In this series on Slow Productivity in School, we’ve been exploring the paradox of festina lente (“hasten slowly”). When it comes to the work of learning, sometimes you must go slow to go fast. Or, perhaps more accurately, you must slow down to be truly productive. Taking our cues from Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment without Burnout, we are applying his three principles for slow productivity to our teaching practices in classical Christian schools (1. Do Fewer Things, 2. Work at a Natural Pace, 3. Obsess Over Quality). 

After first diagnosing the problem of pseudo-productivity in modern schools, analogous to the hustle culture of modern work environments, we then explored the well-known Latin phrase multum non multa (“much not many things”) under the principle of doing fewer things. The key takeaway is that rather than cutting down on “subjects” to the bare essentials, this principle really applies best to the number and quality of “assignments.” Students in our classical Christian schools can read and study widely without suffering through busywork. Second, we explored the need to work at a natural pace as an explanation of how we can recover school as scholé or leisure. The point is that there are rhythms to ideal learning and racing through worksheets and covering pages of textbooks like the wind isn’t necessarily the best for deep understanding and long term retention.

In this final article, we’re focusing on the principle that we might call the main goal of it all: “Obsess over quality.”  In a way, doing fewer things and working at a natural pace are pointless if they don’t lead to an increased focus on quality. At the beginning we set out the idea that what really lurks behind the phrase multum non multa is a prioritization of depth over breadth and quality over quantity. Slowness is not an end in itself but is meant to serve the real or genuine productivity. Newport describes this final principle of obsessing over quality this way:

“Obsess over the quality of what you produce, even if this means missing opportunities in the short term. Leverage the value of these results to gain more and more freedom in your efforts over the long term” (173). 

For those of us who work in classical Christian schools, as I have argued elsewhere (see Rethinking the Purpose of Education), the true purpose of our educational efforts should be the cultivation of moral, spiritual, and intellectual virtues in our students. If that is the case, then haste can be the enemy of progress. Instead, as master craftsmen, we teachers and educators need to take the necessary time to cultivate mastery in our students. Slipshod, shoddy work, rushed through quickly, without attention to the details and to a host of minor improvements necessary for quality do not “move the needle.” 

There is a real mental shift that must occur here for many of us. We have had the rat-race of school so ingrained in our psyche, that we feel like we are wasting time if we’re not completing a worksheet or a powerpoint buzzer quiz every 20 min. Our media-saturated world too has reduced our attention span and given us ADD for the type of focused effort that actually forges increased quality.

Another culprit to our busyness of attitude is the knowledge-transfer vision of education, as opposed to the traditional liberal arts approach. We tend to envision the main part of education as a process of information download, rather than students developing mastery in handling certain well-worn tools. When we view K-12 education instead through the lens of helping students hone their artistry in the liberal arts, then we will focus more on the students producing high quality interpretations, arguments, and persuasive compositions. 

Students would then develop an artist’s eye for quality and mastery in the creative productions of the liberal arts, including of course in math and science. This focus then multiplies labor by making their own independent reading and thinking that much more effective. They are then able to hasten along the path of lifelong learning with ease, because the way has been smoothed for them by mastering the fundamental skills.

What does this all mean practically for teachers working with students in the classroom? In her book Home Education, Charlotte Mason proposed the habit of perfect execution as a major guiding vision for training young children. She explained,

‘Throw perfection into all you do’ is a counsel upon which a family may be brought up with great advantage. We English, as a nation, think too much of persons, and too little of things, work, execution. Our children are allowed to make their figures or their letters, their stitches, their dolls’ clothes, their small carpentry, anyhow, with the notion that they will do better by-and-by. Other nations–the Germans and the French, for instance–look at the question philosophically, and know that if children get the habit of turning out imperfect work, the men and women will undoubtedly keep that habit up. I remember being delighted with the work of a class of about forty children, of six and seven, in an elementary school at Heidelberg. They were doing a writing lesson, accompanied by a good deal of oral teaching from a master, who wrote each word on the blackboard. By-and-by the slates were shown, and I did not observe one faulty or irregular letter on the whole forty slates. (110-111)

If what Mason says was true of Victorian England, how much more would she note “the Habit of turning out Imperfect Work” in 21st century America. Her example demonstrates that this feature is to a large extent cultural, and may have to do with our Rousseauian focus on children’s “personality” and “developmental readiness.” Our teachers may make excuses for failing to hold out the standard for careful execution of work based on how large the class is (“I simply can’t get around to all sixteen students!”), but this German class of forty puts us to shame.

To be fair, Mason does have a category for setting the bar too high for students. It is possible to obsess over the wrong details or expect a type of detailed quality that is not yet attainable by a young novice. Mason explains, 

No work should be given to a child that he cannot execute perfectly, and then perfection should be required from him as a matter of course. For instance, he is set to do a copy of strokes, and is allowed to show a slateful at all sorts of slopes and all sorts of intervals; his moral sense is vitiated, his eye is injured. Set him six strokes to copy; let him, not bring a slateful, but six perfect strokes, at regular distances and at regular slopes. If he produces a faulty pair, get him to point out the fault, and persevere until he has produced his task; if he does not do it to-day, let him go on to-morrow and the next day, and when the six perfect strokes appear, let it be an occasion of triumph. So with the little tasks of painting, drawing or construction he sets himself–let everything he does be well done. An unsteady house of cards is a thing to be ashamed of. (111)

It can be seen from this that Mason endorses explicitly the principles of doing fewer things at a natural pace, in order to enable an obsession over quality. Clearly she wants students to internalize the mindset of mastery from an early age. 

It’s important to clarify that this is not the sort of perfectionism that expects to never make mistakes in the first place. She is endorsing rather the type of growth mindset that believes that every child can produce high quality and accurate work, if they are given the time and held accountable for doing so. This mindset actually functions to empower the student and enable progress. Filling a slate with incorrect strokes does not improve a student’s handwriting, but tends to solidify bad habits. As my gymnastics coach drill in to us when we were young, “Practice does not make perfect. Practice makes permanent. Perfect practice makes perfect.” 

This paradoxical focus on perfection by actively attending to and correcting mistakes is characteristic of what Daniel Coyle calls deep practice. As he explains, “struggling in certain targeted ways–operating at the edges of your ability, where you make mistakes–makes you smarter. Or to put it a slightly different way, experiences where you’re forced to slow down, make errors, and correct them–as you would if you were walking up an ice-covered hill, slipping and stumbling as you go–end up making you swift and graceful without you realizing it” (The Talent Code, 18). This provides a helpful counter to a misunderstanding of Mason’s insistence that “no work should be given to a child that he cannot execute perfectly,” which might lead us to ease the way too much and avoid appropriate challenges. We have to read in to her version of “cannot” a much stronger belief in the capability of children than we tend to have.

The practical applications of this habit of perfect execution and obsession over quality are endless and as varied as the nature of the many subjects and arts that we teach. So, instead it might be more helpful to open out our gaze again to all three principles, and provide a series of practical applications to the classroom that fuse a holistic vision for slow productivity in school through 1) doing fewer things, 2) working at a natural pace, and 3) obsessing over quality.

Practical Applications of Slow Productivity in School

First, emphasize deep engagement with material over superficial coverage. This will involve a reduced workload, time for contemplation, and the ability to marinate in the knowledge and skills they are gaining.

• Reduced Workload: Instead of assigning a vast quantity of assignments to complete, or having students race through reading the textbook at home, teachers should prioritize fewer, more substantial readings, projects, and discussions. This reduced workload will allow students to delve more deeply into the material rather than skimming or memorizing for tests.
• Time for Contemplation and Reflection: Working at a natural pace means allowing sufficient time for students to truly wrestle with ideas, formulate their own thoughts, and engage in meaningful discussions, rather than rushing from one topic to the next. This leisurely approach coheres with the movement’s emphasis on school as scholé or leisure and the necessary slowness for true contemplation. The time spent discussing and thinking through ideas, even if it includes some rabbit-trails and dead-ends will be time well spent for students making these ideas their own.
• Marinating in Knowledge: Learning isn’t always linear, but has its natural ups and downs, periods of lying fallow and moments for break-throughs. A natural pace acknowledges that some concepts require time to “marinate” in the mind. Teachers should schedule in times of review and moments to pause and revisit challenging texts or ideas over time, allowing for deeper understanding to develop organically.

