“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where–” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“–so long as I get SOMEWHERE,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

The case of Alice may be considered a good cipher for that of many modern educators. We have a vague awareness in all our modern ‘subjects’ and ‘classes’ that our students are supposed to be getting somewhere. But we are not always sure of where. At the end of the day, many teachers rejoice in success if they have simply made ‘progress’ in any particular direction. Work has been done, material has been covered, grades have been entered, and not too many disciplinary situations had to be resolved. 

In such an experience of teaching, Bloom’s taxonomy can act as a real savior, delivering the average teacher from the listless state of meandering about the work of school. The definite aims of the cognitive domain in all the precision of their taxonomy have the power to cut through the ambiguity and aimlessness of much modern teaching. 

In this article we build on our proposal to replace Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives with Aristotle’s Five Intellectual Virtues by starting with an analysis of the positive of Bloom’s. In proposing a taxonomy of educational objectives, Bloom and his fellow university examiners made a real advance for modern education, even if they participated in the modern era’s reductionistic philosophy. In the midst of an educational climate that now hosts an active postmodern retreat from overarching values and metanarratives, the clarity of Bloom’s taxonomy of learning goals is like a breath of fresh air to many educators. Instead of wandering aimlessly like Alice in Wonderland, here at last is a clear and precise path forward. 

As I mentioned in the first article in this series, it is important to recognize the positive in Bloom’s taxonomy, even if we are ultimately going to propose a revision of it, because we are most likely to get back on track if we understand clearly where we went wrong. Wisdom involves sifting the value of another’s viewpoint and integrating its virtues into a broader theory. If we simply dismissed Bloom’s taxonomy as mere modernism, we would be acting only as reactionaries, like a pendulum swinging from one extreme to another. Instead we must take what is best from it and integrate it fully with the ancient and classical insights it neglected.

With that goal in mind, let’s now discuss three blessings of Bloom’s. 

1. Objectives Avoid Subjective and Ideological “Learning” Activities
2. Objectives Drive Observable Growth
3. Objectives Foster Flow

The Blessings of Bloom’s 1: Objectives Avoid Subjective and Ideological “Learning” Activities

The value of educational objectives is well-illustrated by the anecdote of Doug Lemov, a trainer at Uncommon Schools and author of Teach Like a Champion 2.0: 62 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College. In describing a teaching technique he calls “Begin with the End,” he explains his process of lesson planning as a novice teacher:

When I started teaching, I would ask myself while I planned, ‘What am I going to do tomorrow?” The question itself revealed the flaws in my planning method in at least two critical ways—even without accounting for my sometimes dubious answers.

The first flaw was that I was thinking about an activity for my classes on the following day, not an objective—what I wanted my students to know or be able to do by the end of the lesson. It’s far better to start the other way around and Begin with the End—the objective. By framing an objective first, you substitute “What will my students be able to do by the end of my lesson?” for “In which activities will my students participate today?” The first of these questions is measurable in a meaningful way. The second is not. The success of an activity is not determined by whether or not you do it and students seem to want to do it, but by whether you achieved an objective that can be assessed.

Doug Lemov, Teach Like a Champion 2.0: 62 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College (Jossey-Bass, 2015), 132-133

Lemov’s original experience is reminiscent of Alice’s listless meandering and is a cogent critique of many teachers today. It is still common for some teachers to plan activities with no awareness of their purpose other than to fill up the time that students are there. Or worse is when teachers plan activities, like watching a part of a movie or a YouTube video, simply to check the box of incorporating technology into the classroom or some other ideological agenda. 

This sort of error is the result of what Lemov had earlier called ideologically driven guidance, where teachers are judged as effective based on whether they have checked off

a growing list of ‘musts’: teachers must teach English, math, science, history, the arts, banking and financial literacy, environmental stewardship, entrepreneurship, and personal hygiene, in a technology-rich environment that builds self-esteem, seats students in pods, provides multiple solutions to every problem, avoids ‘teacher talk,’ and never exposes a student to a page of text that has more than five vocabulary words he or she doesn’t know. Please don’t forget the anti-drug unit. 

Teach Like a Champion 2.0, 6-7

Kolby has written about this problem of ideologically driven guidance in a series on how to synthesize Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion 2.0 with the classical tradition. The solution to this plethora of bureaucratic hoops is to empower teachers as field experts and master craftsmen, who hold themselves accountable to what works in meeting real objectives for student learning.

