Jordan achieved greatness in the NBA through a relentless pursuit of excellence on the basketball court. Yet, early in his life, he encountered an obstacle. He was cut from his high school basketball team. Rather than playing varsity basketball at Laney High School, he was placed on the JV team. He shared in a Newsweek interview how this drove him to work hard. “Whenever I was working out and got tired and figured I ought to stop, I’d close my eyes and see that list in the locker room without my name on it. That usually got me going again.” This drive shows both grit – in that he applied sustained effort to reach long-term goals – and a growth mindset – practicing new skills and learning from coaches along the way. He could have easily taken a fixed mindset and decided basketball wasn’t for him. But instead he had a fundamental belief that he could grow and change the characteristics that were in his control.

Bringing this a little closer to home, we need not set ourselves or our students the goal of NBA greatness to instill the dispositions of grit and growth mindset. There are some simple practices that enable students to engage in effortful work that achieves forward momentum towards tangible goals such as better handwriting, faster times on math facts tests, or the completion of a quality essay. Here we will lay out several concepts and skills that we can use to encourage students along the pathway of grit and growth mindset.

The North Macedonian Study

In a study conducted with middle-school students during the beginning of the 2016 Spring semester in North Macedonia, researchers implemented a curriculum aimed at instructing students in the tenets of deliberate practice, with the goal of discovering whether grit can be acquired at this critical stage of development. I think it is instructive to observe the framework of the curriculum used. It was broken into two parts. The first lays down the deliberate practice framework: “(i) identify stretch goals, (ii) seek feedback, (iii) concentrate, and (iv) repeat until mastery.” (Santos, et al. “Can grit be taught?” 2022). According to Anders Ericsson, “Deliberate efforts to improve one’s performance beyond its current level demands full concentration and often requires problem-solving and better methods of performing the tasks.” (Ericsson, “Deliberate Practice and Acquisition of Expert Performance,” 2008). In other words, to grow a skill or improve performance, it takes focused attention as well as guidance to find new strategies in whatever domain we are working in.

Let’s consider the example of a timed math facts test. Begin by identifying a stretch goal. Ask students to write down for themselves a reasonable, yet moderately difficult time to beat. The feedback should be rather immediate, as students write down their time after completing each math facts test. Before each timed test, have students consciously focus their attention and remove any potential distractions. After each test – and this is often the important step that gets missed – have students analyze their test for problem areas or challenges they encountered. This is whether the teacher can propose new strategies to try. Similar procedures could be used for playing a line of music on the piano the exact same way two times in a row, making four free throws in a row, or entering a written narration into a copybook for eight minutes uninterrupted.

The second part of the curriculum used in the North Madedonian study consisted of training in motivation. This can be a difficult concept. But to begin with, the locus of motivation ought to be personal – self-motivation. Dweck describes motivation with words like “interest” and “positivity” (Mindset 61). She cites how Tiger Woods approached practice by making it fun, “I love working on shots, carving them this way and that, and proving to myself that I can hit a certain shot on command.” (102). In the language of grit, Duckworth uses the word “passion” to describe motivation. She challenges to notion to “follow your passions,” because our passions are often untamed and untrained (Grit 95-116). We need to discover what we are passionate about, or in the terms of motivation, what provides us with joy, interest and a feeling of positivity. There should be an amount of playful discovery, and repeated exposure to the intrinsic interest that captivates the heart.

The result of the North Macedonian study offers encouragement and a caution. It is clear that through training, students can acquire new beliefs about the value of their effort. Deliberate practice can be learned. The study showed that positive impacts on students were greater when the contents of deliberate practice training “were delivered by teachers.” What this means is that higher achievement occurs through not only goal setting and effort on the part of the individual student, but with support by what Vygotsky calls a “more knowledgeable other.” Now, while the study showed an increase in what is called “the perseverance-of-effort facet of grit,” there was a decrease in the “consistency-of-interest facet.” In other words, students grew in their willingness to work hard towards a goal, but they lost interest in that goal. They suggest that given the age of middle school students, they are not settled in their interest in long-term goals. To that end, it may be more important to provide shorter-range goals as well as a diversity of interests that students can sample as they learn how to implement deliberate practice.

Practical Tips for Training Students in Grit and the Growth Mindset

In her book Mindset, Dweck shares how to pass on the growth mindset. Her discussion points out that many parents and teachers who have a growth mindset encounter difficulties passing it on to students. Let’s begin by listing the three major pieces of advice she delineates.

Praise your students the right way. Instead of offering general praise (“good job”) or praise of the child’s ability (“you’re great at math”), be sure to offer specific praise that focuses on the “child’s learning process” (219). For instance, “You really worked hard to get that answer. That must feel good!” By praising effortful practice and overcoming challenges, we encourage and support their perseverance.

Embrace setbacks and failures. Parents, children and teachers suffer a fear of failure. But “setbacks are good things that should be embraced” and “setbacks should be used as a platform for learning” (219). One approach is to highlight the challenge as an obstacle to overcome. Imagine a student struggling to pronounce a multisyllabic word. The teacher who responds, “Johnny found a challenging word, let’s work through this one together.” Finding a response that ennobles hurdles, difficulties and failure supports the growth mindset.

Work towards understanding instead of mere memorization. There is a place for memory work, but the value of memorization can be fairly shallow and can lead to a fixed mindset. Helping students understand what it is they are reading or calculating promotes a growth mindset. Now in mathematics, it is imperative that students learn math facts and formulas by heart. I spend time working on this very skill. But more important than having instant recall is the ability to apply formulas and operations to the correct problem. So, asking the “why” question repeatedly moves the work toward understanding, and therefore growth. Other questions that can be asked to highlight understanding are, “What are typical errors we might find with this kind of problem?” or, “Is there a different way we could approach this problem?”

Model the growth mindset in the work you do. Both grit and the growth mindset can be caught through modeling or a mimetic approach. When we are teaching, we often think we need to be perfect experts of our content. This notion is a fixed mindset. Instead, we should view our knowledge as growing, even in subjects we have taught for many years. When students hear us say things like, “Oh, this is a concept I still struggle with” or “Here’s how I approach this because it always trips me up” we are communicating that learning is a process and that some areas of learning require effort.

Similarly, share stories of failures and challenges you have overcome. Relating to the stage of learning your students are in can help them envision themselves as growing into a more mature version of themselves. This is a core concept in habit training – envisioning the more mature self. I have shared with students about poor grades I received in school, ways I have needed to learn how to study or organize my calendar. Even though I was fairly poor at managing assignments while in high school, I grew in this skill during my college years. There is a concept of the “resume of failures,” which was a viral sensation when Princeton professor of psychology, Johannes Haushofer, uploaded his “CV of failures” online. Keeping track of these failures can provide a storehouse of stories we can share as we guide and mentor our students in the ways of the growth mindset.

Not only should we share our own stories, have students share their past experiences of overcoming challenges. Even our youngest students can share moments they have had to apply themselves through grit and determination to accomplish something. They likely have all the materials needed to cultivate a growth mindset from their own past experiences. It only takes a little reminding to get them engaged in a proper mindset for effortful work.

Finally, get students talking about approaches to overcome challenges. This means we need to be equipped with questions that get the students thinking in the growth mindset. A simple question that could be applied across all situations is, “What’s a different way you could approach this?” Finding new strategies can be very empowering to students. Too often we think we ought to be providing answers and strategies – and there’s definitely a role for that. But beginning with student talk about the nature of the challenges they are facing and providing them the tools to overcome those challenges through guided questioning can powerfully shift them out of the fixed mindset into the growth mindset.

Watch an in-depth training session on how to implement deliberate practice in your classroom. Learn what it means to aim for excellence and to cultivate virtues, drawing upon modern research into high performance practice.

Learn practical strategies to help your classroom aim high and for you to provide effective support. Whether you are a classroom teacher, administrator or homeschool parent, you will find helpful tools to take your craft of teaching to the next level.

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For example, a teacher responsible for teaching The Great Gatsby must consider how the book will be taught, what she will focus on, and how she intends for students to develop and grow through the study. Each day, she walks into a room full of students in need of direction for approaching the text. This requires leadership.

In modern educational circles, we often speak, not of leadership, but of “classroom management.” Unfortunately, this phrase is embedded with faulty assumptions about who students are, what the purpose of learning is, and how we are to manage them toward some desirable end. As a result, classroom management techniques are problematic in two key ways.

First, classroom management techniques are often behavioristic. In other words, they seek to address the behavior of students through systems of external rewards and consequences, rather than aiming to form the whole person of the child, especially the heart. Strategies are deployed to artificially motivate behaviors of respect, obedience, service, and even kindness in a way disconnected from the child’s internal moral development. Is this child growing in a love and understanding of the idea of respect for authority? How is the child becoming more servant-hearted in her disposition? These questions are not usually asked in typical classroom management conversations.

Second, classroom management techniques are often task-oriented rather than people-oriented. This makes sense since the phrase emerged during the post-industrial revolution in which the effective and efficient completion of tasks was prized above all else. Now, at its best, modern business management theory is people-oriented, but most managers too easily slip into the mindset of “How do I get this employee to perform this task?” rather than “How do I lead this employee on a path toward growth and increasing expertise?” The latter focuses on the development of the talent and skill of people, not simply whether they are hitting the deadlines. 

To equip teachers to grow as true leaders of their students, in this article I will recommend three recently published leadership books that contain relevant ideas for classroom leadership. These resources will help teachers see their true leadership role and therefore embrace the responsibility for them to invest deeply in the lives of their students. While teachers will need to push through some of the business-focused examples of these resources, the underlying ideas are both relevant and applicable for classroom leadership today.

Multipliers by Liz Wiseman 

The first book I want to recommend is Multipliers (HarperCollins, 2017) by researcher Liz Wiseman. In this book, Wiseman sets out to show how leaders can make people under their supervision smarter, rather than targeting mere compliance. Early on, she differentiates between two managers, the Genius Maker and the Genius (9). The genius maker grows people’s intelligence by “extracting the smarts and maximum effort from each member on the team.” This type of leader talks only about 10% of the time, thereby making space for others to grow through active participation in coming up with solutions to a problem. 

In contrast, the genius is self-oriented. He is smart and successful, and everyone in the room knows who has the best ideas. He may facilitate “conversations” but soon these turn into opportunities for him to share his correct views with others. After all, he is the genius. Why not just listen to him? The result is that people do not have the permission to think for themselves or the legitimate responsibility to make decisions. It all goes back to what the genius thinks is right. 

For Wiseman, the genius maker is a multiplier of of intelligence while the genius is actually a diminisher. At heart, multipliers “invoke each person’s unique intelligence and create an atmosphere of genius–innovation, productive effort, and collective intelligence” (10). The upshot is that these leaders not only access people’s current capability, they stretch it. People actually report getting smarter under the supervision of multipliers. The fundamental assumption of a multiplier is “People are smart and will figure this out” whereas the assumption of the diminisher is “They will never figure this out without me” (20). 