Second, in agreement with a mastery mindset focus on artistry, teachers should encourage Deep Practice with a focus on correcting mistakes to develop mastery. This will involve favoring perfect execution over speed, process-oriented learning, and slow reading with commonplacing.

• Perfect Execution Over Speed: Instead of rewarding quick completion, focus on mastery of skills and concepts. This might mean allowing students to re-do assignments until they achieve a certain level of understanding, or providing ample practice opportunities without the pressure of a ticking clock. It’s important to remember that education is a not a one-size-fits all: one student may need to repeat the same assignment until it is correct, while other students have gone on to the next. A misplaced emphasis on “fairness” can get in the way of the real goal of coaching each student to mastery.
• Process-Oriented Learning: Emphasize the learning process itself, including research, careful thinking, revision, and refinement, rather than just the final product. Ironically, this aligns with the “obsess over quality” principle. It’s not that the end destination doesn’t matter, but when we let students focus on just getting an assignment done, rather than getting it right, quality gets lost. When we’re willing to linger in the details with a student, then the genuine questions and focus on accuracy make the whole experience that much more meaningful to student and teacher alike.
• Slow Reading and Commonplacing: Encourage students to engage in “slow reading” of classic texts, marking up pages (when possible), asking questions, copying out quotations into a Commonplace Notebook, and truly grappling with the author’s arguments and literary artistry, rather than speed-reading for information. This is where the rubber meets the road in terms of how many Great Books you’re actually trying to get through in that course. At the same time, it’s important to remember that it is possible to go too slow, and so every delay should be qualitatively meaningful. Festina lente (“hasten slowly”) can help the teacher navigate this dance.

Third, we should protect unscheduled time for intellectual play and the pursuit of meaningful interests. There is something to be said for us trying to accomplish too much in school and that backfiring, as students become overly dependent on the structure of school for their ongoing learning. This will look like preserving time for independent exploration both at school and at home and reducing the homework burden by prioritizing the completion of quality work at school:

• Time for Independent Exploration: A natural pace includes periods of less structured time for students. Students need unscheduled time for independent reading, creative pursuits, exploring ideas that pique their interest, and simply thinking without a specific assignment. The idea that “Every minute matters” (popularized by Doug Lemov in Teach Like a Champion) is not without merits, but it depends on the culture into which it is speaking. In low-achieving communities it might bring helpful discipline, but in suburbia with our overscheduled, oversaturated lives, this approach can make children high-strung. Teachers shouldn’t feel the need to cram every minute of every school day but should embrace a proper sense of leisure. This will help to foster the type of genuine curiosity and intellectual growth in students that is not solely dependent on the teacher.
• Reduced Homework Burden: A slow productivity approach means that we should re-evaluate our homework policies and aim for fewer, more meaningful assignments that take a longer time to complete. Our goal should be to reinforce learning rather than simply creating busywork. Also, many of the challenging assignments that we would give them, like writing assignments, should be started in class with the teacher walking around to assist, double check for errors in spelling, punctuation, proper formation of cursive letters, etc. Even in the upper grades a return to this sort of artistic writing process under the guidance of a teacher can help avoid issues with plagiarism and AI-dependence that are only becoming more and more prevalent in our age.

Finally, a focus on slow productivity in school should foster a culture of patient endurance rather than an obsession with a quick fix and short-term results. This will look like embracing the long-term vision of classical education, recognizing that some of the best growth in students occurs over the course of years rather than months, and therefore fostering resilience and grit in students and parents alike:

• Long-Term Vision: Classical education plays out as a long game, building a strong foundation over many years. A natural pace reinforces the idea that significant intellectual growth is a marathon, not a sprint. Slow productivity sees the results of genuine accomplishment over the course of the whole K-12 sequence, rather than week, month or quarter of the school year. This long-term vision helps us sit patiently in the here and now and focus on mastery of the basics in a given area where a student struggles, rather than giving up or opting out.
• Resilience and Grit: By allowing for a natural pace, students learn that challenges take time to overcome and that persistence, not frantic effort, leads to genuine accomplishment. The insistence on facing our mistakes and learning from them, rather than fleeing to easier tasks, develops a resilient attitude that will serve them well for life. Ultimately, a slow productivity mindset makes kids gritty, while also giving them adequate recovery time to maintain the long trek of their education.

I hope you enjoyed the Slow Productivity in School series. I’m planning a webinar and consulting pathway to follow up on these ideas and help your teachers apply multum non multa, festina lente and the habit of perfect execution or coaching in deep practice in your school.

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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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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

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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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This has been a deliberate rhetorical and pedagogical move: an attempt to begin with what is near at hand and understood by modern educators, before exposing its weaknesses and proposing a productive solution based in ancient wisdom. Sometimes on Educational Renaissance we begin with what is new before arcing back to what is past; other times it is appropriate to begin with the wisdom of the past before connecting it to modern research. It may sound strange to some, but in this case I think that Bloom provides the perfect entree to Aristotle.

In this article I will begin situating Aristotle’s intellectual virtues as a part of his holistic philosophy of education. And since Aristotle’s viewpoints are not necessarily authoritative, however much we may revere the accomplishments of “the philosopher,” as Aquinas called him, we will have to lay out how Christians might appropriate his philosophy within a Christian worldview. After all, the early Christian apologist Tertullian’s famous question, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” still needs to be answered today, even if centuries of Christian thought have done so adequately in their own cultural moment. 

We will thus first delve into Aristotle’s philosophy in the opening book of the Nicomachean Ethics. It is necessary to lay a good foundation in Aristotle’s thought generally, if we are to understand his intellectual virtues specifically. Second, we will see how his intellectual virtues fit within his broader paradigm of human happiness as the proper goals of education. Third, along the way we will make reference to the Bible and Christian theology in order to show how Aristotle’s philosophy might be appropriated within a truly Christian understanding of life and education.

The Purpose of Education as the Purpose of Life

I opened this series by remarking on one of the major themes of the classical education renewal movement: rethinking the purpose of education as much broader and more holistic than modern education has been making it out to be:

It is not merely job training or college preparation, but the formation of flourishing human beings. The cultivation of wisdom and virtue is the purpose of education. There is joy in seeking knowledge for its own sake and as an end in itself.

Each one of these statements can be traced back to Aristotle. Human flourishing is a modern cipher for the good life or the life of eudaimonia, the Greek word for happiness or blessedness, which Aristotle proclaims to be the ultimate telos, end or goal, of human beings. All other goals are simply the means to this end (see Book I, Chapter 2). And the master art that aims at this end directly and encompasses all the lesser arts is called by him politics, under which he would lump strategy, economics, rhetoric and even all the sciences. Each in its own way aims at one of the goods that contribute to human happiness collectively.

It is interesting in this connection to compare the conception of Augustine’s City of God as a contrast to this polis or city of man. Because man is a political animal the appropriate unit of happiness for human beings is not the isolated individual, but the city. After all, who could be happy without friends? Or, for that matter, without the benefits of specialization and civilization?

But given the realities of a functioning city-state with the basic specialization that Plato had earlier described in his Republic, the most secure way for an individual to achieve this happiness is by the cultivation of virtue and wisdom, understood as the moral and intellectual excellences, respectively (see chapter 10 and 13). Moral excellence, Aristotle says, is attained by the cultivation of habits, whereas intellectual excellence is born and grown by instruction or teaching, requiring much experience and time (see Book II, chapter 1). 

Since human happiness consists in an active life in accordance with perfect virtue of the soul (see Book I, chapter 13), education becomes the prime means of attaining happiness through developing habits in accordance with the moral virtues and instructing the mind or rational principal in accordance with the truth. Another way of saying this is that the contemplative life, as opposed to the pursuit of pleasure or honor (see chapter 5), is the best method of attaining to happiness in this life, even if good fortune still plays some role (see the end of chapter 8 and 10-11). Aiming either at bodily pleasure or the emotional satisfaction of honor will ultimately fall short, while the cultivation of the mind or rational principle will lead to the proper ordering of the whole human person.

In earlier articles on Educational Renaissance, I have already laid out a couple ways of reconciling many of these reflections with a Christian understanding of the purpose of life. In “Aristotle and the Growth Mindset” I traced the renaissance arc back to Aristotle starting from Carol Dweck’s popular idea of a growth mindset vs. a fixed mindset. Aristotle theorized that excellence or virtue was the main contributor to happiness—an idea that provides more of a solid philosophical foundation for Dweck’s social scientific study of “success”. As human beings, we may not be the masters of our own fate, but to confine human happiness (and therefore virtue as well) simply to chance or fortune does not seem to jive with reality. We have some level of choice and will in our own happiness, just as we can decide to pursue a life of virtue and make deliberate strides toward that end.