In The Problem of Technicism in Conventional Education, I revealed the flaws in the modern focus solely on technique, to the detriment of more holistic goals, like wisdom and virtue, but it’s worth noting that the laundry list of postmodern ideological goals can leave the average teacher afloat on a sea of subjective preferences. Jumping through all the hoops makes each teaching moment as arbitrary as the last. 

By comparison with this, Bloom’s modernist focus on objectives for student growth has a healthy realism and objectivity to it. At the end of your course, unit or lesson, the student should be objectively developed in some way. They should know something real and measurable, and not just had a fluffy experience of some kind. And if some definite knowledge is to be transferred, then the teacher must know what that is. As John Milton Gregory, an earlier modernist-classical thinker, stated memorably,

“What a man does not know he cannot teach, or, if he teaches, cannot know that he teaches.”

John Milton Gregory, The Seven Laws of Teaching (Canon Press, 2014), 27

If the teacher begins with a definite goal in mind, then at least she can know whether or not she reached it and adjust accordingly. 

Which brings us to our second blessing of Bloom’s…

The Blessings of Bloom’s 2: Objectives Drive Observable Growth

We have all likely heard of the acronym SMART goals, but we may not know the story of their development. In his book Smarter Faster Better Charles Duhigg describes how Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, two university psychologists, researched the most effective way to set goals. One of their experiments involved coaching typists at a large corporation who were already the fastest at their company. Locke and Latham provided them with a system for measuring how quickly they typed — at the beginning of the study, they averaged 95 lines per hour — then they helped them set a specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound goal (SMART), like averaging 98 lines per hour over the next week:

The conversation didn’t take long—say fifteen minutes per person—but afterward each typist knew exactly what to do and how to measure success. Each of them, put differently, had a SMART goal….

But one week later, when the researchers measured typing speeds again, they found that the workers, on average, were completing 103 lines per hour. Another week later: 112 lines. Most of the typists had blown past the goals they had set. The researchers worried the workers were just trying to impress them, so they came back again, three months later, and quietly measured everyone’s performance once more. They were typing just as fast, and some had gotten even faster.

Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity (Random House, 2016), 117-118

The thing about goals is that they work! Objectives are powerful to the human psyche because they connect in to our dopaminergic system that rewards us for progress or movement in the right direction. As Brian Johnson, a self-proclaimed philosopher and personal-development coach, has paraphrased Aristotle, “We are teleological beings.” We naturally like to aim at targets.

As Duhigg explains,

“Some 400 laboratory and field studies [show] that specific, high goals lead to a higher level of task performance than do easy goals or vague, abstract goals such as the exhortation to ‘do one’s best,’” Locke and Latham wrote in 2006 in a review of goal-setting studies. In particular, objectives like SMART goals often unlock a potential that people don’t even realize they possess. The reason, in part, is because goal-setting processes like the SMART system force people to translate vague aspirations into concrete plans. The process of making a goal specific and proving it is achievable involves figuring out the steps it requires—or shifting that goal slightly, if your initial aims turn out to be unrealistic. Coming up with a timeline and a way to measure success forces a discipline onto the process that good intentions can’t match.

Smarter Faster Better, 118

Alice and teachers like her may have good intentions, but the discipline of crafting and committing to goals makes for better teaching. This is because it requires clearer and more disciplined thinking and planning about the best or most effective course of action. 

Another reason is that clear goals and a process that involves meaningful feedback are two of the characteristics that contribute to deliberate practice (or at least purposeful practice), which is the gold standard of skill-development. The leading expert on elite performance, Anders Ericsson, describes the feedback loop of positive motivation involved in setting such clear goals that add up to larger objectives in his book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise:

Deliberate practice involves well-defined, specific goals and often involves improving some aspects of the target performance; it is not aimed at some vague overall improvement. Once an overall goal has been set, a teacher or coach will develop a plan for making a series of small changes that will add up to the desired larger change. Improving some aspect of the target performance allows a performer to see that his or her performances have been improved by the training.

Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise (Mariner Books 2017), 99

If teachers are holding themselves accountable to lesson goals and course objectives, then their teaching can become a craft that they practice in such a way as to attain greater and greater mastery. (By the way, this is exactly what Aristotle meant by the intellectual virtue of art or techne: a craft that someone can master to produce a noticeable difference in the world.)

