As a result, for many young people today, it remains an open question whether character actually counts, and if so, to what degree. Today’s sports stars don’t exactly illustrate this truth during their excessive victory celebrations. Nor do the upper echelon of celebrities and business moguls as they seek to outdo each other in the clothes they wear and cars they drive.

In The Road to Character, New York Times columnist David Brooks observes that part of the problem is that our culture has come to value “resume virtues” over “eulogy virtues.” Resume virtues are the skills you list on your resume, the ones that contribute to external success, especially your career profile. Eulogy virtues, on the other hand, are the deeper qualities of character that are remembered at funerals–humility, kindness, faithfulness, and the like. We live in a culture, and by extension, within an educational system, that nurtures career-oriented, ambitious, self-promoters and all but ignores meek, others-oriented, self-sacrificing servants. 

As I wrap up my blog series on “Teach Like a Champion for the Classical Classroom,” I want to suggest that character and achievement, or resume and eulogy virtues, needn’t be at odds. Character and excellence can actually go hand in hand. After exploring David Brooks’ ideas about character formation, then examining Paul’s discourse on love, I will look specifically at the fourth and final part of Teach Like a Champion 2.0, which deals with classroom culture. In these chapters, author Doug Lemov lays out several principles for cultivating a positive classroom culture that sustains and drives excellence. What I hope to show is that the sort of high-achieving classroom culture Lemov envisions is best realized when a heart for service and humility is the true driving force. 

Of Mountains and Timber

First, back to Brooks. You may be familiar with the conservative writer and his spiritual journey over the years. In his own words, Brooks has gone through quite the personal transformation. Early on in his career, Brooks fit the prototype of the young and ambitious careerist, focused on making a name for himself. Although raised Jewish, he wasn’t particularly religious or interested in cultivating a strong “inner self,” either spiritually or morally.

But then something changed. The threads of his life began to unravel. The early success he encountered began to lose its shine. He went through a divorce. He experienced loneliness to a degree he had up to this point not encountered. He began to ask himself deeper questions…about faith, morality, and purpose. These reflections led him to reconsider the organizing principle of his life and what makes for real and lasting joy.

These experiences ultimately led to a paradigm shift for Brooks. In his most recent book, The Second Mountain, Brook casts a vision for life as the journey between two mountains. The first mountain is obsessed with personal accomplishments and tackling ambitious goals for self-promoting purposes. All activity on this peak is geared toward cultivating the resume virtues described above. The second mountain, in sharp contrast, focuses on relationships and service to others through the honing of deeper character qualities, that is, the eulogy virtues. His argument is that the good life–the life of joy and flourishing–is found in the journey from the first to the second mountain. The road of this journey takes a person through the valley of humility and brokenness before beginning the ascent.

A journey that calls pilgrims to descend before ascending may feel foreign to our culture today because the virtue of humility is part of a former moral ecology, what Brooks calls the “crooked timber” tradition. This tradition demands humility, not incredulity, in the face of our human limitations. It calls us to “…confront our own weaknesses, tackle our own sins” and confront ourselves to the core (xiv). The result, as men and women pass through this valley, is a life of character, which is well-integrated, and marked by contentment and joy.

A Cultural Shift

Brooks believes that today’s society has replaced the crooked timber tradition with the culture of the Big Me. Young people are raised to view themselves as the center of the universe and destined for fame (7). The self-esteem movement, embodied in the mantra “Be true to yourself,” has created a generation primed for self-centeredness, narcissism, and self-aggrandizement. This moral framework provides few tools for people when they experience rejection, brokenness, and pain. In the culture of the Big Me, the only response to suffering is disbelief, outrage, and eventual despair. 

The culture of the Big Me leaves little room for growth in character because under this scheme, one’s “timber” is perfectly straight. The problem is not the individual, but the world around him. When circumstances take a turn for the worse, which they inevitably will at times, the boy blames the people and power structures that exist, not the human flaws that dwell within.

A More Excellent Way 

Brook’s conclusion is that at the end of the day the good life is the one marked by humility, not pride, and self-effacement, not self-promotion. This is the way of the crooked timber tradition.

Assuming we generally agree with this idea, as educators, we must ask: How can we train students to view the world in this way, while also encouraging them to strive for excellence? Christ himself said it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye a needle than it is for a rich man to inherit the kingdom of heaven. Perhaps something similar can be said of the quest for achievement. Can one seek achievement along the road to character, especially humility?

In his first letter to the Corinthians, I believe the apostle Paul offers some key insights for our question. During his treatment of spiritual gifts, Paul underscores the fact that the gifts of the Spirit ought to unite believers, not divide them. Just as organs within the human body work together in unity for the good of the body, so Christians ought to use their gifts for the good of the church…no matter what the gift is.

And yet, Paul writes, “But earnestly desire the higher gifts…And I will show you a more excellent way” (1 Cor. 12:31 ESV, italics mine). This way, Paul will go on to explain, is love.