The Moral Virtues and Christian Salvation

From a Christian perspective, while divine gift and human responsibility may be reconciled in various ways, the participation of human beings in their ultimate good or blessing is a matter of both. True and lasting happiness comes as a result of God’s gracious action in salvation and believers “work[ing] out [their] own salvation with fear and trembling” (see Philippians 2:12). Christian sanctification and piety have traditionally been thought to involve the cultivation of all the moral virtues. Salvation involves the conversion of the heart.

In “Excellence Comes By Habit: Aristotle on Moral Virtue” I referenced the Christian idea of common grace to account for the fact that human beings can exhibit moral virtues even in an unregenerate state. For this reason, it is helpful to distinguish between moral and spiritual virtues. Medievals, in particular, adopted a sevenfold paradigm to sum up the moral virtues of Greek philosophy and the Christian virtues mentioned by Saint Paul at the end of 1st Corinthians 13. The cardinal virtues were justice, temperance, fortitude and prudence (interestingly this last was one of Aristotle’s intellectual virtues), and above them were the theological virtues of faith, hope and love. It might be possible for a noble pagan to display the cardinal virtues to some degree, but only a true believer could possess the theological virtues.

For Christians, then, true and eternal happiness involved the possession of both the theological and the moral virtues. As the writer of Hebrews said, “Without holiness, no one will see the Lord” (12:14). The purpose of life, and therefore the ultimate purpose of education as well, consists in the cultivation of moral and spiritual virtues for the enjoyment of eternal happiness. Of course, for Christians this happiness must be God-centered; it is the beatific vision of God himself that wells up in eternal joy for the everlasting life of the believer. Or as the Westminster Catechism has it, “What is the chief end of man? To glorify God and enjoy him forever.” And while salvation is in some sense future, the beginning of the happiness associated with eternal life in Christ is available in part to the believer even now through the process of sanctification. Holiness leads to happiness.

For Aristotle, on the other hand, eudaimonia is attained through the godlike cultivation of excellence in this life alongside good fortune and good friends. Active pursuit of the moral and intellectual virtues, without much emphasis on piety or spiritual virtues, seems for him to sum up the happy life. This life of contemplation, fortune and friends may be godlike but it does not focus upon God. Aristotle’s conception of happiness by excellence certainly leaves something wanting, but perhaps we can see it as providing a part of which the full Christian revelation is the whole. 

Where Have All the Intellectual Virtues Gone?

While Aristotle certainly has the greater lack (the centrality of God in human happiness), perhaps I am not going too far out of bounds to suggest that the traditional Chrstian virtue paradigm is missing something. Moral and spiritual virtues have been well accounted for, but what of intellectual virtues? Do they play no part in the Christian’s happy life? Of course, there is a rich Christian theme of relativizing the intellect to the spirit. And in light of Aristotle’s neglect of the spirit, we can easily see why the apostle Paul would say things like, “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up” (1 Cor 8:1). Or why he would elaborate in detail on the folly of the cross over against the wisdom of the world in 1 Corinthians 1:18-25. On the other hand, Paul does conclude that section by stating that “the foolishness of God is wiser than men,” and he goes on to claim that he and the other apostles do indeed impart “among the mature” a “secret and hidden wisdom of God” (2:6, 7). So perhaps the Bible finds more of a place for the intellect in the happiness equation than we might think. 

In fact, it is worth asking the extent to which the spiritual, intellectual and moral are overlapping and interpenetrating categories for Paul. We might say that, rather than excluding the intellectual virtues from the equation, the introduction of the spiritual reframes the nature of the intellect just as it does the heart. As he explains,

What we are saying is not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual things in spiritual words. But the soulish man [“natural” ESV, but perhaps we should think of Aristotle’s soul-focused paradigm even in the Nicomachean Ethics] does not receive the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness to him and he is not able to understand them, because they are spiritually evaluated. But the spiritual person evaluates all things, but he himself is evaluated by no one. For “who has known the intuition [Greek nous] of the Lord, who will teach him?” But we have the intuition of Messiah. (1 Cor 2:13-16, orig. trans.)

The spiritual frame provides an entirely new source and measure of evaluation for moral and intellectual categories. While hundreds of years and the introduction of various usages may have obscured the definitions of these words, perhaps it is not without significance that Paul is here using the words for two of Aristotle’s intellectual virtues in Greek, sophia or philosophic wisdom, and nous or the understanding of first principles that is wisdom’s necessary forerunner. Although more digging might be necessary to determine the extent to which Paul’s use of nous conforms to Aristotle’s definition of perceiving first principles, we can at least conclude from this passage that spiritual and intellectual virtues are not, for Paul, in the end contradictory.

Divine revelation and the Spirit of God may revolutionize the content of intellectual virtues even from their very starting points in perception of the world and human reasoning, but it is not as if wisdom and understanding are done away with. In fact, we might say that it is at the level of our intuition, the starting point for proper reasoning, that the greatest shifts have taken place. We have the Messiah’s new and spiritual perception of the world and so we reason from different first principles and even from different particulars. We see the world in a cross-centered way, a God-centered way, and not in a man-centered way. The Greek saying, attributed to Protagoras, “Man is the measure of all things,” has been decisively demolished for the Christian as an intellectual stronghold in a way that even Plato’s transcendentalism could not match.

But the intellectual virtues themselves remain, or more properly are restored. After all, a “worthless intuition” is one of the things that God gave the Gentiles over to in Romans because of their idolatry (1:29). So Christians are “no longer to walk as the Gentiles do in the futility of their intuition” (Eph 4:17), but instead should “be transformed by the renewal of the intuition” (Rom 12:2). In the New Testament, salvation involves the reclaiming of the mind, as much as the heart. And the Spirit of God is the source of this intellectual restoration.

This is no less than we would expect from the example of the Old Testament. For instance, consider the inspiration of Bezalel in his craftsmanship for constructing the holy articles of the tabernacle:

The Lord said to Moses, “See, I have called by name Bezalel the son of Uri, son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, and I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with ability and intelligence, with knowledge and all craftsmanship, to devise artistic designs, to work in gold, silver, and bronze, in cutting stones for setting, and in carving wood, to work in every craft. (Exodus 31:1-5 ESV)

The multiplication of intellectual virtue terminology fused with the language of spiritual filling clearly points to a beautiful harmony between the intellect and the Spirit. In this passage we even have Hebrew words that evoke the whole gamut of intellectual virtues. The word translated ‘ability’ by the ESV is the well-known hokma or wisdom made famous by the book of Proverbs, followed by a word for ‘skill’ or intelligence, knowledge and craftsmanship (think of Aristotle’s techne). This biblical support for the role of intellectual virtues could, of course, be multiplied from the book of Proverbs itself, which sees wisdom as a tree of life and more valuable than any earthly good. In a developed Christian view of sanctification, then, we would do well not to neglect the intellectual virtues.

A Christian, Classical Purpose of Education

We can then propose the active cultivation of the moral, intellectual and spiritual virtues as the proper purpose of life. And therefore, education’s grand goal is itself the same as that of Christian discipleship: the preparation for eternity through the cultivation of holiness in all aspects of life. While the biblical conception of holiness may not be confined to the pursuit of moral, intellectual and spiritual virtues, it certainly includes it. After all, Peter himself instructs us to add to our faith virtue, and to virtue add knowledge (see 2 Peter 1:5), perhaps deliberately endorsing the spiritual, moral and intellectual realms. 

We can compare this trifold purpose of education with that of John Amos Comenius, the great Czech Christian educational reformer of the 17th century. In his Great Didactic he argues that this life is but a preparation for eternity, since as we have said, “the ultimate end of man is eternal happiness with God” (p. 36; trans. by Keatinge). As creatures made in the image of God, human beings are rational creatures, stewards of creation and the image and glory of their creator (p. 36):

From this it follows that man is naturally required to be: (1) acquainted with all things; (2) endowed with power over all things and over himself; (3) to refer himself and all things to God, the source of all.

Now, if we wish to express these three things by three well-known words, these will be

(i.) Erudition.

(ii.) Virtue or seemly morals.

(iii.) Religion or piety.