After all, we know from studies that simply gaining more experience in a craft does not make a professional better, whether the person is a teacher, a doctor, a psychiatrist or a financial advisor. As Ericsson and Pool share,

Research has shown that the “experts” in many fields don’t perform reliably better than other, less highly regarded members of the profession—or sometimes even than people who have had no training at all. In his influential book House of Cards: Psychology and Psychotherapy Built on Myth, the psychologist Robyn Dawes described research showing that licensed psychiatrists and psychologists were no more effective at performing therapy than laypeople who had received minimal training. Similarly, many studies have found that the performance of financial “experts” in picking stocks is little or no better than the performance of novices or random chance. And, as we noted earlier, doctors in general practice with several decades of experience sometimes perform worse, when judged by objective measures, than doctors with just a few years of experience—mainly because the younger doctors attended medical school more recently, so their training is more up-to-date and they are more likely to remember it. Contrary to expectations, experience doesn’t lead to improved performance among many types of doctors and nurses.

Ericsson and Pool, Peak, 105

Apparently, experience is not the best teacher, deliberate practice is. And specific measurable objectives increase the likelihood that a teacher is using the time in the classroom to practice her craft. 

The Blessings of Bloom’s 3: Objectives Foster Flow

For some classical educators, it is possible that the idea of educational objectives and goal setting has the tang of artificiality on it. They may feel that they left the educational establishment, in part to leave such things behind and simply enjoy the craft of teaching, focusing on the deeper and higher things. These past two sections may have been worrying to such educators, seeming to endorse the modern factory model of education. After all, isn’t true classical education more about the intangibles, the unspecific and not easily measurable? Isn’t it about transcendentals like truth, goodness, and beauty, and not the cramming of facts and the constant measurements of tests? 

To these educators I would appeal with the age-old saying, “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” There is some dirty bathwater associated with goal setting and lesson targets. But arguably this is because of the ideologies and bureaucracy of modern educational institutions and not because of the principle itself. So we must ask whether in principle it really is anti-classical to have definite educational objectives to measure and push ourselves against. 

After all, it is not only to jump through bureaucratic hoops that we set goals. The ancient traditions of human beings all across the world involves setting skill-development goals with clear feedback. Humans do this for the joy of the game! It is intrinsically meaningful to grow and develop against a real standard. Having clear objectives and immediate feedback actually fosters flow, that timeless experience of getting lost in a challenging and meaningful activity. As the positive psychologist (and advocate of lifelong classical education) Mihaly Csikzentmahalyi explains in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience,

The reason it is possible to achieve such complete involvement in a flow experience is that goals are usually clear, and feedback immediate. A tennis player always knows what she has to do: return the ball into the opponent’s court. And each time she hits the ball she knows whether she has done well or not. The chess player’s goals are equally obvious: to mate the opponent’s king before his own is mated. With each move, he can calculate whether he has come closer to this objective. The climber inching up a vertical wall of rock has a very simple goal in mind: to complete the climb without falling. Every second, hour after hour, he receives information that he is meeting that basic goal.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Perennial Modern Classics ed., 2008), 54

Do you want to enjoy the experience of teaching? Then arguably adopting clear objectives for student learning and playing the game of always seeking improvement is the most direct route. Teaching is a craft, and excellence in a craft involves producing something definite in the world. There must be a product. If so, setting measurable and attainable goals for student growth and striving to meet those goals will be rewarding. 

We must of course still recognize that some of the best and highest aims of education are not easily measurable or attainable in a short time, and that does not mean we should abandon them as objectives. But that does not mean we can abandon SMART goals and lesson targets entirely. We must find a way to embrace both SMART goals and transcendent purposes at one and the same time. Yet that is a topic we must leave for next time…. 

Interested in more on fostering flow in your classroom? Download the free eBook here or visit the flow page to learn more and watch a video by the author, describing the flow state and its relevance to your teaching practices in the classroom.

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One of my favorite podcasters, Brian Johnson who put out a great series of YouTube videos called Philosophers Notes, had this tagline on his podcasts: “Isn’t it a bit odd that we went from math to science to history, but somehow missed the class on how to live?” This idea always resonated with me, not because we need an extra class on living, but because the idea of how to live should be resonating throughout all of our classes. Educators have often missed the fact that math, science and history are to be learned in order to know how to live. If math, science and history don’t seem like subjects where you would learn how to live, then you’re probably like me, having been raised in a system of education more focused on functional outcomes (getting into the best colleges or getting into the best careers) than on living meaningful and purposeful lives. 

