Category: Modern Research

The Benefits and Drawbacks of Online Learning: 6 Hacks to Mitigate the Drawbacks

I am no expert on online learning. Before the pandemic and social distancing, I was about as old school a teacher as one could be. True, I required students to type essays in MLA format and even used a PPT to teach them proper formatting on Microsoft Word. But that’s about it. My main technologies in the classroom were whiteboard, marker, books, pen and paper. If that weren’t enough, I have criticized and countenanced criticism of online classes and courses, including those prominent classical education ones. Years ago, when my former head of school told me his grand plan for

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open journal

The Flow of Thought, Part 6: Becoming Amateur Historians

I’ve never been one for journaling. It’s not for lack of trying or admiration for the idea behind the practice. But keeping a journal and writing down my thoughts about myself or what I experienced that day just never caught on for me. I was almost tempted to say that it would have felt too egotistical to me to record my everyday feelings and happenings, but that’s not entirely the truth. I’ve had plenty of egoism to support that; it’s more that the trivialities of most days didn’t strike me as worthy of that sort of memorialization. And so, not

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monopoly game with dog in the dog house

School Is a Game: Finite and Infinite Games in Education

This is a website about education, particularly pertaining to thinking about education differently. Jason, Kolby and I really enjoy discussing educational philosophy, and hopefully you, our readers, enjoy and benefit from our peculiar take on education. In addition to being educational philosophers, we are also teachers – educational practitioners. What we talk about in our weekly posts we are also trying to live out in the classroom every day. Even though we write from a place of deep thought about educational ideals, sometimes the reality of the daily classroom means we get to workshop how those ideals play out with

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True Mastery: The Benefits of Mixed Practice for Learning

“Practice, practice, practice.” This mantra for learning is proclaimed across companies and schools, athletics and the arts. The widely held belief is that the key to mastering a particular skill or gaining new knowledge is relatively straightforward: Practice.  Now, to be sure, practice is important, especially if it rises to the threshold of “deliberate practice,” an intensive approach which Patrick lucidly explained in a past article. He himself warns, however, that the repeated rehearsal of skills can be futile if the three other components of deliberate practice are not in play. Patrick writes, “ We need to be careful with

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The Search for Happiness, Part 2: The Way of Wisdom

In my previous blog, I examined how modern research, particularly through the avenue of positive psychology, confirms some of Aristotle’s insights about human beings and the well-lived life. In particular, I observed that author Shawn Achor’s definition of happiness as “the joy of striving after our potential” isn’t that far afield from Aristotelian virtue theory.  In this blog, I’ll take a closer look at the notion that virtue is the pathway to happiness through exploring the idea that a person’s everyday habits, not choices, are the building blocks for the happy life. Ultimately, I’ll show, however, that good habits are

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words spelled while playing scrabble

The Flow of Thought, Part 5: The Play of Words

“Words, words, words.” Such was the enigmatic reply of Hamlet to Polonius’ question, “What do you read, my lord?” And as always, Hamlet’s feigned madness displays the ironical insight of a verbal sense of humor. After all, what is anyone reading these days, but merely words, words, and more words? Of course, Polonius interprets this as a depressive comment on the meaninglessness of reading, with a unique philosophical twist. But perhaps it can represent for us an important claim regarding the purpose of education in language and the humanities: words are meant to be played with, not merely learned. In

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brain in internet

Habit Formation: You, Your Plastic Mind, and Your Internet

Shallow. Our brains are shallow. Or at least they have become shallow. This is the point Nicholas Carr drives home in his book The Shallows, where he examined the impact the internet has had on the human brain. Almost at the middle crease of the book, he writes: The information flowing into our working memory at any given moment is called our “cognitive load.” When the load exceeds our mind’s ability to store and process the information—when the water overflows the thimble—we’re unable to retain the information or to draw connections with the information already stored in our long-term memory.

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Attention, Then and Now: The Science of Focus Before and After Charlotte Mason’s Time

The importance of attention for education is almost proverbial. Who has not seen the stereotype of a student staring out the window, while the teacher drones on? Movies and TV shows are filled with it. Everybody knows that a wandering attention and a lack of interest hamper a student’s learning. But we haven’t always paid good attention to the dynamics of focus. Michael Hobbiss, a researcher from the UK on attention, distraction and cognitive control in adolescents, remarked in an interview on the Learning Scientists website, that there’s been too much focus among educators on how to grab students’ attention,

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reading book in flow

The Flow of Thought, Part 3: Narration as Flow

It’s been a little while since my last article on the flow of thought, or how Mihayli Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow can support the philosophy of classical education. In the meantime, I’ve shared an early version of my eBook on implementing Charlotte Mason’s practice of narration in the classroom (see our new Narration page for more information). My hope in making this resource is to inspire more classical schools around the country to adopt narration as a teaching tool in the classroom, because I think it’s incredibly powerful. Past installments – Part 1: Training the Attention for Happiness’ Sake, Part

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ancient Greek goddesses of memory

The Flow of Thought, Part 2: The Joy of Memory

In my last article “The Flow of Thought, Part 1: Training the Attention for Happiness’ Sake” I drew a connection between Aristotle’s view that happiness is the chief goal of education and the findings of modern positive psychology. In Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, he reports his findings that people report being most happy when in a state of flow. Flow is his term for the experience of focused effort at some worthwhile pursuit at a level of challenge commensurate with one’s skills. Whether a hobby, work or a meaningful conversation, the experience of flow is immensely rewarding,

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