Under Erudition we comprehend the knowledge of all things, arts, and tongues, under Virtue, not only of external decorum, but the whole disposition of our movements, internal and external; while by Religion we understand that inner veneration by which the mind of man attaches and binds itself to the supreme Godhead. (pp. 37-38)

Comenius later sums up these three goals of Christian education, which is intended to prepare students both for this life and the life to come, under the titles of learning, virtue and piety. The first would correspond to the cultivation of intellectual virtues, the second to moral virtues, and the last to spiritual virtues. These three areas fulfill man’s nature and fit him for eternal happiness with God. 

But what of Aristotle’s concern for good fortune and good friends to constitute human happiness in this life? The role of earthly goods is relativized to the point of insignificance by the introduction of God and eternity into the equation. The excellences of the body (being born with good looks or good health… remember that the intellectual virtues would cover bodily skill and the moral virtues proper care of the body) are excluded as “extrinsic ornaments” and not ultimately necessary to eternal happiness in light of the resurrection. Learning, virtue and piety are the proper goals of Christian, classical education:

In these three things is situated the whole excellence of man, for they alone are the foundation of the present and of the future life. All other things (health, strength, beauty, riches, honour, friendship, good-fortune, long life) are as nothing, if God grant them to any, but extrinsic ornaments of life, and if a man greedily gape after them, engross himself in their pursuit, occupy and overwhelm himself with them to the neglect of those more important matters, then they become superfluous vanities and harmful obstructions. (pp. 37-38)

Comenius’ reframing of these age-old philosophical questions in Christian terms provides a solid foundation for our restoration of Aristotle’s intellectual virtues as proper goals of education. The intellect is not the entire story, but it should be situated over the heart and under the superior direction of the Spirit. 

In Christian education, the ornaments of life can be relativized in a way that is impossible from the standpoint of mere classical education. Test scores and advancement, money and influence, fame and success are not the proper goals of a truly Christian education, because they are liable to becoming “superfluous vanities and harmful obstructions”; that said, they may serve as helpful sign-posts and markers along the way, as long as our true goals remain clearly in view: moral, intellectual and spiritual virtue, for the eternal enjoyment of God himself. It is in this context that we can then explore the cultivation of Aristotle’s intellectual virtues as part of the purpose of a truly Christian, classical education.

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In this series on child development, I will take a look at a few of these matters bridging historical debates with modern research on topics such as the nature of the mind, the stages a child goes through as it develops and the goals or purposes of child development. Along the way I will also have in view practical take aways that will enable us to make the most of our resources as teachers creating optimal learning environments for our students. In this first part, we will tackle the issue of what the mind knows and how it knows.

We begin by going all the way back to Plato and Aristotle. What we will see is that they come to different conclusions about the mind, especially with regard to how the mind comes to know things. In a previous post I looked at some of the neuro biology of the mind, using Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows as a point of departure. Now we can go way back in time to see how the mind was thought of by a couple of classical thinkers. Plato will assert that knowledge is innate, whereas Aristotle will contend that the mind is a blank slate and knowledge comes to the mind from the eternal world. We’ll take a long look at Plato and Aristotle, since they initiate the long debate about how the mind acquires knowledge. Along the way we will see that despite their differences, both situate their understanding of the mind within a broader context of educational goals. The virtuous citizen is the goal. For one, virtue is innate and must be drawn out. For the other virtue must be acquired through habituating the mind in the direction of virtue.

Plato on the Innate Mind

Plato addresses education primarily in two works, Republic and Laws. In his Republic, a system of education is outlined that would best support a just and orderly city-state. This Socratic dialogue devotes much space to the means and ends of educating everyone in society, yet the ultimate goal of education is to create a ruling class composed of guardians and philosophers. Plato’s Laws was written later in life and is a dialogue with an Athenian stranger. Like Republic, education is considered to be foundational to a properly just and ordered society. A summary statement occurs in Laws 643e, “the education we speak of is training from childhood in goodness (ἀρετή), which makes a man eagerly desirous of becoming a perfect citizen, understanding how both to rule and be ruled righteously” (trans. R.G. Bury [Harvard University Press, 1967]).

For Plato, the chief end of education was to create a ruling class that would ensure the freedom of society. “Our Guardians were to be freed from all forms of manual work; their function was to be the expert provision of freedom for our state” (Republic 395b-c; trans. H.D.P. Lee, [Penguin, 2003]). In order to promote these ends, virtue or arete was the purpose of education. In order for society to be free, its leaders must understand and practice virtue. Plato considered it essential that all children receive education, even though it was only the males of the ruling class that would go on to advanced study in mathematics and philosophy. So there is something democratic in Plato’s view on education (education for all children) that eventually funnels into something much more aristocratic.

Plato divided educational stages into three basic groupings. In primary or elementary education, students would learn music and gymnastics. Around the age of 18 students would then enter into military training. Then around 20 select students would enter into higher education studying mathematics, astronomy, musical theory, logic, metaphysics and so forth. It seems that Plato desired all children, even girls, to participate in primary education, although whether that was applied in practice is difficult to tell. In Plato’s thinking, we can see the emergence of something like stages of development leading to a stratification of education into three levels of education: primary, secondary and higher education. We will keep this three-fold division of education stages in mind in anticipation of part two in this series, which will delve deeper into stages of child development.

The rationale behind Plato’s understanding of primary education is worth exploring. In Laws (2.653d) Plato posits that children are like the young of other animals in that they are incapable of “keeping either its body or its tongue quiet.” This is why the primary mode of education should occur through singing in choir and dancing. “The well-educated man will be able both to sing and dance well” (Laws 2.654b). The proviso is that the person should sing good songs and dance good dances (2.654c). We can relate this back to Plato’s general understanding of education as aimed at virtue in The Republic where he posits that the child ought to have presented to them good speech (εὐλογία), good music (εὐαρμοστία), good forms of dance (εὐσχημοσύνη) and good rhythms (εὐρυθμία) in order that the mind and character of the child be well formed (Republic 3.400d-e).

Now what Plato proposes as the central method of education is mimesis, or the art of imitation. One key passage will suffice to convey his thought here. When a person is presented with items of eternal goodness and beauty “he will endeavor to imitate them and, as far as may be, to fashion himself in their likeness and assimilate himself to them” (Republic 6.500c). Thus, if a person is to be made into a virtuous creature, it is imperative that there is virtuous material for that individual to imitate. They become like the virtuous thing, which is why they must be presented with good speech, music, dances and rhythms.

I think Plato’s idea of imitation or mimesis has merit to it. We can perceive the connection between mimesis and narration, for instance. When we narrate or tell back, we are imitating and assimilating great ideas along the lines of what Plato envisioned. To learn more about the classical background to narration, see Jason’s second article in his series on the history of narration. I also appreciate how the CiRCE Institute has raised awareness of mimetic teaching as a method in the classical Christian movement. However, we might question Plato’s view of the child as dismissive of the child’s true potential. The view of the child is that it is a being that is not fully adult. In many respects this is true; many of the capacities of adulthood are absent in the child. But as we explore this concept of child development, Plato represents a particular view of the child as not adult and therefore lacking in some way.

Vocational Training or True Education?

There is much value in pausing here to consider a key aspect of Plato’s educational program. In Laws, Plato begins his analysis of education by looking at vocational training. He recommends, for instance, that a good builder should be directed to play with toy houses in the nursery (643b-c). This kind of vocational training enables the worker to be happy and possess mastery in a trade (643d). Plato then pivots to a definition of true education. If it was granted that the most happy and skilled craftsman was presented with miniature tools in the nursery, how much more would a virtuous citizen be trained to maintain a good state if presented with virtue in the nursery?

Based on his consideration of Plato’s Laws, Andrew Domanski provides a scathing comparison of Plato’s principles of true education and modernist education. Domanski writes:

“Plato insists on value-based education from the very outset. In so doing, he provides a moral and ethical impetus which is almost entirely absent from today’s secular systems of education. The general absence of Platonic virtue from modern early education goes a long way towards explaining the ills that increasingly beset our societies.”

Domanski, “Principles of Early Education in Plato’s ‘Laws,’” Acta Classica, vol. 50, 2007, p. 71.

As we consider how classical education seeks to renew lost educational principles, Domanski’s remark poignantly addresses a key critique we share. The failure of the modernist educational experiment has left generations adrift in a tempestuous ocean without any light to guide the way. The reduction of education to vocational training, Domanski argues, is not true education in the Platonic sense.