We see in this passage that in Paul’s mind, the pursuit of the higher gifts is not in conflict with love, but indeed, love is their ultimate fulfillment.. When building others up is the aim, spiritual gifts reach their highest end. Conversely, when love is absent from achievement, excellence is futile. Paul writes:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

1 Corinthians 13:1-7 ESV

While in this passage Paul is addressing spiritual gifts particularly, I propose we can expand this idea to gifts, accomplishments, and achievements, in general. Love, along with the other virtues, does not prohibit the quest for achievement, but instead, sanctifies it. Through the way of love, men and women can use their gifts in service to others. In a school that takes this vision seriously, students will be trained to give, not take, and serve, not receive.

Now that we have a broad vision for how character and achievement can work together, we need to think about how to apply these ideas in the classroom. We must acknowledge that teachers are on the front lines of character formation: each day they provide students opportunities for both personal accomplishment and humble service. In this way, schools can be the incubators for future culture makers of character if they support teachers to cultivate the right classroom culture. Let’s now turn to Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion 2.0 to consider the core ingredients of this goal. (Note: I won’t have space to make explicit connections between character development as we have been thinking of it and these principles, but I hope to provide some general categories for practitioners to consider on their own.)

Lemov’s Five Principles of Classroom Culture

In the fourth and final part of Teach Like a Champion 2.0, author Doug Lemov lays out five principles of classroom culture: discipline, management, control, influence, and engagement. Admittedly, I’m not the biggest fan of the terms themselves. Most of them contain the conceptual residue of modern education presuppositions. Nevertheless, I was overall impressed with Lemov’s treatment of the five principles and believe that they can serve as effective handholds, when properly defined, for creating a culture geared toward excellence with a foundation of character. Let me walk through them one at a time.

Principle 1: Discipline

The first principle is discipline. Lemov defines discipline as “teaching students the right and successful way to do things” (344). Too often teachers assume that their students understand the nuts and bolts of what it means to be a scholar and, as a result, give abstract commands: “Pay attention” “Give this assignment your full effort” “Read this next paragraph carefully.”

But as Lemov points out, what teachers need to do first is breakdown these commands into individual elements. Instead of “Pay Attention,” say “Sit up straight, eyes on me, and four feet on the floor.” When teachers give concrete instructions and then provide accountability for obedience, students are able to most effectively grow in the discipline of, in this case, attention.

Overtime, the disciplines the teacher focuses on will become habits. Patrick has written at length in his free eBook about the importance of habit training and how the human brain is wired to put certain tasks on auto-pilot. As teachers, we can leverage this useful function of the brain for the student’s benefit. We can teach students how to be students and watch them grow in the habits of a scholar, including exhibiting strong character, over time.

Principle 2: Management

Lemov’s second principle for classroom culture is management. In modern educational circles, classroom management systems are par for the course. Teachers are baptized in the behaviorist psychology of Skinner and Pavlov and expected to leverage these insights about human behavior to meet their management objectives. Lemov defines classroom management as “the process of reinforcing behavior through the use of consequences and rewards” (343).

Management systems are attractive, minimally, because they tend to yield visible short-term results. For example, if a student has trouble controlling his urge to run in the hallway and the teacher rolls out a consequence of five minutes off of recess for each illicit dash, this action will likely curb his behavior pretty quickly.

The problem, which Charlotte Mason practitioners, among others, are apt to point out, is that this approach fails to take seriously the heart and will of a child. It aims for behavioral conformity, not personal growth. Lemov himself admits that these sort of management systems work in the short-term, but pay decreasing benefits over time. The more you use a consequence or reward, the less effective it becomes. Management systems, without the other principles, devolve quickly. Students become desensitized to the rewards and consequences, and teachers are forced to dial up the dosages to get the desired effect.

As we think about cultivating classroom culture from a classical perspective, we would do well to leave these management systems out of our approach. A preferred course of action would be to focus our attention on training students in disciplines (principle 1) and habits that will serve them better for the long-term.

Principle 3: Control

Let’s move to the third principle: control. It’s not the most culturally palatable term today, but you’ll soon see what Lemov is getting at. He defines control as “The capacity to cause someone to choose to do what you ask, regardless of consequences” (344). Notice that control operates independently of applying consequences within a management system. The teacher instructs. The students obey. The matter is settled.

Notice also that control here doesn’t negate agency. According to Lemov’s definition, teachers preserve the student’s responsibility to choose to obey. This points to an undergirding truth about control and obedience: it leads to freedom. As students demonstrate over time their strength of will to obey when given instructions, teachers can grant more freedom. Rules move from external fiat to internal mastery.

How can teachers exercise control over their students in a way that moves them to self-mastery? The key is relationship. Lemov writes, “Teachers who have strong control succeed because they understand the power of language and relationships: they ask firmly and confidently, but also with civility, and often kindly” (345). In other words, teachers even as they exercise an appropriate form of control, do so while respecting the personhood of their students. Their students would never doubt that the teacher has their best interest in mind.

