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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journal on the table for reviewing the year

20 of the Most Memorable Maxims from 2019 Educational Renaissance

The end of the year is a good time to take stock and review how far we’ve come. These last few days I’ve been doing this, both for myself through rereading my bullet journals, but also for Educational Renaissance by rereading all the old articles of 2019 in search of gems of wisdom. Along the way, I was impressed by the unity of thought among the Educational Renaissance writers, as well as the presence of quite a few memorable maxims in the midst of all that dense (or playful) educational theory and practice. A maxim is usually defined as a

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marketing manipulation

Marketing, Manipulations and True Classroom Leadership

Earlier this fall I finished reading Simon Sinek’s Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action. Besides being inspired and challenged in my own leadership, I was deeply taken with his vision for effective marketing or branding: the idea that starting with why the organization exists is the most effective way to inspire excellence and a loyal following. I was first introduced to Simon Sinek by one of my former students. He was working on his Senior Thesis with me, and his topic was the negative ramifications of the smart phone. So naturally he shared with me

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typwriter saying only a writer knows

Writing on Purpose: How Ought We to Instruct Young Writers?

To teach writing is to teach an art form. It takes lots and lots of practice to write well. The way we think about writing can sometimes limit students, so that they don’t gain the practice they need to write effectively. In order to write effectively there are three concepts that should guide our goals as instructors of writing: 1) The Primacy of the Audience 2) Perspective is Power 3) Multiple Styles In teaching an art form, we can tend to focus on the technical aspects of the art, but we also need to take a long-term view of the

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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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In Search of Happiness, Part 1: The Road of Virtue

In 1952, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, an Ohio-born pastor who went on to minister for fifty-two years in New York City, published a book that would go on to change his life and career trajectory. The book’s title? I’m sure you’ve heard of it, at least, as an idea. It’s called The Power of Positive Thinking.  Next installment – Part 2: The Way of Wisdom. The book earned a coveted place on the New York Times bestseller list for 186 weeks, 48 of which sitting at the top for non-fiction. It launched Peale onto the national spotlight, leading him to

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STEM careers scientist in a lab lost in flow of thought

The Flow of Thought, Part 4: The Seven Liberal Arts as Mental Games

There’s a lot of talk these days about the war between STEM and the liberal arts (which we are meant to understand as the humanities generally). Often this gets posed as a trade-off between a utilitarian education—training our future engineers, scientists and programmers—vs. a soft education in human skills and cultural awareness. Given the hype for STEM, defending the value of the humanities (as Martin Luther did, for one) is an important move in the broader education dialogue. And it’s one that’s not very hard to make, when there are articles like this one on how Google was planning to

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