“It is clear by now that the bulk of what we call education today is, in Platonic terms, little more than vocational training. It follows that the majority of highly skilled professionals (for example doctors, engineers, nuclear scientists and economists), who have not received intensive early instruction in virtue, must be regarded as uneducated in Platonic terms. Conversely, a street-sweeper or labourer who has received early instruction in civic and moral values, would be considered to be education in the true, Platonic sense” (“Principles,” p. 72).

It is difficult to swim against this stream. Many students and parents come to us with the assumption that true education is merely vocational training. Many of us in our educational renewal movement were raised in this cultural assumption, making it difficult to not let the classroom collapse into mere vocational training. That’s why we need not only to train in virtue, but also to be advocates for a virtue-based education.

Aristotle and the Blank Slate

Aristotle inherited many of the views on education Plato put forward. In many respects, Aristotle’s views are nuances of Plato. For instance, Aristotle views the goal of education as happiness. Aristotle highly esteems virtue along with honor, pleasure and intelligence, but one pursues these for the sake of happiness (εὐδαιμονία) whereas one does not choose happiness in order to pursue virtue (Nic. Eth. 1097b). Now regarding happiness or eudaimonia, Aristotle puts forward that true happiness is conceived as the good life, which we might also call a life well lived. Aristotle considers that all people would agree that it is the good life that produces true happiness, but that what constitutes this happiness is a matter of dispute (Nic. Eth. 1095a). So from the outset, Plato and Aristotle are not in fundamental disagreement about the goal of education, they simply are emphasizing what we might consider two sides of the same coin. Virtue and living the good life go hand in hand, with both being necessary to promote a civil society.

Another development Aristotle puts forward is the role habit plays in education. He proposes that intellectual virtue comes about through instruction, whereas “moral or ethical virtue is produced by habit” (Nic. Eth. 1103a). Aristotle sees an etymological connection between the words ethic (ἠθική) and habit (ἔθος). A student is therefore to gain moral virtues through repeated exercises that build the character of the individual. You can read more about Aristotle’s view of habits in Jason’s article “Excellence Comes by Habit.” In addition, you can download my eBook “A Guide to Implementing Habit Training.”

Like Plato, Aristotle divided a child’s educational program into three stages. Aristotle’s view of the child was less animistic, as he included alongside music and gymnastic reading, writing and drawing. There was still a belief in the limitations of the child, however, with higher intellectual pursuits reserved for males in their twenties. Between the primary level of education, which tended to be more mechanical, was the military training of youths as they learned strategy and tactics alongside their military drills. The stages of education in both Plato and Aristotle were not based on a fully articulated understanding of stages of human development, so we will wait for the next article to really dive into this matter.

The main point of debate between Plato and Aristotle comes not in the layout of their educational program, but in their view of the nature of the child’s mind. For Plato, all knowledge is innate, residing in the mind of the individual from birth. The role of education is therefore to unlock this innate knowledge through recollection or remembering. Because the soul is immortal, it has this connection to knowledge so that it is possible to discover what we do not know by courageous inquiry (Plato, Meno 86a-b). Plato illustrates this by Socrates questioning a slave boy and helping him discover his innate knowledge of a geometrical concept (Meno 84d-85b).

Aristotle, however, views the mind not as a storehouse of innate knowledge, but as a blank slate or tabula rasa. The mind of the child is like any other sense organ in that it is acted upon by outside forces. So one can write upon this blank slate by helping the child to acquire knowledge by learning and discovery (Aristotle, De Anima, III.4-7). Unlike Plato, who thinks education is the process of unlocking innate knowledge, Aristotle views education as the process of acquiring knowledge. This has been a longstanding debate for educational theorists down the ages.

The Enlightenment Dead End

The debate between blank slate theory and innate knowledge took on new energy during the Enlightenment. Rationalism had prevailed during the Renaissance era as a new humanistic impulse highlighted the role of human rational faculties as the sole source of knowledge over and against divine revelation. We can trace certain elements of the secularization of Western society to this transition, even though the rationalism of the Renaissance was one of the contributing factors to religious renewal during the Reformation.

Having already devoted so much space to Plato and Aristotle, we will rush our way through the major voices in the Rationalism/Empiricism debate. Several of these figures address education at length, and at some point I should come back to any number of them to further develop their nuanced take on education and learning. For now, however, the aim of this brief traipse through the Enlightenment is to see how blank slate and innate theories took on new emphases. In particular, we will see how both theories became divorced from the goal of education to form learners into virtuous individuals.

The Enlightenment questioned whether human rational thought was indeed the source of knowledge, pitting several figures against one another. Rationalists such as Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz were contested by Empiricists like Bacon, Locke and Hume. A new emphasis on scientific method placed more confidence in sensory experience as the true source of knowledge, placing doubt on the role of rationality. The concept of the mind and its nature figured prominently in this debate.

René Descartes (1596-1650), regarded as the father of modern philosophy, argued that ideas are innate, divinely supplied and accessed through the application of logic. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1678), on the other hand, was an early proponent of empiricism, believing that human behavior can largely be explained materialistically. Ideas, he posited, are external to the human mind. This combination of materialism and non-innate ideas meant that Hobbes viewed though, imagination and memory as instances of sense experience working on the matter of the brain.

John Locke (1632-1704) took up the debate, directly opposing Descartes’s view of the mind, believing the mind to be devoid of all ideas at birth. It is experiences acquired through sense that become imprinted on the mind. Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) then categorically critiques Locke point by point. He posits that universally assented truisms must be innate. Anyone not assenting to a universal truth demonstrates that they have not become aware of it, not that it is not innate. This goes against Locke’s idea that universally assented truisms are actually acquired through experience, just that people have forgotten when and where they learned it.

The idea that human knowledge is solely gained through experience is then championed again. David Hume (1711-1776) essentially views human experience as sensate, making us nothing more than a bundle of nerves. For Hume there are no norms, only facts. This move in the empiricist camp moved rapidly toward skepticism. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was a rationalist who took a different view on norms, finding morality to be natural or innate. Surprisingly, though, he proposes that society has a negative influence impinging on the child’s innate perfectibility.

This review of the rationalist/empirical debate is far too succinct, but it lands us in a place where both innate knowledge and blank slate notions are no longer tied to the sense of virtue espoused by Plato and Aristotle. On the one hand, the blank slate theory of the empiricists leaves the individual a mass of sensate nerves, and knowledge as a store of facts disconnected from a sense of “ought.” On the other hand, innate knowledge can be likened to the “noble savage,” or humans in their natural state. Civilization corrupts this innate knowledge in the attempt to indoctrinate the individual with some moral code.

Confronted by Neuro-biology and Cognitive Science

Recently Steven Pinker challenged this state of affairs in his book The Blank Slate: The Denial of Human Nature (2003). Pinker’s concern is that people have committed to a view of human development as a blank slate to explain problems like racism or sexism as learned behaviors. He draws upon advances in neuro-biology and cognitive science to demonstrate that there are elements of the mind that are innate. He points to Noam Chomsky’s theory of language to show that underlying all human language are universal concepts of grammar. There is a certain amount of genetic code that determines, to some extent, cognitive behaviors. Furthermore, the brain has sets of neural networks that preprogram the mind to accomplish different cognitive functions, such as learn language, calculate quantities, or put one thought with another.

Pinker combines this notion of innateness with breakthroughs in neural plasticity to show that even though the mind is not a blank slate, the innate aspect of the mind is not predetermined solely by our genetic code. Yes, genes do a fair bit of work to determine certain outcomes, but genes work with feedback from the environment. Interestingly, the sense perception work that was so powerful an argument for empiricists in the Enlightenment didn’t account for genetic code. What Pinker shows is that aspects of our personality and temperament, which are genetically determined, create something like a sieve that regulates how we interpret our environments. Nature and nurture are working with and against each other, causing our minds to develop in somewhat unpredictable ways. Even though Pinker demonstrates how our minds are composed of far more innate factors that the blank slate accounts for, he also shows how neural plasticity means our brains change as they learn, acquiring new, non-innate knowledge. Pinker’s work, then, seems to move us in the direction of a synthesis of innate and blank slate theory in helpful ways.