Principle 4: Influence

This leads to the fourth principle: influence. Influence is the linchpin for a strong classroom culture. A teacher can provide students with great support in discipline, implement an effective management system, and exhibit high control, and yet be failing in a key way: moving students from “behave” to believe.” A teacher cannot sustain the culture she wants for her classroom on her own. At some point, her students need to buy into the vision themselves. They must believe and trust that the classroom culture was designed for their own benefit and growth.

You are probably beginning to see how each of these principles, with the exception of the management system, work together. As the teacher demonstrates herself to be a person of character, illustrated by her love, care, and expectations for her students, students will voluntarily follow. In some ways, this is Leadership 101. People follow a leader who looks out for them. As teachers cultivate a culture of joy, belonging, and growth, students will believe in the vision the teacher has painted and respond accordingly. And as we think about developing students to be people of character, the vision we articulate is especially important.

Principle 5: Engagement

The final principle for cultivating a strong classroom culture is engagement, specifically intellectually engagement. As I have discussed in previous articles, our students are not mere clay to be formed or tablets to be written on. Students are persons, made in the image of God, created with capacities to engage dynamically with the world God created. Students are hard-wired to explore, grow, think, work, and create.

In the classroom, therefore, it is crucial for students to be engaged intellectually. They need to be exposed to rich content and then expected to chew on this content themselves, for example, through narration. As Lemov puts it, “Students minds are ready to be intellectually engaged. They need to be stimulated. Something to challenge and fascinate them. Great teachers get students busily engaged in important, interesting, and challenging work” (346). 

Conclusion

Through creating the right classroom culture, teachers can lead their students to become the young men and women of character our society needs more than ever. Moreover, through implementing the right principles of classroom culture, teachers don’t have to choose between character and achievement, but instead can see first-hand how character is the driving force behind it all. When teacher and students form an alliance over the idea to strive for excellence in the way of love for the good of others, the result is a dynamic community of servant-learners.

David Brooks describes these people well:

“They radiate a sort of moral joy. They answer softly when challenged hardly. They are silent when unfairly abused. They are dignified when others try to humiliate them, restrained when others try to provoke the. But they get things done.They perform acts of sacrificial service with the same modest everyday spirit they would display if they were just getting the groceries. They are not thinking about what impressive work they are doing. They are not thinking about themselves at all. They just seem delighted by the flawed people around them. They just recognize what needs doing and they do it” (ivi). 

Well said, Mr. Brooks. May this be spoken of both our students and ourselves.

Other articles in this series:

Building Ratio: Training Students to Think and Learn for Themselves

Work, Toil, and the Quest for Academic Rigor

“Teach Like a Champion” for the Classical Classroom, Part 3: Check for Understanding

“Teach Like a Champion” for the Classical Classroom, Part 2: Teacher-Driven Professional Development

“Teach Like a Champion” for the Classical Classroom, Part 1: An Introduction

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We are what we repeatedly do; excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.

Aristotle

What do you find yourself repeatedly doing? In this digital world, it is easy to immerse ourselves in the repetition of scrolling through social media or clicking out words on a device in the hope of inspiring minds and garnering followers. Yet, the digital world falls short of satisfying our deepest longings for meaning and purpose. The best moments in life are not found on a screen, but in deep, meaningful relationships and the creation of beautiful and useful things.

So, find ways to repeatedly, purposefully foster the habits of relating and creating. 

Though there is much to say on the subject of fostering healthy relationships, this article will focus on the habit of handwork. However, handwork need not be solitary. The art of creating alongside others brings a sense of community and comfort. Help your children foster sweet memories, giggling beneath blanketed forts or coloring comfortably together at the kitchen table. Develop bonds with your friends and family by asking them to join you in your creative endeavors.

As you work, ask yourself, “Who should join me?” Then, invite them. Teach them. Be together as you create and work with your hands. 

Handwork as a Habit Leading to Wonder

Aristotle said that, “Good habits formed at youth make all the difference.” Because young children are like “tender reeds, ready to grow and easy to train,” the habit of working diligently with one’s hands ought to be taught to children as young as four years old.

Young children readily engage in tactile tasks such as building, painting, drawing and cutting paper. Turn their willing hands to tasks that require repetition and precision to create strong habits of attention and perseverance. This habit of attention will in turn create a sense of wonder as children discover the world around them. 

Wisdom begins in wonder.

Socrates

Wonder is foundational to capturing a child’s attention. So begin with something that fills them with awe and awakens their desire to “make it too!” For example, a father using hammer and nail is likely to be interrupted by a child eager to practice what dad is doing. Soon father and child are happily hammering alongside one another.

The child’s wonder leads to wisdom as the skill of hammering in a nail requires a steady hand and focused attention. 

From Wonder to Wisdom by Hand

Whether you are teaching woodworking or finger-knitting, log-splitting or sewing, the same path from wonder to wisdom is travelled. All these skills require repetition in order to achieve excellence.

Mistakes will happen. Problems will need to be resolved. Children who face these challenges develop grit and become stronger emotionally. Just listen for the happy little voice shouting, “I did it!” and you will be thankful you started the journey of handwork together. 