Teachers can become multipliers of intelligence in their classrooms by resisting the urge to be the residential genius. Although they are older, smarter, and more experienced, these assets can be leveraged to empower their students toward growing their own abilities, rather than making it all about the teacher.

Diagnostic Questions for Teachers:

• Do you empower students in your classroom to make major contributions to class culture, discussions, learning, and skill demonstration? 
• Is there room in your classroom for students to make mistakes as you stretch them to attempt difficult assignments?
• Do you ask your students to explain complex concepts to their peers rather than yourself?
• Does your approach to grading grow student intellectual confidence or does it foster dependence on your own intelligence?

Boundaries for Leaders by Dr. Henry Cloud

Boundaries for Leaders (HarperCollins, 2013) is written by clinical psychologist Dr. Henry Cloud, an author recognized for his work on cultivating healthy relationships. In Chapter 1, he writes, “This book is about what leaders need to do in order for people to accomplish a vision” (2). The key word here for Cloud is people. He will go on to argue that people perform their best work in healthy work cultures that take into consideration the psychological well-being of both employer and employee. By setting good boundaries in place and leading in a way that people’s brains can follow, Cloud contends, good results will come. 

Cloud writes that boundaries are made up of two things: what you create and what you allow (15). A boundary is a property line, marking out who is responsible and for what. When someone is given real ownership of something, anything that happens under their supervision only happens because they created it or allowed it. 

In top-performing classrooms, teachers teach in a way that makes it possible for their students’ brains to function as they were designed (25). This happens through setting good boundaries. Cloud writes, “Show me a person, team, or a company that gets results, and I will show you the leadership boundaries that make it possible” (26).

As a psychologist, the author is aware of how the human brain works and what leaders can do to maximize brain health and productivity. In turn, teachers can use these insights as they seek to pass on knowledge, skills, and virtues to their students.

For example, it is helpful for a teacher to understand that the brain relies on three essential properties to achieve a particular task, be it the following of a classroom procedure or the completion of an assignment:

1. Attention: the ability to focus on relevant stimuli, and block out what is not relevant (“Do this”)
2. Inhibition: the ability to “not do” certain actions that could be distracting, irrelevant, or eve destructive (“Don’t do this”)
3. Working Memory: the ability to retain and access relevant information for reasoning, decision-making, and taking future actions (“Remember and build on this relevant information”)

As teachers design their lessons and think through what they want their students to accomplish for the day, it is beneficial to think through these three neurological elements for the completion of a task. When we ignore one or more of these elements, we risk short-circuiting our students optimal use of the way God designed their brains.

Diagnostic Questions for Teachers:

• What student behaviors in your classroom have you created or allowed?
• How do your lessons promote student attention on what is most important for the curricular objective?
• What procedures and expectations have you established and maintained to ensure that what is not important or destructive is not allowed in?
• How are you building your students’ working memory of key information to help them complete assignments with greater success? 

The Motive by Patrick Lencioni 

The Motive (Wiley, 2020), written especially for CEOs, explores the underlying motivation of a good leader. Author Patrick Lencioni, well-known for his book Five Dysfunctions of a Team, illustrates through a leadership parable that one’s motivation for leading will dictate what one prioritizes and how he or she spends her time.

In the parable, two types of leadership motivation are at play (135). Reward-centered leadership rests on the fundamental assumption that the leader, having been selected for the role, has arrived and therefore possesses the freedom to design her job around what she most enjoys. It is the belief that the leader’s work should be pleasant and enjoyable because the leadership position is the reward. She therefore has the freedom to avoid mundane, unpleasant, or uncomfortable work if she so pleases, which she does.

In contrast, responsibility-centered leadership assumes that leadership is all about responsibility and service. It is the belief that being a leader is responsible; therefore, the experience of leading should be difficult and challenging (though certainly not without elements of gratification). 

To be clear, Lencioni writes that no leader perfectly embodies one form of motivation or the other. But one of these motives will be predominant and leaders need to be self-aware of what drives them. Reward-centered leaders often resist and avoid doing the difficult things that only they can do for the team they are leading. As a result, the whole organization suffers.

When it comes to leading a classroom, there are all sorts of things that a teacher would prefer not to do: address difficult student behavior, call a parent with bad news to share, have “family talks” with the whole class about negative classroom culture issues, or give a low grade on an assignment. But to be the best leaders they can, teachers need to lean into these responsibilities and thereby discharge their role teacher well.

Diagnostic Questions for Teachers

• What is your motivation for becoming a teacher?
• What are the 3-5 things you can do for your class that no one else can do? 
• How are you caring for your class culture, especially rooting out dysfunctional behavior and forming healthy interpersonal dynamics?
• What kind of feedback do you give your students on their behavior and work? 
• When was the last time you had a difficult conversation with a student in which you addressed unhealthy behavior?
• When was the last time you complained about a student’s or parent’s behavior? What steps do you need to take to address it?
• How often are you reminding your students of the big picture of their education, your particular curriculum, and the core values of your classroom?

Conclusion

Teachers are the leaders of their classrooms, responsible for casting vision for their students, supporting them in their work, and cultivating healthy classroom cultures. Rather than deploying classroom management techniques which can be overly behavioristic and task-oriented, teachers should embrace their role as leaders and focus on developing their people. By helping teachers become better leaders, we will see dynamic classrooms, better learning results, and, most importantly, thriving students.

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A new book landed on my desk around the beginning of the school year. Robert Greene’s Mastery (New York: Viking, 2012) touches on a number of points that are worthy of exploration and consideration. It reads like a mix of historical biography and self help by a writer who is a master of his craft. I first came across Robert Greene when I listened to his 48 Laws of Power (New York: Viking, 1998) as an audiobook. At that point I largely dismissed Greene as a relevant voice in my life due to how Machiavellian his self-help advice came across. Yet, in Mastery one finds solid career advice based on the apprenticeship model from the Middle Ages. Intermingled in his delineation of one’s journey toward mastery, Greene chronicles the careers of past masters such as Leonardo, Mozart, Einstein, Darwin, Benjamin Franklin, Marie Curie, Carl Jung, and a host of others.

In this article I would like to delve into the second section of Mastery to explore the three phases of apprenticeship as spelled out by Greene. Because the book reads as advice given to an individual embarking on a new career, there is some translation that needs to occur to nuance Greene’s apprenticeship for a school environment. I will endeavor to examine Mastery from three vantage points: 1) the classroom environment as a locus of apprenticeship, 2) the teacher as apprentice, and 3) the work an administrator can do to create a culture of apprenticeship.

The Three Phases of Apprenticeship

Let us begin not with the three phases, but with the master idea of apprenticeship: transformation. Greene writes:

“The principle is simple and must be engraved deeply in your mind: the goal of an apprenticeship is not money, a good position, a title, or a diploma, but rather the transformation of your mind and character–the first transformation on the way to mastery.”

Robert Greene, Mastery, 55.

I cannot help but hear echoes of Romans 12:2, “be not conformed to this world, but be transformed (μεταμορφόω) by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” Our spiritual apprenticeship to Christ Jesus is modeled upon the disciples journeying with Jesus. Our minds and our character undergo a metamorphosis through long years of following Christ. I cannot imagine Greene has this in mind when he writes this, yet the profundity of the truth is well worth noting. The journey of the apprentice in whatever field we might consider is to become someone who is disciplined and focused.

The first phase of apprenticeship is what Greene calls “deep observation.” He lays out two broad categories that one observes in an apprenticeship.

“First, you will observe the rules and procedures that govern success in this environment – in other words, “this is how we do things here.” . . . The second reality you will observe is the power relationships that exist within the group.”

Robert Greene, Mastery, 57

I find Green to be fairly Machiavellian here, especially by framing his second category around power. Now it is true in an educational environment that there is an authority structure – the teacher-student dynamic. It might also be true that certain students wield a kind of power. I find the insights from Jordan Peterson helpful to temper power as the singular characteristic of hierarchies. He would contest that a framework of competence might be a better understanding of group dynamics. Now, competence is a form of power, the power of expertise, but it is different than the form of power that often gets expressed as dominance and unfair privilege.

Okay, so apart from that little diatribe, what Greene lays out is a phase of apprenticeship that features learning the skills of observation, focus, attention, and noticing things. Observation includes the social environment and human interactions. I like how he begins with noticing before making judgments. In education we often want to move quickly to analysis and judgement. Perhaps this is a liability in discussion-based learning. But there is genuine benefit to cultivating the simple skill of noticing things. One of the best tools for cultivating the skill of observation is the practice of narration.

The second phase of apprenticeship is what Greene calls “the practice mode,” which he defines as “practice toward the acquisition of skills.” (58) I think this is the phase that amounts to the biggest portion of apprenticeship, which does not mean it is the most important phase, but it stands to reason that much of our time on task occurs in this phase. Greene spells out what we might call a mimetic form of instruction.

“The natural model for learning, largely based on the power of mirror neurons, came from watching and imitating others, then repeating the action over and over. Our brains are highly suited for this form of learning.”

Robert Greene, Mastery, 59

Watching, imitating and doing over and over is the most visible part of the master’s workshop. Imagine the activity of the great workshops of the Renaissance where apprentices look over the shoulder of the master, go to their own station and practice repeatedly, often with the master then looking over their shoulders.

While there is much that we learn that gets expressed in language or numbers, Greene spells out how there are certain kinds of information that amount to “tacit knowledge” or knowledge that is difficult to put into words. The Medieval model of apprenticeship enabled the learner to put into practice this tacit knowledge, accumulating the 10,000 hours, a la Anders Ericsson, which might take a decade to master. Imitation and practice, then, is a significant idea derived from this second phase of the apprenticeship as Greene describes it.

Furthermore, practice develops over time. As an individual increases in skill, there is an effect Greene describes as the “cycle of accelerated returns” where practice becomes both easier and more rewarding. This correlates well with what Cal Newport shares about passion, enjoyment and interest coming after the accumulation of skill. For something like math, it might take years of work and training to get to the point where true enjoyment emerges. The same is true with excellent literature that demands considerable attention to detail and understanding of literary conventions. We might experience the opposite of joy and passion when encountering these domains early in our apprenticeship. Yet when we gain the requisite time on task, joy and passion emerge.