You might be skeptical, and rightfully so. The dominant mode of education, the one we see in mass media, is all about the systematic approach — a conveyor belt of educational product. But consider my geometry class. The major goal of the class is to see our world differently, especially those parts of our world that appear most obvious. Why ought we to do proofs? Why transform polygons? Why inscribe triangles within circles? To help us to grapple with the world around us in fascinating new ways. We live in a three-dimensional world that is often depicted in two dimensions. Let’s get to the bottom of that. And in so doing gain insight into what it means to live in this space. Now you kinda want to take geometry again, don’t you?

In this article I want to go beyond just academic subjects and consider the entire enterprise of education as it pertains to life. There are many dimensions to this, so I don’t expect I will fully extract every morsel in this essay, but hopefully it will provide you with some suggestive avenues to stimulate your own thinking about life. Additionally, I would like to relate these thoughts to our current response to the COVID-19 epidemic.

(One more thing, before diving in. A justification of a seemingly inadequate title. You might think that I’m missing an indefinite article, since you know my heartfelt devotion to Charlotte Mason. Yes, she states, “Education is a life,” and by that she means that the child’s mind is fed on living ideas. I’m extrapolating that idea to demonstrate that there is another level of understanding Mason’s claim. Furthermore, you will notice the preposition “on” instead of “of.” Many teachers are asked to express their philosophy of education, in which they will describe their teaching techniques and practices, sometimes elaborating on their view of the child as a whole person. What I am doing here is not really a philosophy of education in that sense. I am instead thinking about education as a whole and its place in life. Maybe the preposition “on” will rattle a few feathers. Thus ends the deconstruction of an inadequate title.)

Two Forces: Achievement or Inspiration

To begin with, I think it is important to make a distinction between two competing forces in education. These aren’t mutually exclusive, but they do exist in tension with one another. The first force is what we might call achievement. Students, parents and teachers want what’s best for their child, and this often gets translated into measurable categories. The grade in a class is a measure of the student’s achievement. The class rank, SAT score, National Merit selection index number and a plethora of other measurements let everyone know how this particular student stacks up against all others. It’s actually really valuable to incorporate measurement in education, but it’s really difficult to measure what really matters.

I’ve written elsewhere that most of our educational measurements select only a few areas of learning and growth, solely because they are easy to measure. Unfortunately, much of what we measure has little value in predicting future success. Our tools simply cannot measure determination, the ability to hold pleasant conversation, kindness toward others, piety, resilience, or delayed gratification. So we need this first force — achievement — but it is a force fraught with fallacies.

The second force I will call inspiration. My hunch is that most teachers go into education because they want to inspire students to love subjects they themselves love. Most teachers look back at their own education and can point to a few teachers that inspired them. They want to make a difference in the lives of their own students. Unfortunately, there are far too few teachers who retain this high level of inspiration for the entirety of their career. Teaching is a demanding job, calling for long hours preparing lessons, learning technology, sitting in staff meetings, and grading homework. Teachers who truly want to inspire students find the nature of their work rather intense, because it means you need to bring massive energy to every lesson, you have to work with struggling students, you need to motivate fringe students, you need to coach and counsel both students and parents, and sometimes you need to flex your schedule to reach those students who need extra help. The first force – achievement – can also steal from the second force. The most inspirational teacher can get caught up in tracking the measurements, not only as a way of looking at her students’ success but also to measure her own success. Don’t get me wrong, we shouldn’t be graduating a group of fantastically inspired students who are complete and utter failures. We need achievement. But we also need inspiration. Both forces are necessary. If I’m honest with myself, though, I greatly lean toward the force of inspiration, sometimes wishing the other force could go away. 

These thoughts on two forces have lived with me for quite some time. So when I came across this quote by Charlotte Mason, I felt it was time to really wrestle with it philosophically for a while.

“It seems to me that education, which appeals to the desire for wealth (marks, prizes, scholarships, or the like), or to the desire of excelling (as in the taking of places, etc.), or to any other of the natural desires, except that for knowledge, destroys the balance of character; and, what is even more fatal, destroys by inanition that desire for and delight in knowledge which is meant for our joy and enrichment through the whole of life.”

Charlotte Mason, School Education, pg. 226

The strength of Mason’s feelings is matched by the power of her vocabulary. The character of learners is “destroyed” when education becomes focused on the desire for wealth or success. The only sure educational desire is for knowledge. She calls it fatal to base education on anything else. The word “inanition” means that a thing is emptied of all of its nourishing content. Take your bleached grains, your generic white bread, with its crusts cut off, and try living off just that. That’s the picture Mason paints for education when the focus is shifted away from the life-giving enrichment of knowledge. I would guess that Mason sides more with the force of inspiration than the force of achievement, too.