One last idea I want to draw out from Pinker, which is why I have devoted so much attention to him, is that in light of the innate yet malleable mind, he demonstrates that morality is a universal. Every culture shares a great deal of common moral code traits. This concept reminds me of Jordan Peterson’s connection between the snake reflex and dragon narratives. Our brains are wired to flinch away from snakes or anything that looks like a snake. This is an innate, hard-wired reflex that requires no conscious thought. If we were to see, think and then react, we would already be bitten by the snake. This deep neurological structure is something Peterson connects to a universal fascination with dragon narratives. It seems that just about every culture has stories of heroes confronting dragons to rescue the maiden. What Peterson is observing is something that seems to be universal in every culture and that has a basis in our neurological brain structure. This corresponds well with what Pinker is talking about. Whereas the result of the Enlightenment project left us with a material brain and no virtue, Pinker has applied recent science to show a more nuanced understanding of the human mind connected with virtue.

Practical Take Aways

Having walked this long road through philosophy and theory, let’s consider a few practical results of this study of how the mind develops. First, we see how theories of the mind brought us to a fairly destitute place devoid of values. As an educational renewal movement, we can now understand that the goal toward which the mind is developed is a value-rich end. We are cultivating virtues. Certain aspects of virtue are inherent in the child, while others require us to bring virtuous knowledge into contact with the mind. We can agree with Plato that courage already resides in the person and only needs to be unlocked. But we can also agree with Aristotle that a truly courageous person is one who is practiced in courage, who has formed the habit of courage. Let us not shy way from connecting learning to values.

Second, the mind seems to come preprogrammed for learning and that certain avenues of learning are optimal for acquiring new knowledge. I was struck by this quote from Charlotte Mason which seems to anticipate some of Pinker’s conclusions:

“I have so far urged that knowledge is necessary to men and that, in the initial stages, it must be conveyed through a literary medium, whether it be knowledge of physics or of Letters, because there would seem to be some inherent quality in mind which prepares it to respond to this form of appeal and no other. I say in the initial stages, because possibly, when the mind becomes conversant with knowledge of a given type, it unconsciously translates the driest formulae into living speech.”

Charlotte Mason, Towards a Philosophy of Education, pp. 333-334

Notice how she finds that the mind has a certain “inherent quality” that enable the mind to acquire knowledge. That quality is a literary bent. The mind really likes story. So when presenting new information, embedding that knowledge in story form optimizes learning. I think this is why a vast majority of Scripture is in narrative form and why children love to hear stories. Let us not shy away from placing before our children great stories full of rich ideas and noble values.

Finally, the notion that children are persons takes on new significance when we realize that their minds are composed of innate qualities and yet are capable of learning much new knowledge. When we consider how children are beings with genetic data and predispositions but are also beings capable to tremendous change, there is a sense of marvel we should have when beholding a child. When we educate there is untapped potential that will grow and learn regardless of our influence on the child. In this way the teacher really needs to get out of the way so that the child can flourish. But because the child can also be molded, we as teachers must be careful to place before the child that which is worthy of his or her attention. Let us not shy away from promoting a growth mindset among our children.

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

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

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

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

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The notable weakness of the supervisor-driven approach is that it is…supervisor-driven. Growing as a professional entails two crucial components: increasing in one’s knowledge of the particular field and increasing in self-awareness of one’s performance in that field. As long as the principal is setting the goals, observing teachers in their classrooms, and giving feedback, the teacher remains a largely passive rather than active participant in her professional development. 

In this blog series, I am exploring insights from Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion 2.0 for the classical classroom. Lemov is a field expert in the charter school movement and has worked tirelessly over the years to bridge the achievement gap in inner-city schools. While he may not be operating with a classical education framework in mind, at EdRen we have found many of his techniques to be beneficial for the classical classroom all the same. In this blog, I will examine Lemov’s insights on professional development, especially the importance of a teacher and data-driven approach that allows teachers to own their own development.

The Desire to Grow

In Part 1: An Introduction of this blog series, I began by clarifying some key concepts. I explained that classical education is intent on making better humans; it is, therefore, a humanizing education, one that views students as persons and not merely economic producers. Humans have minds, hearts, souls, and bodies, and each of these components need educating. As important as job training is, it does not sufficiently prepare someone to live a deep and meaningful life. Students need significant servings of truth, goodness, and beauty to feed their hungry minds, nourish their souls, and guide their decision-making. Kevin Clark, a thought leader in the movement, goes so far as to say that he views his chief job as “to lead souls with words.”

If classical schools are going to strive for such a laudable aim, then professional development is crucial. The heartbeat of any school is its faculty and, in particular, the ability of the faculty to teach. By “teach,” of course, I don’t mean merely the dissemination of information. I mean the conscious act of leading students to pursue wisdom through cultivating virtue and engaging in disciplined mental and physical training. This is no easy task; it requires a unique combination of tact, resolve, confidence, empathy, and, perhaps most importantly, a desire to grow personally. 

You see, a teacher won’t get very far in leading his students to pursue wisdom if he himself hasn’t set off on the journey. Like Frodo Baggins in The Fellowship of the Ring, students need a mentor to imitate. Someone older and wiser. For Frodo, of course, it was his Uncle Bilbo. When Frodo was twelve-years old, he went to live in Bag End with his uncle, following an unexpected family tragedy. During those formative years, Bilbo taught Frodo the Elvish language and much of the lore of the Middle-Earth. But most importantly, Bilbo and Frodo lived together, giving Frodo the rare opportunity, especially for a hobbit, of doing life with someone who had been on an adventure. When the time came for Frodo to set out on an adventure of his own, Frodo already had an image in his mind of the way forward. Although neither Bilbo nor Frodo realized it at the time, their many years together forged the very path on which Frodo would one day tread. 

Like Frodo, students need to experience life with older and wiser men and women who are on the pathway of virtue. These mentors, called teachers in school parlance, embody the growth mindset and desire to grow personally even as they help their pupils grow.

Field Experts and Master Craftsmen

But in order for teachers to embody this growth mindset and truly desire to grow personally, they need to be supported to drive their own development. The supervisor-approach is insufficient for this aim. I am not suggesting, of course, that teachers should operate autonomously. They need mentors themselves to lend support, provide feedback, and formally evaluate progress gained. But the administrator-teacher dynamic should always be oriented toward empowering the teacher to drive her own development.

When it comes to developing classroom instruction in particular, Doug Lemov demonstrates in Teach Like a Champion 2.0 that the data-driven approach, culled by the teacher, is superior. He argues that this approach, “…considers teachers not just as recipients and implementers of the field knowledge, but as creators of it–problem-solvers, entrepreneurs, generators of the professional insight. It makes teachers intellectuals” (8). Imagine with Lemov if teachers viewed themselves as field experts in the craft of teaching. This self-understanding would lead to all sorts of exciting possibilities for driving one’s personal growth.

Another analogy that is helpful here is that of craftsmanship. In Cal Newport’s book So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Newport argues that in a knowledge economy, a successful professional must adopt the mindset of a craftsman. Rather than subscribing to the modern myth of “follow your passion,” knowledge workers should focus their time and attention on cultivating rare and valuable skills. They should obsess over how they can add value in a particular industry. Imagine again if teachers took on this mindset. They wouldn’t feel comfortable passively waiting for the next classroom observation. They would constantly be on the hunt, looking for the next best resource or technique that will enhance their effectiveness as teachers.

Ideology-Driven Guidance

As I mentioned in my first article, Lemov suggests that there are generally three drivers of advice that administrators give to teachers. The first form is ideology-driven. This advice tends to focus on some predetermined vision of what a classroom should look like and is often manifested by a checklist for teachers to follow. While this approach to coaching teachers can be helpful, ultimately, we must acknowledge that it is supervisor-driven. Too quickly, the teacher can become overly focused on teaching to please an administrator, rather than teaching for the growth of her students.

In the classical school movement, we can too easily settle for this kind of advice. We articulate our vision for a classical education, distill it into a checklist, and visit different classrooms to cross the items off. “Teaches Latin for forty minutes. Check. Leads a discussion on C.S. Lewis. Check. Asks questions rather than dominates through lecture. Check.”

The problem with this approach to teacher guidance, Lemov points out, is twofold. First, it puts the supervisor in the driver seat. The checklist is a thought product created and implemented by administration with no meaningful contribution offered by the teacher. Second, it unnecessarily privileges ideology over outcomes. To be clear, both our necessary, and ideology-driven guidance unduly neglects the latter.