The third phase of apprenticeship is what Greene calls “experimentation” or “the active mode.” In this phase the apprentice attempts to work independently. Greene writes:

“As you gain in skill and confidence, you must make the move to a more active mode of experimentation. This could mean taking on more responsibility, initiating a project of some sort, doing work that exposes you to the criticism of peers or even the public. The point of this is to gauge your progress and whether there are still gaps in your knowledge. You are observing yourself in action and seeing how you respond to the judgments of others. Can you take criticism and use it constructively?” (62)

Robert Greene, Mastery, 62

Some of the words that stand out to me in this description of the active phase are “responsibility” and “criticism.” In earlier phases of apprenticeship, you can imagine the apprentice working almost mechanically. At one level there is observation where the apprentice is soaking everything in. At the practice stage the apprentice is building the habits over and over accumulating skill. Then at this level there is genuine ownership, a sense of personalization of the task at hand. When one takes personal responsibility for one’s own work, there comes with it a vulnerability or exposure of one’s weaknesses. This is why the goal of this phase is to learn how to take criticism well.

I am reminded of the growth mindset. Carol Dweck describes a form of constructive criticism, “Growth-minded teachers tell students the truth and then give them the tools to close the gap.” (Mindset, 203) As students work at the cutting edge of their knowledge and skill, honest and forthright communication enables them to have an accurate picture about what they are doing well, but also about what they are not doing well. Yet the child cannot be left there, they must then be given the tools to improve. In the apprenticeship mindset, we can add to Dweck paradigm that a significant part of education ought to be teaching students how to find for themselves the tools to improve, so that when they get to the active stage, they can receive criticism and then creatively explore ways they can improve.

Greene goes on to dig deeper into the emotional detachment one must learn in the final phase of apprenticeship.

“It is always easier to learn the rules and stay within your comfort zone. Often you must force yourself to initiate such actions or experiments before you think you are ready. You are testing your character, moving past your fears, and developing a sense of detachment to your work–looking at it through the eyes of others.”

Robert Greene, Mastery, 63

Stepping out of the comfort zone can occur at all stages. I think about students who question whether the answer they produce in my Geometry class is correct. I begin to shift that assessment back onto them. How do you know? Have you checked your work? What if the textbook is wrong? Can you be confident that you have gotten the right answer even if it doesn’t match what others have produced? The answer is either correct or incorrect. If the student is able to assess that on their own, they begin to have a detachment from relying on others to tell them the answer is correct – as though correctness is some mystery only revealed by the text or the teacher.

Greene concludes his delineation of the three phases of apprenticeship by relating it to the nature of work today. We are moving beyond the industrial factory-model of work. Everyone can be a creative by writing blog, producing videos or podcasts, hosting webinars, or starting a business. The apprentice mindset enables individuals to not view themselves as cogs in an economic machine, but to explore new possibilities for creative careers. He writes:

“In general, no matter your field, you must think of yourself as a builder, using actual materials and ideas. You are producing something tangible in your work, something that affects people in some direct, concrete way. To build anything well – a house, a political organization, a business, or a film – you must understand the building process and possess the necessary skills. You are a craftsman learning to adhere to the highest standards. For all this, you must go through a careful apprenticeship. You cannot make anything worthwhile in this world unless you have first developed and transformed yourself.”

Robert Greene, Mastery, 64

The apprenticeship model Greene develops points to the fact that we cannot view the work of our students (nor our own work for that matter) as fixed. If we view ourselves as capable of transformation, the apprenticeship model provides a pathway to enact coaching and skills formation as a natural part of life.

Apprenticeship in the Classroom

When we are working with our students in the classroom, the three modes or phases of apprenticeship provide a helpful framework for the different kinds of work we are doing. I think it is important to keep in mind that these modes of apprenticeship are not strictly sequential, nor are they bound to long spans of year before one moves into another phase.

Beginning with deep observation, the first phase, I would encourage teachers to utilize the concepts of atmosphere and habit training to coach students in “how we do things here.” This is true with regard to how we carefully read texts or patiently observe something in nature. There are procedures and routines that must be learned, such as sitting in a ready position or having a moment of silence after the reading of scripture. Then there is the emotional/social intelligence component, where one of the ways we are training students is to have facility in relating with all kinds of people in different kinds of situations. This argues for a teacher’s direct involvement in breaks and lunch, in order to coach students well in the hugely important task of cultivating social skills.

Narration, or telling back, is essential to the task of deep observation. We cannot tell back what we have not given our attention to. While we tend to think of narration as part of a method, it is in and of itself a skill to be cultivated. Students can grow in the ability and capacity to narrate with greater attention to detail, to more fully convey the meaning of the author by utilizing his or her language and style, and to follow with greater nuance the sequence and order of thought in an episode. When we think about deep observation, the depth with which we are able to assimilate texts, music, artwork and nature provide a foundation for the next phases of apprenticeship.

The second phase, the practice mode, is where the bulk of the work occurs in a student’s life. We are wise not to consider this solely as homework. Much of the most effective practice a student or apprentice ought to do occurs under the watchful eye of the teacher. This provides greater scope for demonstration (“watch how I do it”) and correction (“instead try it this way”). Here I think the concepts in Make It Stick are invaluable. Spacing and interleaving are preferable to massed practice. At the heart of deliberate practice is a faithful guide – a master – who is able to place before the student the correct number of problems that will accomplish the most growth for the apprentice. This might entail a reduced number of practice problems in math or shorter writing assignments so that greater focus can be placed on discrete skills.

The active or experimentation mode, the third phase of apprenticeship, sees the students exploring their boundaries. We might hear a student ask, “What if I tried it this way?” or say, “I got the same answer but my steps were different.” A wise master poses open ended questions that force the student to be creative, considering an issue from a different angle. Teachers can provide a class with a problem to solve that requires teamwork, collaboration and may involve trial and error.

The big takeaway from thinking through the apprenticeship model in this way is that all phases are relevant to the group of students in your classroom. It could be a lesson weaves together observation, practice and experimentation. The phases might move back and forth between practice and observation with experimentation coming days later when the requisite knowledge and skill can be unleased on an interesting problem, issue or question. Perhaps a unit can be structure around this broad series of phases. I could see a quiz or exam structured accordingly. The key is to see how guiding students towards mastery involves all three: observation, practice and experimentation. Our role in this is to establish these guiding principles and then to be the master in the workshop alternately demonstrating and then providing feedback.

Teachers as Apprentices

The bulk of my thoughts has centered on the classroom environment. However, I think it is equally important to view our task as teachers as a craft. Whether you are in your early years as a teacher or have been in the classroom for decades, take as many opportunities as you can to observe other teachers. One of the brilliant tools available with TLAC is that there is video content where techniques and best practices can be watched. Some of the most important skills a master teacher deploys are actually quite difficult to put to words. We develop intuitions about which student needs attention, when to raise or lower a voice, whether to turn my back when writing on the board or where to position myself when the class returns from PE. It’s quite another thing if one sees another teacher doing these things. We catch much by way of osmosis. What this points to is getting outside your classroom to catch by any means available a glimpse into a colleague’s room.

Practicing lessons is most often done when a teacher is in college. They practice lessons, do a semester or year-long placement, and then are launched into their career. Daily teaching is indeed a form of practice, but it might not be deliberate practice. We might very well reinforce rather bad teaching habits unless some planning or focused attention on some technique is applied. Here I think a wise teacher will insert into lesson plans notes about techniques they will practice. I might note to myself, “walk up and down the rows in my classroom” or “use cold calling today” or “wait for more hands during history class.” Narrowing the aperture in this way gives us more leverage to cultivate discrete skills and perhaps track our growth in certain areas.

Talk with your supervisor about techniques you are working on in your classroom. Invite him or her to come observe you, telling them that you are trying something different today and would like their feedback. This is where you are simultaneously practicing the craft of teaching but also experimenting with the edges of your comfort zone.

You don’t have to be far into your tenure as a teacher to take another teacher under your wing. Oftentimes our pathway to mastery lies not in practicing in isolation, but in taking opportunities to coach and mentor other teachers. This doesn’t need to be formalized in any way. I have seen teachers only a few years into their careers come alongside new faculty to “show them the ropes.”

Creating a Culture of Apprenticeship

Observation, practice and experimentation should be encouraged amongst the faculty, and if you are an administrator there is much that can be done to plan training around the apprenticeship model. Here are a couple of ideas that I have implemented at various times and hope to build on in the future.

First, the most impactful thing you can do as an administrator is to observe your teachers. When I go into a classroom, I literally open a new Word document and simply type what I see and hear. I have told my teachers that I am here to learn and not to judge (a technique I learned from Jason). I need to be able to see what is happening in the classroom to understand the “teacher personality” of the teacher. I am often surprised to hear the teacher’s voice while teaching, which can be quite different than their voice when interacting one on one. I need to see how the students are behaving. I look at the décor and the arrangement of the furniture. I catch the major transitions and subtle looks between the two students in the corner. Untied shoes, untucked t-shirts, but also kind words, helpfulness and genuine thoughtfulness all get noted. I try to spend fifteen to thirty minutes in the classroom, which is quite a lot of time. Before I leave, I send a copy of my notes to the teacher. I include items of feedback and advice in and amongst the notes. I send my notes without expecting any reply, but sometimes I will get a good interaction going. Sometimes I will ask the teacher to interact with the notes during our next one-on-one meeting. The big idea here is that observation with feedback supports the teacher as he or she strives towards excellence in their craft.

Second, do what you can to enable teachers to observe one another. This is professional development gold! You yourself might need to sub or to hire subs to make this happen. At my previous school I devoted a week to peer observation, scheduling peer observations like a round robin tournament. Some preliminary planning sought to identify individuals that might have a technique or practice that would benefit another teacher. Some of the pairings were simply serendipitous. What I found was that peer observation injected a potent shot of energy into our work as teachers. Conversations around teaching practices lasted weeks after the peer observations. What’s more, it significantly boosted the culture of mutual learning I had wanted to implement for years. Why had I not attempted this peer observation things sooner?

Finally, my most recent experiment involves short practice lessons in small groups of teachers. By teaching other colleagues in a compressed format, we get outside the daily routines with the students and get highly valuable feedback from our peers. The format I used was to have groups of four teach lessons in five to seven minutes (which means it has to be short and to the point, likely a portion of a lesson), and then for three to five minutes the other teachers provide feedback (similar to my observation model above). Each teacher gets roughly ten minutes in the “hot seat” and then at the end we all discuss some of our big takeaways. It’s a fifty to sixty minute exercise that gets us into the mode of deliberate practice with one another. It also provides an opportunity for experimentation, the third mode of apprenticeship.

Hopefully this short interaction with Robert Greene’s book Mastery has stimulated your thinking about how an apprenticeship approach can impact your classroom or school. As I’ve reflected on this book, I find myself viewing my vocation as simultaneously one of an apprentice moving toward mastery and a master coaching apprentices. If this idea of apprenticeship has sparked your imagination, I would like to direct you to a resource created by my colleague, Jason Barney – the apprenticeship lesson plan. In this free resource, you will discover ways in which you shape your lessons around coaching and apprenticeship derived from Comenius’ method of teaching.