A child who is busy with their hands is also busy with higher level thinking such as analysis, synthesis and evaluation. Analysis comes in the form of “what if” questions such as, “What if I use a different thickness of string in knitting, will my project look different?” Synthesis is when a child can defend their choices and discuss why they used a smaller nail for this project vs the larger one. In evaluation a child can construct and deconstruct their design and even change their opinion regarding the materials used, based on their experience.

Simple tasks, with little challenge may bring a quick smile, but immersing your child in a long-term project that requires deep thought will reap the rewards of confidence and character. 

1 Thessalonians 4:11 encourages us

“to aspire to live quietly, and to mind [our] own affairs, and to work with [our] hands.” 

So, turn off the technology and find some work for your hands to do. Lead yourself and your child into something creative and you may discover your side-by-side work evokes a calm, satisfying, joy-filled atmosphere that leads to habits of excellence.

About the Author

As a Classical Christian Educator, Joleen has had the joy of leading her young students to joyfully discover handwork that has a purpose.

As the director of Camping Stick Kids, Joleen enjoys writing, developing and marketing materials that will enable CSK to share the Gospel one camper at a time.

Download her free eBook Handwork with a Purpose!

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As we’ve mentioned before (Aristotle and the Growth Mindset), while the great philosopher Aristotle doesn’t discount any of these factors in attaining excellence, he is more inclined to emphasize the importance of education and our personal habits.

Of course, as Christians, we attribute all of these factors to the providence of God and can relativize the importance of them by appealing to a heavenly hope. People may not have an equal shot at excellence in this life, whether in academics, sports, business or the arts, but it doesn’t ultimately matter in comparison with spiritual and eternal realities.

Intellectual and Moral Excellence: Where do they come from?

The situation gets trickier for us Christians when we think of moral virtue. Aristotle and the Greek philosophical tradition had one and the same word for these two ideas: excellence was virtue, and virtue was excellence. According to Aristotle there were two types of excellence:

Excellence [or virtue], then, being of two kinds, intellectual and moral, intellectual excellence in the main owes its birth and its growth to teaching (for which reason it requires experience and time), while moral excellence comes about as a result of habit….

Nichomachean Ethics 2:1 or 1103a15-b25 (trans. W. D. Ross)

Interestingly, Aristotle attributes the origin and development of intellectual excellence to teaching or instruction. While he doesn’t discount the role of heredity in academic attainment, he emphasizes the primary role of the long process of education. Intellectual virtue requires the accumulation of experience and knowledge over time through qualified teachers.

(Incidentally, I wonder what would happen in our schools if we actually took on board the liberal arts tradition’s insistence on the intellectual virtues as a chief goal of education…. We might have an educational renaissance on our hands.)

Moral excellence, on the other hand, Aristotle attributes to our habits or customs, those repeated practices that form in us character qualities or propensities to act in a certain way in a given situation. This idea is revolutionary for putting ball in the human court, as it were, and calling on individuals to reform themselves through building better habits, and parents to set their children up well through moral habituation. As he concludes the section cited above,

It makes no small difference, then, whether we form habits of one kind or of another from our very youth; it makes a very great difference, or rather all the difference.

Plato had emphasized, as we might be inclined to, that moral virtue was a result of divine gift:

To illustrate, he tells Protagoras the charming account of a conversation between Hermes and Zeus. While Zeus is putting the finishing touches on his human creation, Hermes asks him if virtue is to be distributed among men like the gifts of the arts, unequally, with only a favored few receiving skills in medicine and in music. But Zeus resists this proposal and commands Hermes to distribute the gift of virtue to all men equally, ‘for cities cannot exist if a few only share in the virtues, as in the arts’ (Jowett 1969).

David Hicks, Norms and Nobility (24)

In a way this makes sense, since basic moral virtues (like fair dealings in business, general truthfulness, courageous action in warfare, hard work and perseverance) are the glue that holds society together. Without a general distribution of these qualities, no city-state could survive for very long. Civilization can only operate in a world where most of the time a good number of people have been divinely blessed with basic moral virtues.

Or course, it’s possible that divine gift and human responsibility are ultimately compatible, rather than opposites. Aristotle might have agreed with Plato and simply contended that divine gift manifested itself in the habit training of the citizenry to form basic levels of moral virtue in most people.

Moral Virtue a Result of Common Grace

When Christian students and teachers interact with Plato or Aristotle on the topic of moral virtue, in my experience, they tend to think primarily in terms of higher order spiritual virtues, like faith, hope and love, or else the absolute versions of these virtues, where all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. But Aristotle and Plato had in mind the work-a-day world of the polis or city-state, and while they were certainly not hesitant to criticize the rampant human corruption they saw, they also noticed how often things tended to go right.

In this way, their discussions of moral virtue cohere with the Christian doctrine of common grace. Despite the reality and pervasiveness of human depravity and sin, the doctrine goes, human society would completely fly off the rails if God did not also grant the grace of moral virtue, distributed generally (i.e. in common) to people, regardless of their spiritual condition. This explains why unredeemed human beings, while still corrupt, are not nearly so bad and destructive as they could be.