Mason, however, was very much aware of the force of achievement, and most definitely saw that a good education entailed success at such things as examinations (Vol. 3, pg. 301). So we can’t minimize the role achievement plays in education. There remain standards that must be met in order to be considered a well-educated person. But Mason also recognizes that our standards ought to be measured against what truly matters in life.

“But the one achievement possible and necessary for every man is character; and character is as finely wrought metal beaten into shape and beauty by the repeated and accustomed action of will. We who teach should make it clear to ourselves that our aim in education is less conduct than character; conduct may be arrived at, as we have seen, by indirect routes, but it is of value to the world only as it has its source in character.”

Charlotte Mason, Towards a Philosophy of Education, p. 129

Achievement, then, is not only necessary, it is of fundamental importance. It is actually the goal toward which inspiration aims. The two forces that tug at each other actually cohere elegantly when put together properly. If our aim is on top marks, a 4.0 GPA, college entrance, merit-based scholarships, and the like, our aim isn’t truly aligned. What Mason is articulating is that true achievement is a life so well lived that the world is made a better place. This life of great value is achieved through character. Here is achievement that is truly inspirational.

The Classroom is a Microcosm of Life 

The vision of a life well lived is our ultimate goal of achievement. But that vision seems so far off that it feels impractical on a daily basis. Time presses upon us each day holding in our faces the immediacy of the lesson at hand, the upcoming assessment, or the report card soon to be released. Achievement snaps into focus, pushing inspiration out of the picture.

We need to start viewing the classroom differently. The classroom is the place where life occurs. The temptation is to think about life as truly occurring outside the classroom. Students feel this way, since home is where they most often eat, rest and play. Their youth group, sports team or the Starbucks where they hang out with their friends feels more like the locus where life occurs than the classroom does. School is where they have to go to do the work that’s required of them. How often do we get sucked into that way of thinking as well? But life occurs in the classroom all the same, even if students don’t place the greatest importance on that aspect of their life. To be clear, I don’t think one can say one sphere of life is more or less important than others. Our existence as living beings transcends time and space, and we are unified beings no matter what space we inhabit. To view ourselves as more alive in one place than in others begins to disintegrate the coherence of our being. In light of this, we must strive to breathe genuine life into the atmosphere of our classrooms, lest we cause real harm to ourselves and others.

So what does it mean when I say life occurs in our classrooms? For one, it means that our students are whole persons. We are not just interacting with our students’ minds. Students are also emotional, social and spiritual creatures, just like we are. All dimensions of their personhood come into the classroom. All dimensions of their personhood are being trained and cultivated. This means that teaching that doesn’t connect to their multi-dimensionality will actually not get assimilated because it isn’t fundamentally important to their existence as living beings.

But wait, you might say, aren’t there things you just have to learn, even if there isn’t an emotional, social or spiritual connection? Let’s consider a recent geometry lesson. We are just starting to learn trigonometric functions. This is hard stuff when it’s brand new. I could see the look of frustration on their faces. Lurking in the background is a feeling that if this doesn’t relate to real life in some way, what’s the use of putting in the effort to figure out when, how and why to use inverse sine? In this very moment, though, real life is happening before our very eyes.

What I did was take a step back from the lesson about the law of sines, to help them grapple with their encounter with things that are difficult to learn. “You are feeling the fog right now, aren’t you?” I helped them to see that some things we learn aren’t fully clear at the outset. This might have been true when they first learned long division in early grammar school. This might have been true when they learned factoring in algebra 1. I was connecting them to their emotional state. “Hey, we’re all experiencing this together.” It is very common for us to feel that we are the only one who doesn’t get it. But when there’s a recognition that we are doing something together, a deep bond is formed. The “ah-ha” moments become a group celebration. Learning is a social and relational thing. I was connecting them to their social state. “This seems pretty out there, doesn’t it?” The deeper you go in mathematics, the more abstract and esoteric things become. In this moment, I was showing them that they were exploring something almost mystical. I could relate this to something as practical as navigating an airplane. But the practical application will actually compound their frustration in the moment. Instead, I helped them to see how their imaginations were gaining new tools. I was connecting them to their spiritual state. Real life was occurring in a specific learning environment. The temptation was to think in terms of achievement. “We’re not getting it. Our grades will suffer. I won’t go to the best school. I won’t get a good job. I’ll likely be homeless for the rest of my life!” Instead, we thought in terms of life and saw geometry as a field of endeavor in which we can gain an understanding of meaning and purpose. (I might add that these students have done well using trigonometric functions. As an experienced teacher I knew the fog would dissipate through more practice.)