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With this groundwork laid in Aristotle and modern research, we proceeded to articulate an understanding of the arts as situated in history and culture, as familial and traditional in nature. The upshot of this view is that we must apprentice students into specific traditions of artistry. We are not training abstract intellectual skills that can be transferred to new contexts, as Bloom’s taxonomy and the faculty theory of education supposed. When we train students in arithmetic or grammar, just like painting or gymnastics, we are inducting them into something both old and new. The ancient insights, styles and methods in these domains have been continuously adjusted and updated since their inception. This does not mean we must accept modern methods or assumptions in various arts (see A Pedagogy of Craft), but it does entail that some traditional artistic abilities and practices have little relevance in our contemporary context. Few schools teach horseback riding or ancient sailing and navigation techniques, and for good reason.

The Limitations of Artistic Divisions

In a similar way, there is no sacrosanct set of divisions between the arts handed down as if from on high. What we see in the classical tradition is a variety of distinctions between the branches of various artistic traditions as they developed over time. Many of the things that we regard as grammar (e.g., distinctions between singular and plural, parts of speech, types of sentences) are discussed by Augustine of Hippo in his treatise On Dialectic (de Dialectica). We should not be surprised at this fact. Since the arts are living traditions, human descriptions of their boundaries and nature are like mapping a flood plain. So, as much as we may nerd out about the Seven Liberal Arts (I am speaking to myself as much as to others…) we should not be disturbed when Hugh of St Victor, for instance, refuses to follow the early medieval divisions. 

(In the Didascalicon Hugh advocates for four branches of knowledge or wisdom: the theoretical [disciplines like mathematics, physics and theology], the practical [ethics and politics], the mechanical [architecture, medicine, agriculture, etc.], and logic, or the science which ensures proper reasoning and clarity in the other sciences.)

While we are, in this series, developing Aristotle’s divisions of the intellectual virtues, therefore, we should not prejudge the idea that his is the best or the only proper mapping of the intellectual virtues, the educational project or the distinctions between categories of knowledge. This series should be viewed as the opening of a conversation about rethinking our educational goals within Aristotelian terms, as more philosophically sound and helpful than Bloom’s Taxonomy. In the same way, though I have often referred to the classical distinction between the arts and sciences, it would be more accurate to reference the Aristotelian distinction between artistry (techne) and scientific knowledge (episteme), which had the effect in the tradition at varying times and places of issuing in a similar distinction between the branches of knowledge and of arts. 

Likewise, with arts in particular, I have proposed a fivefold division of the arts as in my view the most helpful for gesturing toward wholeness in our current renewal movement, and not because I dismiss the elegance of the threefold vision of common, liberal and fine arts, endorsed by Chris Hall, Ravi Jain and Kevin Clark. 

Techne — Artistry or craftsmanship

1. Athletics, games and sports
2. Common and domestic arts
3. Professions and trades
4. Fine and performing arts
5. The liberal arts of language and number

The main reason to do so lies in the realization that athletics, games and sports are indeed forms of techne, but they are not easily captured under the headings of common, liberal or fine. This is a problem if, as I contend, athletics, games and sports rightly play an important role within education. Separating out professions and trades from the common and domestic arts, secondarily, gestures towards modern cultural realities post-industrialization. Tending a garden in your backyard represents a different stream of craftsmanship than managing a commercial greenhouse. We risk a high degree of unhelpful equivocation by attempting to use medieval categories in the modern world. 

Of course, the fact that these are arts does not entail that we are obliged to train students in all of them—an impossibility in any case! What I have said is that we should structure the academy optimally to cultivate the arts and that we should aim at a universality, not a comprehensiveness, of artistic training in our K-12 educational programs. It is possible to train students in representatives from each of the five categories, with the liberal arts occupying a central role for the production of the other intellectual virtues (see later section in this article). As I discussed in an earlier article, the choice of which arts to cultivate constitutes a cultural judgment based on the calling and opportunities of a particular school. 

If all this talk of the culturally situated nature of the arts lands me in controversy, at least I can claim that I am not anti-tradition, but I am in fact restoring a proper understanding of artistic traditions against the modernist pretensions about objectivity. As Aristotle articulated so clearly, techne concerns itself with the ultimate particular facts, with what may or may not be, with contingent things and not with necessary being. Knowledge of how to make something does not constitute knowledge of the essences of things or philosophic wisdom. These truths are part and parcel of the natural limitations of artistry. 

The Transcendence of Artistry into Morality

However, it is also worth recognizing how artistry can in fact transcend itself. If craftsmanship can be figuratively represented by skillful hands, then as we already explained those same hands are hardwired to the heart and head, and even the spirit. In a way we have already noted this fact at length in the prelude to Apprenticeship in the Arts. Aristotle himself recognized the similarities between morality and artistry. But we have not as yet duly noted the extent to which the training of the hands also conditions the heart. As Comenius recognized, the arts require their own sort of prudence, by which the artisan foresees what will turn out for the best with his artistic production. 

Likewise, a hard and painful practice regimen enables the production of good and beautiful things. In this way, apprenticeship in the arts participates in the nature of the moral training that enables a person to delay instant gratification for the sake of a greater reward later. By thus disciplining the desires, artistic training acts as a natural prelude and arena for the development of self-control and this not only in athletics and sports, but in all the various arts. In both artistry and morality, one must aim at a target and pursue it through reasoned use of contingent means. Techne transcends itself through its natural participation in all the moral virtues and in the intellectual virtue of phronesis, or practical wisdom. 

After all, the sphere of human production has a natural affinity with the sphere of human action and goods. Producing something beautiful and valuable is itself a prudent action for a human being. Even more, developing some form of artistry is necessary for living a good life and enjoying the good things of life. Adopting a craftsman mindset in one’s work and getting into the flow of deliberate or purposeful practice constitutes a chief element of a prudent, and therefore happy, life. One must at times display the moral virtues of courage, temperance and justice in the serious work of artistic excellence. Jordan Peterson, for one, has discussed the importance of fair play and reciprocity in games as an emergent ethic. 

Artistry’s Moral and Spiritual Limitations

All this said, we can note again the limits of this blending of artistry into prudence. After all, the super star performer and artistic genius are also liable to moral dissolution and depravity, as we have daily witness in the tabloids. As in the case of the traditions of artistry themselves, it seems that self-control and moral foresight are not necessarily transferred from one sphere of life to another. The devoted Olympic athlete has his impeccable diet and training regimen, but he might be notoriously licentious or proud.

This limitation even shows itself in the spiritual sphere where transformations of artistry can mask, for a time, the impurities of the heart. As Jesus stated explicitly in the Sermon on the Mount,

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’” (Matt 7:21-23 ESV)

Spiritual gifts, or what we might call spiritual forms of artistry (since they are productive acts in the world), do not ensure that such artisans are morally sound. They might outwardly perform spiritual works, but in the eyes of God they remain still “workers of lawlessness.” In the same way, our liberal arts educated students may become nothing more than “clever devils,” to borrow C.S. Lewis’ phrase from The Abolition of Man. 

Among other things, this is why we must go on from artistry, which, for all its possibilities for transcendence, is properly basic and preparatory to the other intellectual virtues, rather than constituting them in itself. As Saint Paul claims, “I will show you a still more excellent way” (1 Cor 12:31b ESV), while he transitions from the gifts of spiritual artistry to the transcendent value of love, over and above all the intellectual and moral virtues on display in their full extravagance and grandiosity. Not just tongues of men, but of angels—what a statement to put the trivium arts to shame! “Prophetic powers” and understanding “all mysteries and all knowledge”—what phrases to humble the prophet, scholar and philosopher alike! 

It may be that we can ascribe the term ‘wisdom’ even to the greatest exponents of the arts, as Aristotle mentions in Book VI, ch. 4 of the Nicomachean Ethics. But by this we do not mean either that practical wisdom for life or philosophical wisdom of the highest mysteries.

Artistry as a Prelude to the Other Four Intellectual Virtues

And yet again, the arts can by their very nature transcend toward philosophical wisdom just like toward moral prudence. In the fine arts, for instance, it is not only their beauty that we prize but the messages that our great artists have embodied in shape and form. These insights into the nature of life and reality are valuable in so far as they are true. Or to put it another way, great artists rely on their intuition (nous) or understanding of reality (both in universals and in particulars) for the messages they have skillfully conveyed in artistic form. This intuition about life can, fortunately and unfortunately, coexist with poor habits and a personal lack of prudence. The artist may be our muse, whether or not she herself practices what she preaches!

Not all artistic productions convey a high degree of knowledge about the world, but the higher fine and performing arts, as well as the liberal arts do. In fact, it is these traditional productions of genius—paintings and sculptures, poems and novels, histories and plays, speeches and debates—that act as the forerunners of intuition and scientific knowledge in the student. It is through attention to these Great Works that defy easy categorization that the perceptive and reasoning abilities of the student are honed and developed. They provide a form of enriched second-hand experience enabling students’ thought to grow and mature. By imitating them throughout their training in the arts, students are given more than simply artistry itself. They are given the forerunners of the other intellectual virtues: the opinions of authorities, “the words of the wise and their riddles” (Prov 1:6b ESV).

While experiencing artistic productions can lead to artistry in the student when combined with imitation and coached practice, it is through reflection on the authorities, especially in the liberal arts, that prudence, intuition, scientific knowledge and ultimately philosophical wisdom are developed. In this way, while artistry is not enough, it is by nature a prelude to the other intellectual virtues. For this reason, the tradition recognized training in the liberal arts as preparatory to the sciences. In particular, the traditional productions of artistic wisdom are meant to provide fodder for reflection on the nature of human goods, thus developing prudence. From our Aristotelian vantage point, we can see the late medieval vision of moral philosophy as informing the individual’s development of phronesis. 

In a similar fashion, the arts help us see in a way that we would not on our own, forming our intuition or nous, those starting points for reasoning, whether in human, mathematical or natural spheres. At the same time, training in the liberal arts of language and number enable us to demonstrate propositions to be the case, establishing a statement as true or false. In this way, artistry with words and numbers constitutes the necessary prerequisite for scientific knowledge in what the later tradition would have called metaphysics and natural science. Both deliberation (for affairs of human choice regarding goods) and inquiry (for universal and particular truths regardless of human desire), then, require use, if not mastery, of the liberal arts for their practice. And so, these other intellectual virtues are dependent upon the liberal arts.

So, we are for this reason justified in seeing the liberal arts tradition as in a unique way indebted to the Aristotelian paradigm of intellectual virtues. Although not everyone in the tradition articulated this distinction between the liberal arts and sciences in the same way, the insight about the liberal arts’ central role as the pathways to moral virtue and wisdom owes a great deal to Aristotle. 