For this reason, it’s probably helpful for us to differentiate between moral excellence and spiritual excellence, just as the medieval tradition did. In borrowing from the classical tradition of philosophy, medievals distinguished between the theological virtues of faith, hope and love, which could only be imparted by the Holy Spirit as a result of true repentance, and the cardinal virtues of justice, prudence, temperance (or self control) and courage.

Not only is the doctrine of common grace helpful for answering questions about virtuous non-believers, it can help us in raising and educating the children of believers. In the classical Christian school movement there can tend to be some uneasiness about our ability to train our students in moral virtue as the classical tradition proposed and some modern educators still discuss today. We have a strong sense as Christians that only the Holy Spirit can change hearts and we tremble to tread too presumptuously on his domain.

With the doctrine of common grace in our minds, we can proceed forward boldly with the project of cultivating moral virtues in our children through the power of habit. (By the way I borrow the phrase “the power of habit” from Charles Duhigg’s incredible book, which I can’t recommend highly enough.)

The Power of Habit in Forming Moral Excellence

For Aristotle, habits are the primary determiner of character. I don’t have to quote his famous, “We are what we repeatedly do…. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” (By the way, does anyone ever give a citation for that? Where is it from? What translator?) Everyone already knows it, and hopefully we all have a sense of its power. The power of habit comes in its susceptibility to practice and development, like all other sports, arts or skills. This means that we can grow in moral excellence, and therefore have every reason to foster an Aristotelian growth mindset.

Moral virtues become the qualities of a person through active exercise of them. As Aristotle explains,

Excellences we get by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of the arts as well. For the things we have to learn before we can do, we learn by doing, e.g. men become builders by building and lyre-players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

Nichomachean Ethics 2:1 or 1103a15-b25 (trans. W. D. Ross)

It’s hard to overstate how important the implications of this insight are for education. A few immediate applications come to mind. Procedures that allow or encourage cheating for the sake of grades are abhorrent because they form the habit of deceptive practices to get ahead in children. Motivators that operate primarily on students’ desire to be better than others or receive awards for achievement may be forming the vices of avarice and pride.

The customs and culture of a school or home are not a neutral factor in a child’s education, if moral excellence is our goal.

Another implication, unpacked by the English philosopher John Locke, is that children should not be taught by memorizing rules for conduct but by habit:

But pray remember, children are not to be taught by rules, which will always be slipping out of their memories. What you think necessary for them to do, settle in them by an indispensable practice as often as the occasion returns; and if it be possible, make occasions. This will beget habits in them, which, being once established, operate of themselves easily and naturally without the assistance of the memory.

Some Thoughts Concerning Education (40)

If you’ve ever experienced the failure of your precepts, whether as parent or teacher, to stick in the minds of children, then you know what Locke is talking about. “I forgot,” is about the most common excuse for misconduct of all. Locke invites us to view moral formation in a different light, by relying on the peaceable coaxing of habits. While difficult, because it requires a proactive presence and gentle encouragement beforehand, rather than the harsher but less labor-intensive scolding afterward, Locke’s path of habit training holds incredible promise.

Perhaps this sort of habit training, then, is part of what Paul was talking about when he commanded parents to “train their children in the discipline and nurture of the Lord.” Then Paul’s encouragement to fathers not to “provoke them to anger” or “exasperate them” could have had in mind the same sort of phenomenon that Locke mentioned just before the passage quoted above: parents heaping up rules and expectations for their children without giving them the practice and training they need, and then harshly punishing them for forgetting to perform them later on (39-40). All too often our attempts at discipline are merely an exercise in unrealistic expectations.

Of course, this isn’t a rejection of discipline and rules for children; the place of legitimate authority and obedience is a primary given of life. But the function of habit in the development of character and moral virtue provides the key backdrop that will prevent us from numerous abuses.

For more on Aristotle’s educational paradigm for today, check out my series on Aristotle’s Intellectual Virtues replacing Bloom’s Taxonomy.

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Dweck’s portrayal of how our beliefs influence our behavior is truly mind-altering, especially given how she bolsters it with numerous studies of children, teachers, athletes and businesses. The importance of adopting a growth mindset as a parent, teacher, coach or business leader can hardly be overstated. There’s a reason her work has made a significant splash and been called “one of the most influential books ever about motivation” (Po Bronson, author of Nurture Shock).

But perhaps it’s worth asking whether what Carol Dweck is saying here is fundamentally new. For those participating in an educational renaissance, it’s worthwhile to step back and consider the extent to which the new ideas of modern research are confirming (rather than discovering) the traditional insights of the classical tradition of educational philosophy. After all, as the writer of Ecclesiastes said, “there is nothing new under the sun” (1:9 ESV) and “of the making of many books there is no end” (12:12). In this case, I think we need look no farther than Aristotle, the great philosopher himself, for an anticipation of the growth mindset.