Research-Driven Guidance

The second driver of advice tends to be research. Lemov ranks this approach higher than ideology-driven, but acknowledges that it, too, is not without its problems. He provides a litany of concerns about blindly following research:

“If research supports a particular action, does that mean you should always perform that action, to the exclusion of everything else, or should you combine it with other things? How often, in what settings, and with what other actions? And how do you meld them?…There’s a lot of research out there of varying quality, and even useful parts are interpreted with a mix of good sense, cautious fidelity, outright distortion, and blind orthodoxy. This can result in ‘research’ justifying poor teaching as easily as good.” (7)

Research is helpful, but only when it is analyzed and adapted by professionals to achieve a specific goal. All too often we hear “Research states…” and we are expected to blindly assent, especially in light of the scientistic world we live in. The reality is that research is conducted in a particular time and place, and therefore any principles gleaned must be implemented and studied in its future applied context. Like ideology, research can be disconnected from outcomes, and lead to ineffective results.

Data-Driven Guidance

The third driver of advice for teachers and the one Lemov ultimately endorses is data-driven guidance. This approach is based “…not on what should happen but on what did happen when success was achieved” (7). For Lemov, success is determined by state test scores controlled for poverty (14). After identifying the schools who performed exceptionally well on these exams, Lemov and his team visited these schools to study how those teachers approached teaching, relationships, lesson-planning, and so on.

Now, as classical educators, we are right to bristle at this notion of success. We understand that success isn’t reducible to a state test score. To a certain extent, even Lemov agrees with this, which is partially why I find his writing so refreshing. Lemov’s point isn’t state test scores. It is data. Lemov writes,

“Even if you disagree with my conclusions, whether you are a teacher or a leader in charge of a school, a school district, a state, or a nation, you can use a data-driven approach to take your best shot at measuring the outcome you think is most valuable, finding its best practitioners, and inferring guidance from their work” (8). 

As classical educators, we need to hone in on the outcomes we think are most valuable and then follow Lemov’s advice to identify and study the master craftsmen in achieving those outcomes. We did this a few years ago at the school I work at. We noticed that year after year one particular teacher helped her class perform excellent poetry and scripture recitations, regardless of the perceived strength or weakness of a particular class. We studied her technique and asked her to catalogue what she believed contributed most towards the excellent result.

The final product was a training document full of techniques that we now use year after year. And as a side benefit, the process of analyzing and discussing what made for a strong recitation coaching lesson led to a unique spirit of camaraderie amongst the faculty. Lemov himself confirms this benefit, writing, “Teaching, as it turns out, is a team sport, where teachers make each other better fastest by building robust cultures where they study and share insights about their work” (14).

Conclusion

In my next installment in this series, I’ll begin to examine the various techniques revealed through Lemov’s data-driven approach. Interestingly, one of the fascinating observations about many of the techniques is how simple they are to implement. To this point, Lemov offers this caution:

“Many of the techniques you will read about in this book may at first seem mundane, unremarkable, and even disappointing. They are not always especially innovative. They are not always intellectually startling. They sometimes fail to march in step with educational theory. But they work. As a result, they yield an outcome that more than compensates for their occasionally humble appearance.” (10)

By “educational theory,” of course, he means modern educational theory. He has in mind the sorts of theories dependent on the premise that education practices must be hip, innovative, quantifiable, or techy for them to be effective. But as Lemov himself pointed out, that’s not the direction the data points. Instead, often the data pointed toward practices of simplicity, ones that simply call on students to do the work of learning. These practices include forms of retrieval practice, akin to narration, as well as instilling finely tuned classroom routines, akin to elements of habit training.

At the end of the day, as teachers set out on the path of owning their own growth, may they be driven, not by test scores, hip techniques, or even simplicity, but Lady Wisdom herself.

Questions for Classical Educators 

Doug Lemov has given us a lot to think about. I would love to hear responses from readers and even invite you to brainstorm with me some answers to the following questions:

• How should classical educators measure success and successful teaching?
• What practices are consistently present in successful teaching?
• How do we equip teachers to be field experts, the generators of knowledge and professional insight on successful teaching?

Thanks for reading! Please respond in the comment section below! 

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Broadly speaking, I like how Waitzkin frames the book from the vantage point of the learner. As educators, we can become immersed in the headspace of the teacher as we work on our craft. This in itself is a good thing, since there’s much to practice and hone as teachers. But Waitzkin’s book provides a helpful reminder that the work of the student learning is our primary goal. He gives ample insight into his own learning, first as a chess player (he was the subject of the book and subsequent movie Searching for Bobby Fischer), then as a martial artist, becoming a world champion in Tai Chi. While Waitzkin is a top performer in multiple (and disparate) fields, the book focuses more on the process of learning, only incidentally referring to his accomplishments. As we’ll see below, process is way more important that results.

Jason has written extensively on the concept of flow.

(See The Flow of Thought series: Part 1: Training the Attention for Happiness’ Sake; Part 2: The Joy of Memory; Part 3: Narration as Flow; Part 4: The Seven Liberal Arts as Mental Games; Part 5: The Play of Words; Part 6: Becoming Amateur Historians; Part 7: Rediscovering Science as the Love of Wisdom.)

This is a major concept that weaves through Waitzkin’s book. While some readers might not take on board some of his examples from Eastern mysticism, much of what he writes about illustrates and exemplifies how important flow is to top performance as a learner. (For what it’s worth, and perhaps this can be a future article, for almost every point at which Waitzkin draws upon Eastern ideas, I was able to think of a biblical passage that effectively communicated the same concept. For instance, Waitzkin beautifully describes the child-like nature of learning [p. 80], which reminded me of Matthew 18:3 “unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”)

This book is a great read, and I encourage you to read it thoroughly for yourself. Here I will unpack four principles that are central to Waitzkin’s understanding of the art of learning. If you’ve been following Educational Renaissance for some time, you will hear many resonances with articles we’ve written elsewhere. The four principles are growth mindset, deliberate practice, discipline AND love, and routines.

The Art of Learning Principle 1: Fixed vs. Growth Mindset

Carol Dweck is best known for her book Mindset. So it was interesting to see Waitzkin draw upon her work to describe a key aspect of his own learning (Art of Learning, pp. 30-33). Dweck argues that individuals can be placed on a spectrum of views pertaining to their own intelligence. Those adopting a fixed (or entity) mindset view their intelligence as an innate quality. For instance, the student who thinks, “Well, I’m not good at math,” has adopted the fixed mindset. The liability is that the individual perceives herself as something that will be perpetuated into the future, which short-circuits growth. Contrast this with the growth (or incremental) mindset in which the individual takes on the view of self as in a state of development. It’s important to note that these mindsets aren’t adopted consciously, and an individual needs to be observed to determine where they fall on this fixed vs. growth spectrum. The reflective learner, though, once their mindset has been identified, can modulate towards the growth mindset.

Waitzkin draws out an important point from Dweck’s work, which is the learner’s response to failure. He writes:

Children who associate success with hard work tend to have a “mastery-oriented response” to challenging situations, while children who see themselves as just plain “smart” or “dumb,” or “good” or “bad” at something, have a “learned helplessness orientation.”

Art of Learning, p. 30

What Waitzkin is talking about is how fixed-mindset students want to avoid failure because it is received as a definition of their innate ability, whereas the growth-mindset student invests in failure because it reveals an area for growth–a place where the student is not at the level they want to be at yet. The “mastery-oriented response” means that the student sees initial failure as a challenge to work hard toward mastery.

At a later point, Waitzkin develops the idea of “investment in loss” that expands upon the growth mindset (pp. 107-113). It can be difficult to take on a growth mindset in part because it hurts when our pride gets bruised due to failure. We want to resist the learning process, finding it easier to adopt a fixed mindset and assume that’s just the way it is. He writes,

“In order to grow, he needs to give up his current mind-set. He needs to lose to win.” (p. 107)

Giving yourself to the learning process means that the learner must actually embrace loss and failure. Failure leads to humility as our pride is chipped away. Failure also leads to growth, step by step. Adopting the growth mindset means accepting the long journey to maximizing one’s ability in any given field. Yet more often than not, we are operating at suboptimal levels. That’s just the nature of life. As Waitzkin states,

“It is essential to have a liberating incremental approach that allows for times when you are not in a peak performance state.” (p. 113)

In other words, the growth mindset can simultaneously recognize that one is not working at the top level and still invest in the opportunity for growth.