It is important to conclude by stating clearly that training in the liberal arts, like other forms of artistry, does not always and necessarily lead to the other intellectual virtues. As Clark and Jain have contended in The Liberal Arts Tradition, the liberal arts are not enough. We need only look to Plato’s Gorgias to see Socrates demolishing this supposition before Aristotle came along. Rhetoric could be a mere knack or craftiness that makes the worse appear to be the better cause. All the arts have their forms of trickery that are out of step with moral or spiritual reality. Artistry, particularly liberal artistry, can transcend itself as the doorway into deeper things, but it need not and therein lies the danger of relying or focusing on it alone. Which is why we must go on from artistry, entering the realms of prudence next….

Earlier Articles in this series:

1. Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Purpose of Education

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

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

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

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

6. Aristotle’s Virtue Theory and a Christian Purpose of Education

7. Moral Virtue and the Intellectual Virtue of Artistry or Craftsmanship

8. Practicing in the Dark or the Day: Well-worn Paths or Bushwalking, Artistry and Moral Virtue Continued

9. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 1: Traditions and Divisions

10. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 2: A Pedagogy of Craft

11. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 3: Crafting Lessons in Artistry

12. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 4: Artistry, the Academy and the Working World

13. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 5: Structuring the Academy for Christian Artistry

Next subseries in Aristotle’s Intellectual Virtues:

The Counsels of the Wise, Part 1: Foundations of Christian Prudence

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Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of artistry (Greek: techne) is by its very nature creative and productive. In order for it to flourish in a school culture, it must draw some of its lifeblood from the natural creative and productive impulse of children as human beings. When they see the products and beautiful creations of the masters of these living traditions, then they will naturally want to imitate them (see Comenius, The Great Didactic, 195-196). Drawing from this natural desire will make unnecessary the carrots and sticks of modern education’s manipulative motivational techniques. 

The Example of the Renaissance Guilds

We might be tempted to think that the structure of a system, like a school, has nothing to do with the cultivation of high levels of artistry or genius. We are tempted to think primarily in terms of in-born talent as a fixed entity (see Aristotle and the Growth Mindset • Educational Renaissance), but research on geniuses and elite performers points in another direction. In his book, The Talent Code, Daniel Coyle notes that geniuses “are not scattered uniformly through time and space” but “tend to appear in clusters” (61-62): 

Athens from 440 B.C. to 380 B.C., Florence from 1440 to 1490, and London from 1570-1640. Of these three none is so dazzling or well documented as Florence. In the space of a few generations a city with a population slightly less than that of present day Stillwater, Oklahoma, produced the greatest outpouring of artistic achievement the world has ever known. A solitary genius is easy to understand, but dozens of them, in the space of two generations? How could it happen? (62)

The scholar David Banks proposes a number of possible explanations that we might expect: the prosperity of Florence, its relative peace and freedom, etc. Unfortunately, each one of these is disproved by the historical record. Instead, the flurry of genius-level work is best explained by a social structure and educational process relentlessly focused on deep practice: the craft guilds:

As it turns out, Florence was an epicenter for the rise of a powerful social invention called craft guilds. Guilds (the word means “gold”) were associations of weavers, painters, goldsmiths, and the like who organized themselves to regulate competition and control quality. They had management, dues, and tight policies dictating who could work in the craft. What they did best, however, was grow talent. Guilds were built on the apprenticeship system, in which boys around seven years of age were sent to live with masters for fixed terms of five to ten years. (64)

The apprenticeship process that we have discussed throughout this series, it seems, can have better and worse cultural structures for training students in artistry. On a side note, the hierarchy of excellence seems to foster artistic genius more readily than the democracy of talent. In addition, the experience of apprentices at the bottom of the hierarchy mirrors the recommendations of Comenius for students to begin with the most basic and practical skills of the craft, and not with elaborate theory. As Coyle further explains,

An apprentice worked directly under the tutelage and supervision of the master, who frequently assumed rights as the child’s legal guardian. Apprentices learned the craft from the bottom up, not through lecture or theory but through action: mixing paint, preparing canvases, sharpening chisels. They cooperated and competed within a hierarchy, rising after some years to the status of journeyman and eventually, if they were skilled enough, master. This system created a chain of mentoring: da Vinci studied under Verrocchio, Verrocchio studied under Donatello, Donatello studied under Ghiberti; Michelangelo studied under Ghirlandaio, Ghirlandaio studied under Baldovinetti, and so on, all of them frequently visiting one another’s studios in a cooperative-competitive arrangement that today would be called social networking. (64)

This apprenticeship system can be thrown in stark relief with our common vision of what a “liberal arts education” should look like. Are our teachers masters of the liberal arts? Are our students cooperating and competing within a culture focused on rewarding excellence? Or are they simply hearing lectures on knowledge, taking notes and taking tests? Is their educational experience properly artistic in nature, focused on production in the common, liberal and fine arts? Are they systematically and structurally encouraged to try to solve problems of a production, even if they fail again and again along the way? Or are they motivated by grades, and jumping through the hoops of a rigid system?

In short, apprentices spent thousands of hours solving problems, trying and failing and trying again, within the confines of a world build on the systematic production of excellence. Their life was roughly akin to that of a twelve-year-old intern who spends a decade under the direct supervision of Steven Spielberg, painting sets, sketching storyboards, setting cameras. The notion that such a kid might one day become a great film director would hardly be a surprise: it would be closer to unavoidable (see Ron Howard). (64-65)

The Renaissance Guilds offer us a compelling vision of how the academy could be structured for artistry in a way that transcends the conventions of the modern school.

Adopting an Apprenticeship Model of Grading

This leads us to a first implication for the academy of our better understanding of Apprenticeship in the Arts. Students should be induced to create and produce with excellence, not by the overuse of fear or love, grades, punishments or rewards, but by their natural desire for imitation, creativity and production. Charlotte Mason put it this way: 

These principles are limited by the respect due to the personality [i.e. personhood] of children, which must not be encroached upon whether by the direct use of fear or love, suggestions or influence, or by undue play upon any one natural desire. (vol. 6, p. 80)

For this reason, and to avoid the grade inflation so typical of schools today, at the school where I serve as principal we have adopted an apprenticeship model of grading for our younger students and in artistic subjects for older students . 

This Apprenticeship model attempts to assign accurately a student’s level of mastery of grade-level artistic expectations. Since, as we discussed before, so much of K-12 education consists of training in the arts (if we include all the skill development of the liberal arts as well as the fine and performing arts!), it makes the most sense to assess students’ progression through the traditional vision of apprenticeship. When learning an art, every student begins at the level of novice, where the entire nature of the art and its practice is still new and unknown to the student. Through introduction to the art and early experiences in beginning to imitate a master, the student proceeds to the status of apprentice. At this point the student must still be watched closely by the master as he or she is producing, since the apprentice is liable to make mistakes and therefore still in need of some hand-holding and regular demonstration or correction to help the student practice the art correctly. After the student has gained some facility and can work mostly on his or her own, he has attained the status of journeyman, being able to produce the goods of the art dependably and with a measure of both autonomy and excellence. Finally, when a student displays a high level of artistry, excellence and a seasoned understanding that implies the ability to teach or train others in the craft, he or she has become a master, at least of that subskill. 

Apprenticeship Model Grade Levels

• Novice — a student who is new to the art and unacquainted with the processes that lead to proper production
• Apprentice — a student who is imitating the processes with some measure of success, but is also in need of frequent support and correction by the master
• Journeyman — a student who can produce the beautiful goods of the art with some autonomy and creative artistry
• Master — a student who consistently displays artistry and independent creativity, as well as the mastery that implies the ability to train others in the art

Adopting this sort of grading philosophy and system in a school can help clarify for teachers, students, and parents the actual nature of much of the educational project. When traditional grades are used it is often unclear whether or not students should be graded mainly on the completion of assignments or their effort, as opposed to their understanding and mastery. While no doubt students who work hard should be recognized in some way, when artistry is being judged it can actually be demotivating to students to adopt an A for effort standard. Objective grading honors the facts that students’ consciences are sensitive to and can observe quite clearly in front of their faces: some students produce more excellent and beautiful work than others. 

At the same time, this apprenticeship model avoids the judgmental approach of a traditional, objective grading system, because it creates a story arc of progression from the lower levels. Everyone starts out as a novice in any area of artistry. Very few students will attain mastery of any art or subskill in a given year in which it is introduced. When this expectation is introduced and normalized in a school culture, the rare situations of student mastery can be appropriately recognized and celebrated in a way that encourages all other students to continue to strive for excellence. 

That said, overemphasizing the judgment of grades can also be detrimental and ineffective. So even though it is important to retain the assessment of students’ mastery levels, perhaps the more effective assessments are cultural. When students are being trained to produce in a craft, their work should be displayed before their peers, their parents and the school community. This inspires the natural motivation to do their best and involves the natural judgment process of the community for what artistry looks like. Because of this, academic events, performances and competitions provide the natural clearinghouse for developing a culture of artistry. 

Many of these school events almost go without saying in the school calendar, but their value is often overlooked and neglected. Why do students work so hard for artistry in sports, when they might not for other school activities? Because their artistry is clearly on display and being judged through the natural cooperative-competitive environment of the game or tournament, with spectators watching for their success. In the same way, a classical Christian school can make much of liberal arts through academic events like a Spelling Bee, Speech Meet, or public debate, with rules strictly followed and mandatory participation, and with audiences and judges in attendance. In the same way, when classes perform recitations (i.e. memorized passages of scripture, poems or historical speeches) in front of the entire school and teachers are encouraged to impart a dramatic flair, the training of the rote memory turns into the artistry of rhetoric. 

Viewed in this light, school concerts and plays, competitions and games, art galleries, and displays of student work at events are not nice extras at a school. Instead, these school community activities become earnest teaching and learning moments that apprentice students in the arts and create a culture of craftsmanship in the academy. Academic events should be chosen with care and conducted with reverence for the mission and beating heart of the school. Although a school calendar can become overscheduled, we should remember that such performances, whether high or low stakes, are opportunities for cultivating the natural motivation of students to excel in artistry. Such opportunities are potentially transformative educational experiences and should be viewed as a crucial piece of the curriculum or course of study. 

Understanding the motivational value of proper grading in an apprenticeship model as well as the role of academic events, competitions and performances can go a long way toward creating a culture of artistry and excellence at a school. But we should not be unaware of the deeper spiritual ramifications of this process. 

Apprenticeship in Christian Perspective

First, we need to remember that the creation of beautiful and good things is innately human. God created mankind in his image as the stewards of creation and he commissioned human beings with the cultural mandate: the call to fill the earth and subdue it. This is rightly interpreted as an invitation to all the creative arts, or techne which use the stuff of earth as the raw material for the creating beautiful and good artifacts. (Read Aristotle’s Virtue Theory and a Christian Purpose of Education.) That is precisely what we see happening in Genesis 4. In spite of sin and its disastrous effects displayed in Cain and Abel, we see the progenitors of various common, liberal and fine arts:

Adah gave birth to Jabal; he was the father of those who live in tents and raise livestock. His brother’s name was Jubal; he was the father of all who play stringed instruments and pipes. Zillah also had a son, Tubal-Cain, who forged all kinds of tools out of bronze and iron. (Gen 4:22 ESV)

Thus the apprenticeship model was born. We might note that it was initially passed down in families; apprenticeship and the father-son, mother-daughter relationship went hand in hand. 