What does this mean for you as a teacher? We must become observers of life. We only get a relatively small amount of time with the students God gives into our care. By being watchful for real life occurring in our midst, we position ourselves to seize every moment we can. The little arguments that erupt between students, the games that are played on the blacktop, the struggles to learn new concepts, the disorganized backpack. All things are avenues into genuine life connections.

Application of Education is Life to COVID-19

If we agree that education is about life, then this COVID-19 epidemic presents a huge teaching and learning opportunity. We are confronted with the frailty of our humanity. A few weeks ago I compared our present epidemic with the black plague in the mid-1300s. A confrontation with death and our own mortality is not a topic we should shy away from. We ourselves as teachers might be wrestling with new emotions and concerns about safety. We must also assume our students are wrestling with the reality and implications of COVID-19. Their world just got turned upside down.

Because one of the forces of education is inspiration, I think now is the time to inspire our students with a deep and profound vision of what life really means. There are some students who miss their interactions with friends through daily contact. Students presently feel a deep sense of loneliness and isolation. Many students miss the life-structuring order of our daily schedules. We can share with them how all of these feelings point to their yearning for meaning and purpose in their lives. Our texts and discussions can take on new importance if we are forthright in our response to the impact of COVID-19 on them and us right now. You may have a chance to model for them how your faith is upholding you in this moment, or what practices you’ve incorporated during this time of social distancing.

As an example, I teach a health class for sophomores and juniors. We spent time this week talking about meditation and mindfulness as a Christian practice. When I planned this unit, coronavirus was not in my thinking. Now that we’ve gotten to this unit, I opened up about how just a few minutes of quiet meditation in the morning helps me to calmly approach my day. I contrasted this to mornings when I opened up a news feed and saw how many new cases and deaths there were. They were able to see how I was responding to COVID-19, and then I asked them to share their own responses to the epidemic. We explored how stress can impact our health and well-being.

Clearly there are boundaries that we need. I am always careful not to make a class about me, my feelings or my viewpoint on current matters. I am also careful not to traumatize my students by forcing them to talk about raw feelings or controversial matters. Yet we should be open to teachable moments when we can provide insight through our transparency. We should equally be open to discussing matters that are hyper-present in their minds. How odd it would be for a teacher not to mention COVID-19 or social distancing.

Application of Education is Life to Online Learning

Speaking of social distancing, online learning has meant that we are all accumulating new technological skills. You are using student management software in new ways, or you are becoming masters of Zoom or Skype, or you are learning how to use Google Classrooms or MS Teams. Your students are also accumulating new technological skills. If you’re like me, they are learning these skills quicker than you. You might be asking them questions about how to upload assignments or share your screen. With this in mind, don’t be afraid of being a learner. Show them that you are learning how to do some new things. Ask them questions. There’s something empowering when a student is able to teach a teacher. If we are promoting life-long learning, then there are moments when we need to let our guard down so that our students can see that we ourselves are life-long learners.

My other piece of advice as we dive deeply into technological solutions to educating amidst social distancing is to make sure the techniques and technology of education don’t drown out our experience of life. I have told my students how much I miss them at the end of our Zoom sessions. There’s something about being able to see them eye-to-eye in the hallways. I can casually ask them how they’re doing, and they can see the care in my eyes. The technology enables us to connect, but our pixelated, two-dimensional connection is no replacement for embodied presence with one another.

Teach Like Life Depends on It

Someday — hopefully sooner rather than later — we will return to classrooms. We will return having learned some lessons about the nature of education. My hope is that one of the enduring lessons is that education is about life. My hunch is that the reason you come to our humble website is that you get this concept, and that you are striving to provide an education that nourishes the lives of your students. Let me encourage you that I think it will be teachers and schools that feed their students’ souls who have the best hope of surviving this epidemic and even thriving during and after this epidemic. Why do I think this? It is because when people confront forces like our frailty and mortality, we begin to ask questions of meaning and purpose. Parents and students will be looking for this kind of education, one that engages the mind and the soul. Now more than ever is the time to teach like our lives depend on it.

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