Near the beginning of his Nichomachean Ethics Aristotle announces a very similar research question to that posed in Dweck’s research:

“whether happiness is to be acquired by learning or by habituation or some other sort of training, or comes in virtue of some divine providence or again by chance.” (Book I, ch. 9, trans. by W. D. Ross, accessed at http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.1.i.html)

The word translated happiness (Greek: ‘eudaimonia’) is not the flippant feeling that we often mean today. In fact, some circles are inclined to prefer the term ‘joy’ to happiness to imply something longer lasting—a life satisfaction or fulfillment rather than momentary excitement or the absence of challenges. Of course, Dweck uses the term ‘success’ in her study, which resonates better with the modern American focus on advancement in work and career. But both terms are meant to tap into the fundamental human drive for contentment, fulfillment, human flourishing, the good life.

And the question that is posed concerns whether or not our fate is fixed. Can we learn such that we succeed and find joy, fulfillment, blessedness, through our accomplishments? Or are we stuck with what we’ve got, such that we’d better hope we were one of the lucky ones, blessed by the gods (or by the random lottery of our DNA) with intelligence, talent, or whatever that it-factor is in our particular field or endeavor? Aristotle’s answer to this question is ultimately a nuanced one: No, if someone gets to the end of their life and dies horribly without friends and alone, all their accomplishments turning back on them and coming to naught, that person cannot be said to be blessed, no matter how successful they seemed earlier in life. Some external luck must play a role, but excellence, virtue can be developed, and it is virtue which ultimately makes a life blessed.

The key to Aristotle’s growth mindset is a proper conception of virtue or excellence (Greek areté) as an activity. The truly happy person finds fulfillment in the continual pursuit of excellence. As he explains,

“For no function of man has so much permanence as virtuous activities (these are thought to be more durable even than knowledge of the sciences), and of these themselves the most valuable are more durable because those who are happy spend their life most readily and most continuously in these; for this seems to be the reason why we do not forget them. The attribute in question, then, will belong to the happy man, and he will be happy throughout his life; for always, or by preference to everything else, he will be engaged in virtuous action and contemplation, and he will bear the chances of life most nobly and altogether decorously, if he is ‘truly good’ and ‘foursquare beyond reproach’.” (Book I, ch. 10)

Virtuous activities, for Aristotle, seem to be those physical, moral and intellectual virtues discussed throughout his Ethics, often described as a mean between two extremes: for instance, courage is a mean in having the right amount of fear, not too little (rashness) or too much (cowardice). Others, however, include the excellence of art, or skill in producing some good through a true course of reasoning; practical wisdom, or the ability to weigh correctly what things are good or beneficial for oneself; knowledge, or the ability to demonstrate the truth of something; and friendship (see Nic. Ethics VI.3-7 and VIII). In other words, the pursuit of excellence in school, work, business or relationships is the most likely course of action to bring about happiness.

And as he explains, part of the reason for that is that if you are seeing every opportunity as a chance to grow and improve in virtue (i.e. a growth mindset), then no matter what life throws at you, you will find satisfaction (eudaimonia) in that pursuit. Virtuous activities are durable sources of happiness, because they don’t flit away like less noble ones: money, sex, or power. There are very few circumstances, however challenging or disastrous, that don’t allow you the opportunity to contemplate or reflect on how you could improve. Even nobly bearing up under suffering is an exercise of virtue and will therefore give a measure of its own satisfaction.

One of the weaknesses of Dweck’s book is her narrow focus on success in specific life goals and endeavors, like school, sports or work, to the exclusion of this broader conception of the ultimate goal of a life well lived. But other researchers have made a stronger case for the connection between vigorous striving after excellence and happiness more broadly understood. For instance, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi conducted a study conducted in the 90s, in which subjects would subjectively rate their mood at random times throughout the day. Cal Newport describes in his findings in his own book Deep Work:

“The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile…. Csikszentmihalyi calls this mental state flow (a term he popularized with a 1990 book of the same title). At the time, this finding pushed back against conventional wisdom. Most people assumed (and still do) that relaxation makes them happy. We want to work less and spend more time in the hammock.” (84)

The opposite is actually true; people rated their work time much higher than their leisure time, in spite of thinking that they enjoyed their leisure time more. As human beings we were made to be most joyful when striving in pursuit of excellence, when engaged in deep work, or deliberate practice. As the wise author of Ecclesiastes had said, “There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil” (Eccl. 2:24). Toil is not all pain and drudgery, but can actually be enjoyed… if we believe we can grow and see each task as an opportunity to strive for excellence.

What difference should this make for the work of education? Well, educators themselves should embrace the life of growth. Excellent teachers are not born, they are made. We should strive for excellence in the craft of teaching, but also for the practical wisdom of living life well. But more than that, teachers should cast a vision for their students of pursuing excellence in each and every ability, skill or type of knowledge that the curriculum calls them to. They should explicitly teach students to believe that they can develop their abilities, and learning activities and practice sessions should be framed so as to reinforce that belief. Teachers should aim to get their students willingly and joyfully engaged in the hard work of learning through inculcating a growth mindset. John Milton, in his tractate Of Education, described it this way:

“But here the main skill and groundwork will be, to temper them such lectures and explanations upon every opportunity as may lead and draw them in willing obedience, inflamed with the study of learning, and the admiration of virtue; stirred up with high hopes of living to be brave men, and worthy patriots, dear to God, and famous to all ages.”