So apprenticeship in true, good and beautiful arts is human and therefore part and parcel of a redeemed Christian life. As human beings created in the image of God, our lives are most whole and fruitful when they fulfill the creation mandate through some type of artistry, through culture-making to borrow Andy Crouch’s term.

But secondly, we can note from the traditional and familial nature of apprenticeship, that it often carries with it, by nature, the lifestyle of the master craftsman. All the arts are embodied by their master craftsmen in a way of life, involving their beautiful creation and practice of the art, ideally alongside a full and good life. But let me be clear, this very fact means that apprenticeship in the arts as a means of bringing up children in the discipline and nurture of the Lord (see Eph 6:4) must be embodied as part and parcel of a whole Christian life. 

So if Christian parents apprentice their child to a pagan man who is a master of rhetoric, they should not be surprised if their child eventually takes on the moral and spiritual faults of this man, even if they also gain some of his rhetorical skill. That is how human beings work. In the same way if a young girl is apprenticed to an immoral dance or music teacher, who is immersed in a pluralistic world with its values, it is not impossible that over time the influence of that world will be transferred to her alongside the art. 

This is one of the forgotten premises by which our Christian classical schools attempt to operate. In the modern factory model of education we have forgotten what Jesus said: “A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher” (Luke 6:40 ESV). Disciple – apprentice – student. We have forgotten that these are roughly equivalent terms

Of course, when we follow Quintilian’s lead and partially apprentice children to many different arts (see On the Education of the Orator I.12), we minimize the potentially negative influence of any one teacher, but we do not really depart from this principle. In fact, we might say that at an ideal classical Christian school, a university or wholeness of the arts and sciences, this apprenticeship process under the leadership of a head master, a head magister or teacher, or else a principal or chief teacher (this is what these words original meant), the whole school of teachers pass on a communal way of life together. The culture of the school with all its teachers, curriculum, classes and traditions, apprentices the individual students.

This insight about apprenticeship as resonating with the nature of true Christian classical education is well-summed up in a statement of the school where I serve as Principal, Coram Deo Academy. We say that we apprentice students into the Great Conversation for the purpose of the Great Commission and the Great Commandment. 

To sum up, so far I have indicated by two statements the way in which apprenticeship in artistry, i.e. various arts, established traditions of craftsmanship, whether liberal, common or fine, contributes to the spiritual development of children. Those two ways are, first, through the fulfillment of our human calling in the creation mandate to act as sub-creators of good and beautiful things. This is what it means to fulfill our purpose as human beings, and therefore artistry is part of how we experience the redeemed Christian life. But second is through Christian apprenticeship into the life of good works established for us by Christ the true Master’s life, death and resurrection, the life of those apprenticed to him and characteristic of the family of God. And we should recall again the warning attached to this point, that non-Christian masters, teachers, artisans are by nature liabilities as well as potential sources of the blessing of artistry. 

Entwining the Spiritual and Artistic Goals of the Academy

Because of this, the classical Christian school rightly has a high bar of qualifications for its faculty based on spiritual maturity. The character of the teachers will inevitably have a long term influence on the character of the students. Structurally, then, the leadership of a school should not only develop careful recruiting and hiring processes that are intended to ensure the Christian maturity of its teachers, they should bake into the life of the school some measure of the spiritual practices of the church that aim at developing spiritual maturity. It is not that classical Christian academies should attempt to replace the worship and community of the local church, but by involving the faculty and staff in the rhythm of prayer, worship, and scripture reading, characteristic of the universal church, the discipleship—or, should I say, apprenticeship—of the Christian life become evident in the school culture. 

It is important, in this connection, to fuse our goals for training in artistry through assessment and artistic events, with discipleship in an appropriate and not an artificial way. The cross country coach can lead students in prayer before a race. The Spring Concert can feature the famous poems, spirituals and hymns of Christian worship, artfully performed. Academic events can include brief homiletical exhortation and instruction as part of the program, alongside the competition or performance itself. Assessments, awards and recognition of artistry can be publicly relativized to higher spiritual ends. Excellence in artistry can be deliberately and intentionally pursued soli Deo gloria, with glory to God alone, as J.S. Bach signed his masterful musical compositions. 

Further, the leadership of a school must be careful not to compromise core spiritual commitments for artistic ends, whether in hiring faculty or staff or in the nature of the content or practices. It can be so easy to tolerate that borderline coach or drama teacher, or to skate the line of acceptability in some way. Because, after all, the sports team or play is so important to the kids and their families…. Often this is a false dichotomy, but even when not, we should be willing to sacrifice high quality artistry for gospel purity whenever necessary, remembering Jesus’ words: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Mark 8:36 KJV) The value of intellectual virtues can never outweigh that of spiritual virtues. As Paul says, “For while bodily training is of some value, godliness [i.e. piety] is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come” (1 Tim 4:8 ESV). That said, artistry can be used in support of higher ends; prime examples are musical worship and preaching (derived from two of the traditional liberal arts, music and rhetoric). 

The classical Christian school is the ideal place for this beautiful fusion to occur and be actively trained. Such considerations should color an academy’s vision of their school’s or their students’ future greatness. Kolby Atchison has discussed the application of the Hedgehog Concept from Jim Collins Good to Great to classical Christian schools. Decisions about which arts to pursue and prioritize, when the list of possible arts seems endless, would benefit from careful thought about a school’s Hedgehog Concept: what the school can be the best in the world at will involve the culture, events and arts that are emphasized in the curricular and extracurricular programs. Innovations in a school will often occur here as leaders capitalize on local opportunities and the community’s unique giftings.

After all, we can become like the Renaissance Guilds in every area of artistic excellence possible. Greatness requires focused effort on particular arts. And true Christian artistry focuses us even more narrowly on what will serve Christ in our generational moment. As C.T. Studd wrote in his famous poem, “Only one life, ’twill soon be past, / Only what’s done for Christ will last.”

Earlier Articles in this series:

1. Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Purpose of Education

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

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

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

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

6. Aristotle’s Virtue Theory and a Christian Purpose of Education

7. Moral Virtue and the Intellectual Virtue of Artistry or Craftsmanship

8. Practicing in the Dark or the Day: Well-worn Paths or Bushwalking, Artistry and Moral Virtue Continued

9. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 1: Traditions and Divisions

10. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 2: A Pedagogy of Craft

11. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 3: Crafting Lessons in Artistry

12. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 4: Artistry, the Academy and the Working World

Final article in this series:

14. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 6: The Transcendence and Limitations of Artistry

The post Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 5: Structuring the Academy for Christian Artistry appeared first on .

“You’ve got to find what you love….[T]he only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, and don’t settle.” (as qtd in Newport, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, 3) 

There are few premises more ubiquitous in our career counseling world than this passion mindset; and, as Cal Newport demonstrates, there are few ideas more misleading and damaging. Stories of people who quit their day-job to pursue their dreams often end in financial ruin, as well as the dashing of those same dreams. Interviews of people like Jobs who have ‘found their passion’ actually reveal that “compelling careers often have complex origins that reject the simple idea that all you have to do is follow your passion” (13). This is because passion for a career often coexists with quite a bit of drudgery and comes as the result of a great deal of effort expended in developing rare and valuable skills or what we might call arts. In fact, it is the “craftsman mindset,” Newport explains, that is the surest route to work you love.

What is the craftsman mindset? It is to focus on a job as an apprenticeship in a tradition of artistry as a means to offer some valuable good or service to the world at a high degree of excellence or mastery. Perhaps you can see how his insight connects with the apprenticeship process that leads to Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of craftsmanship or artistry (in Greek techne). Newport contrasts the craftsman mindset with the passion mindset this way:

Whereas the craftsman mindset focuses on what you can offer the world, the passion mindset focuses instead on what the world can offer you…. When you focus only on what your work offers you, it makes you hyperaware of what you don’t like about it, leading to chronic unhappiness. This is especially true for entry-level positions, which, by definition are not going to be filled with challenging projects and autonomy—these come later…. The craftsman mindset offers clarity, while the passion mindset offers a swamp of ambiguous and unanswerable questions [like]…. “Who am I?” and “What do I truly love?” (38, 39)

Ironically the advice to pursue your passion in work ends up resulting in a hyper-critical and self-focused spirit that makes it almost impossible to enjoy your work. Instead, if a person allows their consciousness to get lost in the hard work of creating value through deliberate practice of their craft, they are more likely to experience flow and over time earn the career capital needed to negotiate the details of their work to their own liking. Newport draws on the research of Anders Ericsson on deliberate practice and applies it to the professional world of not-so-deliberate pathways to excellence. 

This excursus on career counseling paradigms has a purpose in our overall evaluation of apprenticeship in the arts. Newports’ compelling case for the craftsman mindset sets in stark relief the modern school’s marginalization of artistry and craftsmanship, for all our elite stadiums and flashing performing arts centers. One of the major effects of Bloom’s Taxonomy’s abstraction of intellectual skills is that it has severed the life of the academy from the artistry of the professional career world. In addition, the passion hypothesis is one of the plagues of the postmodern buffet of potential selves that students are being subtly and not so subtly indoctrinated into in our contemporary schools.

In this article we will explore how to restore this link through a recovery of artistry in our schools without embracing either utilitarian pragmatism on the one hand, or the ivory tower separation characteristic of many modern and postmodern schools, whether they call themselves classical, progressive or otherwise.

The Liberal Arts as Pathways of Professional Preparation

In endorsing Newport’s craftsman mindset, I am very aware that I will sound like a utilitarian pragmatist to many classical educators. What, after all, hath Career to do with the Academy? Isn’t the entire purpose of the classical education movement to throw off the tyranny of the urgent and the capitalistic reduction of education to career preparation? The Academy should focus on the timeless and perennial things, not STEM and training for the jobs of tomorrow. 

While I understand and acknowledge the importance of this type of polemic against K-12 education as mere college and career preparation (in fact, we have engaged in it on EdRen from time to time, even or especially at the opening of this series countering Bloom’s Taxonomy), this argument in its bare form ultimately resolves itself into a false dichotomy. It is not either the case that education is all career preparation or that it involves no career preparation at all. In actual fact, a proper education ought to prepare a student for many different careers: as John Milton said in his tractate,

“I call therefore a compleat and generous Education that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the offices both private and publick of Peace and War.” (see “Of Education” in the John Milton Reading Room managed by Dartmouth College)

Just performance might correspond to Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of prudence or practical wisdom (phronesis), while magnanimous might gesture toward the enlargement of mind or soul characteristic of a person who has attained some measure of philosophic wisdom (sophia) through the long cultivation of intuition (nous) and scientific knowledge (episteme). But skillful performance corresponds to apprenticeship in those arts which undergird all the professions. 