A corollary to the fixed vs. growth mindset is the result vs. process approach. Waitzkin, who is a top performer in multiple fields, believes that results are harder to come by when you are results oriented. Instead, we should focus on setting up a “process-first approach” (pp. 44-47). I’ve heard other performance experts talk about setting systems rather than setting goals for long-term success. What I appreciate about Waitzkin is that he balances both result and process approaches. He writes,

“While a fixation on results is certainly unhealthy, short-term goals can be useful developmental tools if they are balanced within a nurturing long-term philosophy.” (p. 44)

So as teachers, we can set small benchmarks to track progress, but these benchmarks should not detract from the sense that we are establishing a process or system.

The Art of Learning Principle 2: Deliberate Practice

Anders Ericsson is a pioneer in high performance research and is perhaps the first to express the idea that the key to expert performance rests not in innate qualities but in extended periods of deliberate practice. He writes in an article published in Psychological Review,

“We argue that the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.” (1993, Vol. 100. No. 3, pg. 400)

Deliberate practice has obvious connections to the growth mindset, so it’s not surprising to find Waitzkin incorporating concepts of deliberate practice.

Learning effectively takes time. As Waitzkin describes sessions of deep absorption in the world of chess, he provides us with an image of the kind of learning students need to take on board in order to become really effective in any domain.

“Sometimes the study would take six hours in one sitting, sometimes thirty hours over a week. I felt like I was living, breathing, sleeping in that maze, and then, as if from nowhere, all the complications dissolved and I understood.” (Art of Learning, pg. 74)

The satisfaction and joy of understanding is a profound experience, but it only comes after time spent in deep work. Waitzkin expresses the concept of deliberate practice as “numbers to leave numbers.” When we are confronted with highly technical information, it needs to be assimilated in such a way that it becomes integrated into our intuition. A concert pianist doesn’t think about scales and arpeggios while performing on stage. This would detract from her expression. What we can assume when watching a virtuosic performance is that hours upon hours have been spent internalizing scale patterns so that the finger patters are simply part of her being. There is no thought of scales or of fingerings, simply of music. She has studied scales to leave scales, which is what Waitzkin is expressing here.

As teachers it can be difficult to help students catch the bug of deliberate practice, especially when our goal is not necessarily expert performance in one domain, but merely steady progress in multiple simultaneous domains. Our students are predisposed to be highly motivated in some subjects and less than motivated in others. The joy of understanding feels too remote and hours of deep absorption is the last thing they want to be assigned. Good coaching is one aspect (and we will delve into this below shortly). Another concept that will guide us is reduced complexity.

Waitzkin uses the concept of “smaller circles” to get at this essential idea:

“Over time expansiveness decreases while potency increases. I call this method ‘Making Smaller Circles.’” (p. 120)

Perhaps we can be forgiven of thinking of Mr. Miyagi training Daniel LaRusso with his “wax on, wax off” techniques. Mr. Miyagi was using “smaller circles” by breaking down karate moves to its component parts that were learnable through garden-variety exercises. The vast expanse of knowledge in mathematics, history, literature and science require deliberate practice in order to gain competence, let alone expertise. Such a task is way too overwhelming for a teacher, let alone so many students with different dispositions. Yet, breaking down the complexity into small steps provides a way to train students in deliberate practice. Additionally, some of the complexity occurs because we try to move quickly through content. Some skills, though, are built best when practiced slowly.

“We have to be able to do something slowly before we can have any hope of doing it correctly with speed.” (pg. 120)

As an example, for our students who will be taking AP tests in May, I have them practice a few problems slowly and deliberately early in the training process. This builds certain skills they will need with regard to understanding the nature of multiple choice questions, how to eliminate incorrect answer, how to avoid trick questions, etc. Later they can operate at a more rapid speed because we’ve taken the time to thoroughly comb over a few example questions multiple times. (For what it’s worth, I have mixed feelings about the whole AP enterprise. Forgive me for viewing the College Board as the Galactic Empire.)

A seemingly contradictory concept is “chunking” or “the ability to assimilate large amounts of information into a cluster that is bound together by certain information into a cluster that is bound together by certain patterns or principles particular to a given discipline” (pg. 138). Yes, we want to break massive complexes of information and skills down to small steps absorbed slowly, but we can also recognize that the mind works like a supernetwork to systematize all it knows into meaningful relationships. By letting new information bump up against other closely related information, the brain can absorb it more easily than if it is completely disconnected from everything else.

As educators, we can help our students capitalize on their natural interest in specific domains by connecting other areas of knowledge to those domains. Modern education fractures domains of knowledge into separate arenas. It is no surprise then that students become fractured beings, thinking of themselves as math people or art people. Therefore, we need to provide students a means of putting their being back together again, a unifying theory of reality and existence occurs when we understand all learning as interrelated.

The Art of Learning Principle 3: Discipline AND Love

Waitzkin describes many of his different chess teachers. Some challenged him to become more disciplined while others wanted him to express his natural game. There’s a balance between discipline and love that needs to be considered carefully. In describing his first teacher, Bruce, Waitzkin writes,

“He had to teach me to be more disciplined without dampening my love for chess or suppressing my natural voice. Many teachers have no feel for this balance and try to force their students into cookie-cutter molds.” (p. 9)

This is one of the great tensions all teachers face. We have a tendency to slip to one extreme or the other according to our personalities and propensities (especially when we ourselves are stressed). We need order and we need warmth in the learning environment.

I think the imagery Waitzkin provides by way of his mother beautifully describes the way we as teachers can build an alliance with students. He explains two ways of taming a wild horse. One way is to break it:

“The horse goes through pain, rage, frustration, exhaustion, to near death… then it finally yields.” (p. 86)

This dominance approach can be highly effective, but our response is that something damaging happened to that horse. It lost something of its nature by being broken. An approach defined by extreme discipline lacks love of the beautiful creature being trained.

Waitzkin’s mother, on the other hand, is a “horse whisperer.” The trainer creates an alliance with the horse by petting it, grooming it, stroking it.

“So you guide the horse toward doing what you want to do because he wants to do it.” (p. 87)

Notice that the horse whisperer hasn’t give up all discipline, but the discipline comes through love. Training students takes the same kind of indirect approach of leadership rather than manipulation. If students are going to operate at their best, the can be broken, submitting to the rigors of the system, or they can be groomed to desire for themselves their personal best. When we are growth minded and process oriented as teachers, we can help our students gain for themselves a growth mindset and process approach.

The Art of Learning Principle 4: Routines

The last concept I want to draw out from Waitzkin’s book is the concept of routines. Effective learning occurs when we have established healthy patterns. Imagine what a school day would look like if every student ate right, got to bed on time and ordered their books nicely each day. Waitzkin describes his involvement with the Human Performance Institute in Orlando. We associate the Institute with high caliber performers like Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, so it is striking that they brought in a chess player to study high performance beyond athletics. One of the key concepts gleaned from his experience is the importance of routines.

High performers often incorporate routines as a means to maximize their effectiveness. We often hear of inspiring stories of top athletes who get to practice before their teammates to put in that many more reps that later pay off on the field. These athletes created a routine; the routine of getting to practice early. Effective routines enable top performers to get into the right frame of mind, especially when they have to operate under pressure. As a Chicagoan growing up in the Jordan era, I recalled that Michael Jordan would regularly ask for the ball in clutch situations. He wanted the ball when the game was on the line. He had a winning frame of mind that was cultivated through routines.

Students can create routines that help them to function at their best as learners. Waitzkin advises working backward from the desired state to identify a “trigger” that initiates a four- or five-step routine (p. 188). For example, a student experiences anxiety whenever a test is handed out. She wants to calm herself so that her anxiety doesn’t adversely impact her test. Working backwards from her desired state (calm), she decides that she will take a deep breath, after stretching her arms, after sharpening her pencil, after getting a drink of water. The trigger for this four-step routine is the transition to test time. By laying out this routine, she is taking control of her emotional state with the goal of being in the right frame of mind to do her best on the test.

What Waitzkin is describing here is very similar to what Charlotte Mason teaches about habit training. We gain a vision of some inspiring idea that we would like to attain (for example, focused attention). We delineate a few key steps to the habit. And then we practice that until it is internalized. This is obviously an overly simplified description of Mason’s philosophy, but as teachers one of our primary tools is habit training. We can lovingly enable our students to acquire the discipline to live masterful lives through our support.

Speaking of habit training, a couple weeks ago I finished writing my eBook on habit training! It should be coming out in the next few weeks. So stay tuned. There you will find a much fuller treatment of habit training from a Charlotte Mason perspective.

In the comments let us know how you are applying these concepts (growth mindset, deliberate practice, discipline AND love, and routines) in your work as an educator!

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