Here Milton claims that the most important and foundational task of the educator of youth is to put them into a certain mindset: that of being on fire with a zeal for learning and with a deep appreciation for excellence. Students also need hope, “high hopes” that they can make something of their lives, by living in service to their country and to God, and perhaps even becoming so excellent at what they do that their names go down in history. If this isn’t a growth mindset, I don’t know what is.

At the school where I work (Clapham School) these ideas are reflected in part of our mission, which is to “inspire students with an education… approached with diligence and joy.” This attempts to capture the powerful combination of hard work in the pursuit of excellence and the deep satisfaction that is the natural result. We call it joyful discovery for short. How will this influence your life, learning and pursuits? How will you teach, coach or parent differently because of your newfound understanding of the classical growth mindset?

For more on the growth mindset see my article on “Charlotte Mason and the Growth Mindset” here!

References:

Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle. The Revised Oxford Translation. Princeton, 1984. Also accessed at http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.1.i.html.

Carol S. Dweck. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Ballantine: New York, 2016.

Cal Newport. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. Grand Central: New York/Boston, 2016.

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All classrooms and every subject should be a breeding ground for deliberate practice. Hear me correctly, though. Not all students (and maybe none of our students) in a given subject will go on to become experts in the field. However, they can acquire the core skills of deliberate practice in every subject, so that whatever path they choose, they can apply these skills in the pursuit of excellence. By incorporating these skills in my history class, for instance, I may expect to see my students apply deliberate practice as musicians, journalists, or mathematicians.

There are four essential components to deliberate practice. All of them are necessary if one is to see gains in a discipline.

#1: Repeat, Repeat, Repeat

The first component of deliberate practice is repeated rehearsal of a skill. Finding the right frequency is key here. Too much practice on a given skill can be just as detrimental as not practicing enough. It would be counterproductive to spend hours a day practicing scales on the piano, perhaps causing injury to the hands and wrists. How many scales ought to be done? Just enough to see improvement in a focused area, like the fluidity of finger movement.

The best way to get the frequency right is to set up a regular appointment to work on a given skill. Our class schedules often provide daily or weekly opportunities to drill down into a set of skills. Helping our students manage their out-of-school course work, though, may help them find optimal results. Same place, same time, same subject.

We need to be careful with this first component. It is all too easy to set up high frequency and think we are accomplishing something, when in fact all we are doing is a long series of empty work. Thus, the second through fourth components must be present within the rehearsal times we set up.

#2: Break It Down

Any skill can be divided into many smaller skills. Even the simple act of running can be broken down into components such as foot strike, kick, forward lean, hip rotation, head position, and arm swing to name a few. In my hermeneutics class, I break down for my students various constituent parts of the act of reading.

The second component of deliberate practice is breaking down concepts and skills into smaller pieces. Those smaller pieces can then be isolated and practiced with focused attention, energy and motivation.

Imagine being told to improve your writing. One could write more, lots more. But without first breaking down the task of writing into smaller parts, writing will be a frustrating endeavor with little improvement occurring. Instead, bad habits are likely to be reinforced. Being guided, however, toward making more concrete choices for your nouns, or using stronger active verbs, or expanding your vocabulary, or varying your sentence length gives the author specific, actionable items to work on each time writing is practiced. More can be accomplished through focused attention on a small part of the whole, than by trying to lift the whole by brute force.

Practically speaking, this means that in our regularly scheduled practice session, a choice needs to be made as to what specific sub-skill will be practiced. As teachers, we can provide for our students a specific area to work on for a given problem set or reading exercise. There are some master skills specific to each subject that have outsized impact on that area of knowledge. For instance, all of us have heard the math teacher encourage her students to show their steps for each problem. That’s because this is a master skill. Finding the few skills that enable a student to see massive improvement in a subject is a sure way to cultivate interest and participation within a class.

#3: Best Effort

In order to get the most out of practice, one must actively engage the will. When you picture an elite athlete working on drills, their level of intensity is what sets them apart from the weekend warrior joining a pickup game of soccer or basketball. Arnold Schwartzenegger once described his process for building muscle. He would intensely focus on a specific muscle before and during a lift. There was a mind-body connection made that enabled him to see significant gains as a bodybuilder. To see gains as a scholar, musician or athlete, this kind of intense connection needs to be cultivated.

This is the hardest, but most necessary component of deliberate practice. Will power, or motivation, can be weak in our students. Many authors have made the analogy between will power and muscle. Our wills can be trained, so that we develop stronger motivation. But we can also use up our strength as the day goes on. We can help our students to increase their will power, but we also need to be realistic about how long we can expect them to apply themselves with intensity. My suggestion is that episodes of deliberate practice occur in the classroom. As the adult in the room, we teachers (hopefully) have greater will power and can set the tone for the level of intensity we expect from our students. We become the coach motivating them through their mathematics drills, their writing exercises, their scales and arpeggios. The goal is for them to acquire the ability to reach this level of intensity on their own, but that might take time to internalize. But if they see results in the application of will power leading to gains in the subject area, the intrinsic reward will start to drive them.