While training in artistry is, then, not the whole of a “compleat and generous Education,” it constitutes a fundamental core of training in productive intellectual virtue. This can be illustrated further through recovering the liberal arts themselves as pathways of professional preparation. In our zeal for the ivory towers of the Middle Ages and Classical Era, we too often forget the origins of the liberal arts themselves as professional arts. It may be true that the liberal arts are used to discover and justify knowledge (see e.g. Clark and Jain, The Liberal Arts Tradition 3.0, 39-43), yet they began their traditional life as practical skills for prominent professions. 

• Grammatical training prepared the scribes of the ancient world in using the technology of writing to assist in marketplaces or business transactions, the religious affairs of a temple complex or the administration of a royal bureaucracy. 

• Rhetoric came to prominence in classical Greece largely because of a democratic city-state polity which relied on public speakers and trial lawyers to decide the city’s political strategies and legal cases. 

• Dialectic might be Socrates’ own invention, but his art of discussion arose in a rich context of traveling public intellectuals and built on the tradition of wise men and sages who functioned as professional teachers and purveyors of wisdom, developing into the tool or art of the philosopher.

• Arithmetic is the characteristic art of the household manager, the merchant and the treasury official. The earliest written documents in many societies are more than likely numerical records and calculations of goods and services.

• Geometry is the architect’s and the general’s art, because both building and war require the exact mathematical calculations involved in creating sturdy and dependable use of resources, whether wood, metal or stone, or else in coordinating the movements of regiments of armed men, cavalry or assault weaponry. 

• Astronomy, likewise, concerned the military general, as well as the merchant or ship captain, since charting the stars enabled one to travel from place to place reliably.

• And finally, the art of music was practiced by musicians who provided entertainment and the cultural transference of stories and values through soothing sounds and melodies, along with the poetic words that often accompanied the playing of an instrument. 

Apprenticeship in these liberal arts, just like the common and domestic arts, or other professions and trades, functioned as pathways of preparation for a life of service to the community. Even if they could be contrasted with servile arts as more fitting to a free man in ancient cultures, they nevertheless performed important functions for society that were remunerated, in one way or another. Therefore, drawing too strong a dividing wall of hostility between the Academy and the working world strikes me as historically inaccurate. Students today may choose between a technical college (remember that techne is Aristotle’s term for artistry) and a liberal arts college, but that does not mean the liberal arts are unconnected to the professions. 

This argument may be complicated by the fact that few modern professions require a person to practice only one art anymore. The modern equivalent of a blacksmith (i.e. a member of a company that forges metallic tools) might engage in several arts in a given day: computer programming (a development of grammar and arithmetic?), project management (rhetoric and dialectic), engineering and design (arithmetic and geometry), and checking and responding to email (grammar and dialectic). Of course, there are the specific sub-skills of using particular computer programs, machine maintenance, etc., that might be unique to a specific profession or company. But the point stands that the liberal arts, like all other arts, are not absent from the working world of production but are deliberately preparatory to its tasks. 

Artistic Training in the Academy

All this follows naturally from what we have said in earlier articles on Apprenticeship in the Arts. Since arts are living traditions with an originator, they are constantly being updated and adjusted to new contexts and technologies. Navigation is not now what it once was. The arts are culturally and historically situated; they may carry with them the memory of their traditions, as painters now must reckon with the styles and movements of the past. But the traditional nature of the arts entails their vital connection to their contemporary expressions in many professions or by their elite performers. Apprenticeship in the arts is one of the ways that the Academy draws its lifeblood from the working world. 

As such, the Academy is most likely to excel at cultivating the virtue of techne in various arts when it draws some of its strength from the professions of the surrounding community. This is part of the brilliance of John Milton’s call for connecting what Chris Hall calls the common arts with the mathematical arts in his “Of Education”:

To set forward all these proceedings in Nature and Mathematicks, what hinders, but that they may procure, as oft as shal be needful, the helpful experiences of Hunters, Fowlers, Fishermen, Shepherds, Gardeners, Apothecaries; and in the other sciences, Architects, Engineers, Mariners, Anatomists; who doubtless would be ready some for reward, and some to favour such a hopeful Seminary. And this will give them such a real tincture of natural knowledge, as they shall never forget, but daily augment with delight. (see “Of Education” in the John Milton Reading Room)

The idea that it is unclassical to share with students the experiences of the working world with all its goods, services and products is a pernicious one. We should be wary of falling into the trap of trying to prove that our education is unpractical to distinguish it from modern pragmatism and utilitarianism. Ironically, we will have to subvert the nature of the liberal arts themselves, as well as other arts to truly accomplish such an ivory tower task. It is all well and good to argue for schole or leisure as the basis of culture (see Josef Pieper’s book Leisure: The Basis of Culture, or Chris Hall’s reference in Common Arts Education, 41), but it is not quite accurate to blame the modern white collar and blue collar divide for a utilitarian view of the liberal arts, as Hall does: “these liberal arts were harnessed less for their ancient purposes, and more for their utilitarian ends” (41).

Leisure may have more to do with the philosophical act of contemplation, or the cultivation of Aristotle’s intellectual virtues of intuition, scientific knowledge and philosophic wisdom, than it does with the liberal arts. After all, this would seem to do better justice to the context of Pieper’s work. The liberal arts, like all other arts, are productive and savor more of the workaday world, even if they can be pursued for their own sake or as ends in themselves, as I have argued at length in The Joy of Learning: Finding Flow through Classical Education.

I absolutely concede the danger on the other side of reducing education to mere career preparation. This, however, is easily avoided by making the other intellectual virtues of Aristotle major ends or objectives of education as well. Prudence is not developed by time spent drawing a painting, nor is philosophic wisdom attained through an internship at a local company. But time spent being well coached by practitioners of various arts, in athletics, games and sports, common and domestic arts, fine and performing arts, the professions and trades, and the ever-present liberal arts themselves, will prepare students for the working world. 

By showing them how these arts are currently practiced and drawing inspiration from these contemporary contexts, students will look out at their future selves as producers and will be inspired and ignited with the passion necessary for deliberate practice. This is why Comenius places as the first step for training in artistry that the instructor “take them into the workshop and bid them look at the work that has been produced, and then, when they wish to imitate this (for man is an imitative animal), they place tools in their hands and show them how they should be held and used” (The Great Didactic, 195-196). Human beings by nature desire to create; we are imitative culture makers!

Comenius’ vision of turning schools into “workshops humming with work” has this outcome as one of its goals: the invigoration of the learning environment through a proper overlap with the working world. Creative production has a power in it that can be harnessed for educational purposes. Then at the end of a productive apprenticeship session, “students whose efforts prove successful will experience the truth of the proverb: ‘We give form to ourselves and to our materials at the same time’” (195). Students are internalizing the craftsman mindset focused on honing their craft in productive service to the world.

This is not a carrots and sticks based motivational method, but the second level motivation of what Daniel Pink calls “mastery” in his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. He quotes Teresa Mabile, a professor of Harvard University, as saying, “The desire to do something because you find it deeply satisfying and personally challenging inspires the highest levels of creativity, whether it’s in the arts, sciences or business” (116). Pink goes on to associate this level of intrinsic motivation with Csikszentmihalyi’s work on flow, the enjoyable experience of appropriate challenge in a meaningful pursuit of mastery. Connecting students organically to the real-world mastery of the working world, not trying to motivate them to perform well through grades and the threat of a menial career, is the real way to engage them delightfully in their studies. It also cultivates the craftsman mindset now that will help them experience work they love later. 

It is worth pausing to consider what percentage of an ideal school day would involve training students in arts. When you add up art class, music and PE, the language arts, math, and the training aspects of science, Bible, and the humanities, not to mention the sports, extracurriculars and other artistic lessons that students have after school, along with the practice regimen of both homework and these side pursuits, we might see the majority of a student’s day as engaged in some part of the apprenticeship process. It is imperative that we get this aspect of the Academy right. It is not just the training of students’ metaphorical hands that is at stake. 

In the next article, I will discuss the spiritual implications of how to capture students’ hearts through the apprenticeship model by creating a culture of craftsmanship. Building on our understanding of the importance of apprenticeship in artistry to connect the life of the Academy organically with the working world, we will delve into the example of the Renaissance guilds. This will help us consider macro-implications for the organizational structure of our schools, including the role of curriculum, academic events, and programs for specific arts in the Academy’s broader apprenticeship process.

Earlier Articles in this series:

1. Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Purpose of Education

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

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

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

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

6. Aristotle’s Virtue Theory and a Christian Purpose of Education

7. Moral Virtue and the Intellectual Virtue of Artistry or Craftsmanship

8. Practicing in the Dark or the Day: Well-worn Paths or Bushwalking, Artistry and Moral Virtue Continued

9. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 1: Traditions and Divisions

10. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 2: A Pedagogy of Craft

11. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 3: Crafting Lessons in Artistry

Later articles in this series:

13. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 5: Structuring the Academy for Christian Artistry

14. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 6: The Transcendence and Limitations of Artistry

The post Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 4: Artistry, the Academy and the Working World appeared first on .

My claim is that in order to achieve lasting flow, one must achieve an appropriate level of intensity. The first aspect of this claim to elaborate is the concept of intensity. Intensity as I will be using it here occurs at the intersection of motivation and practice. It is only when students approach their work with intensity that they will achieve lasting flow.

The Winter Olympics recently concluded. The requirements for a sport to qualify for the winter games is that the sport occur on either ice or snow. That in and of itself sets the Winter Olympics apart from other sporting events. Consider the amount of practice athletes must accumulate in adverse conditions to become world-class competitors. After watching numerous interviews with athletes across many sports, a consistent picture emerged. These athletes were highly motivated, but also genuinely loved their sport. A twin pairing crystalized in my mind: motivation and love of the sport go hand in hand. Not everyone will be as highly motivated to put in long hours on the ice or snowy slopes, but perhaps there are other areas where any one of us might find the spark of motivation, and that spark most often consists in something that stirs our hearts.

Motivation

When we think about examples of motivation, we most often picture athletes. Whether it be the athletes of the Winter Olympics or some other sport, success stories are often the result of high levels of motivation. In her book Mindset, Carol Dweck highlights examples such as Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods to demonstrate how individuals “took charge of the processes that bring success – and that maintain it” (101). Athletes like this work hard every day to improve some aspect of their performance. Dweck quotes Tiger Woods as saying, “I love working on shots, carving them this way and that, and proving to myself that I can hit a certain shot on command” (102). This love of practice kept him returning day after day no matter the conditions outside.

Motivation comes in two flavors. Goeff Colvin, in Talent is Overrated, writes “The central question about motivation to achieve great performance is whether it’s intrinsic or extrinsic” (206). Extrinsic motivation is connected to external rewards such as stickers, candy or prizes, whereas intrinsic motivation is connected to the perceived value of the sport or academic subject. Notice the work “love” in the Tiger Woods quote above. Even though he has won a vast array of golf tournaments, he found intrinsic value in practicing the shots themselves. This occurs not only for athletes, but musicians, artists and mathematicians can be found who express this same kind of passion not simply for accolades or awards, but because there is a perceptual value in the subject.

An essential component of finding flow is connecting students to intrinsic motivation. In his 2018 research paper, Jeff Irvine was “struck by the dominance of intrinsic over extrinsic in many theories related to motivation” (12). He goes on to comment:

“This is even more striking considering the dominance of extrinsic rewards in current education systems. Motivational theories emphasize the intrinsic dimension where research has shown important gains can be made in positively impacting student motivation. A significant body of evidence suggests that motivation has a major role in student achievement.”

Jeff Irvine, “A Framework for Comparing Theories Related to Motivation in Education,” Research in Higher Education Journal 35 (2018): 12.

To put it another way, carrots and sticks do not provide lasting motivation, we cannot reward or punish a student toward achievement in language learning, mathematics or writing mechanics. A more fruitful pursuit would be found by highlighting the value inherent in a language, in numeracy or in written communication. Connecting students to intrinsic value has much more durative impact that rewards or punishments.

A more recent study of musicians found a link between grit, growth mindset and flow. Their findings are fascinating. Musicians who found intrinsic value in music were more motivated to engage in daily practice, which led to increased skill, which led to a deeper love of music, which reinforced daily practice, and the cycle goes on and on. The authors found that musicians experienced flow as a result of long-term engagement with music through daily practice. They write:

“In the full model, music performance anxiety and daily practice hours are the only significant predictors for dispositional flow in this sample of musicians, suggesting that the strongest predictors for musicians’ flow experience are how you feel while playing music and how often you engage in it” (6)

Jasmine Tan, Kelly Yap, and Joydeep Bhattacharya, “What Does it Take to Flow? Investigating Links Between Grit, Growth Mindset, and Flow in Musicians,” Music & Science 4 (2021): 6.

Musicians who connect to the positive feelings that music provides through regular, daily practice deepen their experience of the flow state.

But notice how anxiety can inhibit flow. Fear of performance can lock up a musician, creating a negative feedback loop. Anxiety lessens intrinsic interest in music, and leads to diminished practicing resulting in little to no experience of flow. In a study of rock climbers, this concept of anxiety was noted to reduce attention and focus (55). However, stress and anxiety are constituent aspects of life. So we cannot completely eliminate stress and anxiety. Instead, high performers learn how to cope with anxiety. The authors of the rock climbing study write, citing other literature:

“Stress is an unavoidable and potentially positive aspect of life (McGonigal, 2015). A person’s approach to stressful situations (climbing or otherwise) may predict his or her success at negotiating the challenge. The ability of a person to engage cognitive inhibitors and set-shift (Derakshan & Eysenck, 2009), invoking specific mental capacities during specific events, may enhance performance and resilience in many challenging life domains.”

Andrew Bailey, Allison Hughes, Kennedy Bullock, and Gabriel Hill, “A Climber’s Mentality: EEG analysis of climbers in action,” Journal of Outdoor Recreation, Education, and Leadership 11, no. 1 (2019): 64

Notice how stress can be embraced as a positive aspect of life. Top athletes learn to identify pre-match nervousness as the body’s preparation for action. As opposed to allowing stress and anxiety to shut them down, they accept the stress as an aspect of high performance. This mental work take practice and coaching to transform something potentially debilitating for inexperienced learners into something that can enhance performance.

One immediate take away from this examination of motivation is both the nature and locus of motivation. First, motivation is about the intrinsic value of the activity or subject at hand. Our chief goal as educators is not to throw a bunch of external motivators at the students, whether those be rewards or punishments. Instead, we ourselves need to identify the intrinsic value in the activity or subject with the aim of guiding our students toward that sense of value. Even so, we need to be open to students finding their own sense of value in a given activity or subject quite apart from our own. This leads to the second take away, the locus of motivation has to be the student. It is counterproductive for us as teachers to whip up a frenzy of motivation only for the students not to catch the bug themselves. Now there is definitely a role for us to play as motivators, but for long-term flow to be achieved, students need to take on board their own sense of motivation.

Practice

The first component of intensity is motivation. One’s level of intensity corresponds in some measure to the intrinsic value one places in an activity or subject. The second component of intensity comes down to practice. Here we’ll talk about two kinds of practice that promote intensity: deliberate practice and retrieval practice.

I remember my first violin teacher had a bumper sticker on her violin case that said “practice makes perfect.” Well, that’s not entirely the case. Perhaps better would be “practice makes better.” And it’s really not just practice, it’s practice of a certain kind. I could mechanically play through a piece and never really improve. What I learned over time as a music student is that focused practice on the problem spots is where real improvement occurs. You never really play through the whole piece in one sitting, you stop constantly to rework a section, get the finger right, repeat and come back to it.

The focused, intentional type of practice is what we call deliberate practice. Anders Ericsson put forward a framework in his 1993 article which posits that expert performance is achieved through effort directed towards improvement, even when the effort is not enjoyable (see K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf T. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Römer, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Psychological Review 100 (1993): 363-406). This is the article that gave us the 10,000-hour rule, later popularized in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers. Angela Duckworth, though, explains that the 10,000-hour rule is not about accumulating lots and lots of hours on task, instead we should think of it as a factor of the quality of time we spend practicing. And yet, individuals who commit to long hours of arduous effort seeking to improve a skill eventually experience the state of ecstatic immersion that Csikszentmihalyi terms flow. In her book Grit, Duckworth writes, “I’ve come to the following conclusion: Gritty people do more deliberate practice and experience more flow” (131). Duckworth’s point is that even though deliberate practice takes perseverance or grit, as she calls it, there is a payoff in the form of higher levels of performance and enjoyment.

Ericsson summarized the state of research on deliberate practice in a 2008 article:

“Based on a review of research on skill acquisition, we identified a set of conditions where practice had been uniformly associated with improved performance. Significant improvements in performance were realized when individuals were 1) given a task with a well-defined goal, 2) motivated to improve, 3) provided with feedback, and 4) provided with ample opportunities for repetition and gradual refinements of their performance. Deliberate efforts to improve one’s performance beyond its current level demands full concentration and often requires problem-solving and better methods of performing the tasks.”

K. Anders Ericsson, “Deliberate Practice and Acquisition of Expert Performance: A General Overview,” Academic Emergency Medicine 15 (2008): 991

Not the role motivation plays in Ericsson’s model. In addition, clearly defining goals and providing feedback are essential to deliberate practice. We will explore the fourth point in detail in a moment. But for now it is worthwhile to emphasize the word “deliberate” here. To do something deliberately is to do so with purpose or intent. Moving students away from rote or empty practice to practice that engages their understanding of the “why” of the exercise is essential to growth.

In an earlier article on deliberate practice, I used the analogy of weightlifting. In order to achieve hypertrophy, or muscle growth, weightlifters talk about making a mind-muscle connection. This has become an area of growing research (see J. Calatayud, J. Vinstrup, M. D. Jakobsen, et al. “Importance of Mind-muscle Connection during Progressive Resistance Training,” Eur J Appl Physiol 116 (2016): 527-533 and the extensive bibliography therein). For our purposes, the mind-muscle connection pertains to productive, effortful learning. Enabling our students to connect their intentional mind with their learning mind, in a manner of speaking, is a meta-cognitive goal we should strive for in our classrooms.

The second type of practice essential to achieving the kind of intensity that enables flow is retrieval practice. The book Make It Stick breaks retrieval practice into three components. First, there is spaced practice, or the spreading out of practice over time. “The increased effort required to retrieve the learning after a little forgetting has the effect of retriggering consolidation, further strengthening memory” (49). It is better to allow a “little forgetting” to set in rather than massing practice in one session. It gives the feeling that learning has occurred, but the knowledge was simply placed into short-term memory.

Second, there is interleaved practice, or the randomization of skillsets such that the learner moves from skill to skill or subject to subject. This breaks up learning sessions. This process feels slow and can be confusing to students at first. However, it promotes long-term retention (50). So instead of grouping all addition problems followed by all subtraction problems, you would randomize the set so that you do a few addition then a few subtraction, and go back and forth.

Closely related to this is varied practice or mixing together different skillsets or subjects. Varied practice or variable training is more challenging than massed practice because it utilizes more centers in the brain, which leads to more cognitive flexibility (51-52). Consider a humanities class that reads short sections of literature alongside a philosophy book, with a smattering of poetry and scripture thrown in. Mixing subjects in this way highlights the uniqueness of the concept, forcing the learner to make associations drawing upon different parts of the brain.

Practical Steps

Getting students to a state of flow requires an accumulation of skill as well as a sufficient level of challenge. So it will not be every day that a flow state is achieved. However there are some practical steps you can take that will set your class on the path toward flow. Here are a few items to consider.

First, inspire your students early and often. Intrinsic motivation is such a key component that we should be demonstrating regularly the magnificence and wonder of the subjects we teach. You can do this by drawing upon your own sense of the intrinsic value of the concepts and ideas you are teaching. You can also have your students share what they find valuable or interesting or surprising.

Second, on the analogy of the weightlifters who prime their workouts by making a mind-muscle connection, we need to help our students prime their minds for the intensity of deliberate and retrieval practice. Because this kind of practice takes energy and intentionality, students cannot simply be given sets of exercises without proper priming. Here are a couple of suggestions to prime students for high performance. Use students’ imagination to visualize high performance. For instance, before beginning practice problems in mathematics, you could ask students, “How would a mathematician think about this problem?” This kind of imaginative priming has them take on the character of a high performer in math.

Another strategy to prime students for mental intensity is through nostalgic recollection, or remembering previous high performance. Whereas the previous strategy visualizes future high performance, this exercise primes students for mental intensity by recalling some previous experience they had of high performance. Taking mathematics as the example again, a student can draw upon any memory of high performance – in a sport, musical instrument or other academic subject – to get into the mindset of active engagement with their work.

Third, we need to place before our students what has been called “worthy work.” If in retrieval practice we are turning away from massed practice, in worthy work, we are turning away from empty repetition. Charlotte Mason describes the depths and heights of what we are striving toward:

“What we desire is the still progress of growth that comes of root striking downwards and fruit urging upwards. And this progress in character and conduct is not attained through conditions of environment or influence but only through the growth of ideas, received with conscious intellectual effort.”

Charlotte Mason, Towards a Philosophy of Education, 297.

If we are placing in front of our students materials that have proper depth to them or reveal the heights of the heavens, the “conscious intellectual effort” becomes the fitting disposition of the student. If the work is worthy, there is so much more scope to find intrinsic motivation.

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