#4: Aim High

The fourth component of deliberate practice is about setting our aim at improvement. The goal is not about completing assignments or covering all the material in a class, although completion and knowledge are important in their own right. The goal really boils down to human growth. Are we improving ourselves in some area? And even more importantly, are we identifying areas where improvement can occur?

Cultivating a growth mindset in the classroom can be difficult, especially where there is undue focus on grades, or where the class is perceived as a hoop to jump through prerequisite to some other course, job or qualification. The biggest hurdle that stands in the way of a growth mindset is fear of failure. The discomfort students feel when they fail could derive from a sense of shame, pressure they’ve put on themselves or others, or an overly competitive group dynamic. However, failure is necessary in order for growth to occur. Put another way, if our students are constantly succeeding, they are probably not encountering sufficient challenge to enact growth. Returning briefly to our example of bodybuilding, the bodybuilder will repeat a lift to the point of failure — meaning they can’t make another lift — which stimulates muscle growth. We can approximate this failure-growth connection by using feedback loops in our classrooms.

A feedback loop is a means of verbalizing and demonstrating a concept or skills that is either incorrect, not fully formed or could be taken to the next level. For example, showing students capitalization errors in their writing and bringing their focused attention to improving this area is a feedback loop. We can now connect them to regular practice on a discrete skill that requires their best effort. Students can be coached to find their own failures. Errors can also be anticipated before they occur. “Now class, where are we likely to make mistakes in this problem?”

Setting measurable goals is part of aiming high. We may have a long view toward perfect execution, but there may need to be incremental growth along the way. Setting these as measurable increments helps students track their own growth as well as celebrate their victories along the way (increasing motivation). If we are to learn all 100 vocabulary words by the end of the semester, maybe we set an increment of 10 per week. Runners training for their first marathon set incremental goals for the weeks of training, five miles this weekend, eight miles next weekend, get into double digits, build up to 20 miles, until one is ready to go 26.2 miles.

Now, we need to keep in mind that expert performance in the field of our subject area may not be possible for all of our students, let alone any of our students. So calibrating what it means for our students to aim high takes a deep understanding of the students in our classes. Helping them set goals is part of them internalizing how to enact deliberate practice. Remember, we are helping them acquire a transferable skill set. Our subject area is not really about our subject at all. It’s really an opportunity to practice deliberate practice. Of course, I’m overstating the case. Obviously there are standards related to history, mathematics, science, languages that need to be met. But we don’t want to be so short sighted as to think that growth in our area of knowledge is the only goal we’re aiming for.

Putting It All Together

I remember learning how to do effective practice when I was a music major. It began with committing myself to daily practice (repeat, repeat, repeat). Whenever I would mess up a measure, I would stop, and spend several moments just working the fingering of the sequence of notes (break it down). This passage was circled and repeated at intervals over the coming days. I would make sure I stopped the automatic mode of just making it through a piece, so that I would put my whole mind and effort into these challenging passages (best effort). Each time I improved a measure, my overall performance increased. I saw results in moving up in the section (aim high). My ambitions never really took me beyond college orchestra as a performer. But I learned a transferable skill that helped me excel in other areas, such a languages, biblical studies, history, and writing.

Learning to think well is just like learning music or basketball. Charlotte Mason writes about how deliberate practice enables children to develop habits of thinking:

How the children’s various lessons should be handled so as to induce habits of thinking, we shall consider later; but this for the present: thinking, like writing or skating, comes by practice. The child who has never thought, never does think, and probably never will think; for are there not people enough who go through the world without any deliberate exercise of their own wits? The child must think, get at the reason why of things for himself, every day of his life, and more each day than the day before.

Charlotte Mason, Home Education, pg. 153-154

Differentiation and Deliberate Practice

One of the challenges we face as educators is assisting students who lag behind the group or outpace the group. We usually place the laggers into extra tutoring and give the really smart kids extra work or try to accelerate their progress in that area. There’s good reason to consider these strategies. But one often unexplored strategy is to look at deliberate practice as a means to develop skills that will enable them to reflect on their own practice habits. Stragglers often lack the practice skills that will help them achieve forward movement in their studies. Instead of breaking down their workload, they become overwhelmed by the sense that they are behind their peers. Small victories can begin to build the momentum to see themselves catch up to the pack. The frontrunners can be tempted to skim the surface of their work, delighting in the thrill of gaining early access to new knowledge. Finding alternative goals to ripping through advanced levels of content, articulating goals such as perfect execution, or understanding concepts at a deeper level may help them to learn better practice habits. I’ve seen several intuitive learners come crashing down when they hit their first challenge, largely because they haven’t internalized the habits of deliberate practice.

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