Tag: habit training

Training the Prophetic Voice, Part 5: Internalizing the Prophetic Message

So far in this series, we have explored the theological and biblical paradigms surrounding our understanding of what it means to speak prophetically. It centers around God’s divine revelation to humanity and then becomes expressed through people who take up the message of God’s truth and speaking truth into new contexts. The model of discipleship we explored among the OT prophets and then with Jesus and his disciples helps us see that training the prophetic voice is very much an educational enterprise. At this point in the series, we pivot to the formation of individuals in our classrooms. We will

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Educating for Humility: Promoting a Classroom Culture of Excellence in Service to Others

Of the many ills that plague modern society, perhaps one of the most insidious is the wedge we have driven between character and excellence, or ethics and achievement. Contemporary examples abound of  “successful” men and women who have earned impressive accolades despite deep recesses in character, and occasionally, because of those recesses.  As a result, for many young people today, it remains an open question whether character actually counts, and if so, to what degree. Today’s sports stars don’t exactly illustrate this truth during their excessive victory celebrations. Nor do the upper echelon of celebrities and business moguls as they

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Handwork: Fostering Excellence Through the Habit of Creating

Guest post by Joleen Steel, Classical Christian Educator and Director of Camping Stick Kids We are what we repeatedly do; excellence, then, is not an act but a habit. Aristotle What do you find yourself repeatedly doing? In this digital world, it is easy to immerse ourselves in the repetition of scrolling through social media or clicking out words on a device in the hope of inspiring minds and garnering followers. Yet, the digital world falls short of satisfying our deepest longings for meaning and purpose. The best moments in life are not found on a screen, but in deep,

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Habit Training during Online Distance Learning

Everything changed a couple months ago when school went online. At-home learning has caused every school to attempt schooling in new and creative ways. We can also get creative about habit training during online distance learning. I shared my new eBook on habit training in the classroom about a month before we stopped meeting in classrooms. So here is a brief update where we consider how habit training might work while doing school online. The Method of Habit Training Doesn’t Change Even though our classrooms are online and it feels like everything has changed, the method of habit training doesn’t

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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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Charlotte Mason and the Liberal Arts Tradition, Part 2: Educating the Whole Person

What has Charlotte Mason to do with classical education? In my first blog in this series, I began exploring this question through a close reading of Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain’s The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Philosophy of Christian Classical Education. In this book, Clark and Jain offer a paradigm for understanding classical education as it exists within the broader liberal arts tradition. According to these thinkers, the purpose of classical education is to cultivate virtue in body, heart, and mind, while nurturing a love for wisdom under the lordship of Jesus Christ. This is a comprehensive purpose statement to

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art of learning chess

The Art of Learning: Four Principles from Josh Waitzkin’s Book

My mother-in-law feeds my addiction to books. For over a decade she has worked at a used bookstore, and often shows up at family events with a stack of books for me to add to my personal library. She now also supplies my friends and my school. Jason was recently the beneficiary of her generosity, inheriting a slew of Hebrew resources–much to his enjoyment as he begins teaching an Intro to Hebrew class. At Christmas, my mother-in-law got me a brand-new copy of Josh Waitzkin’s book The Art of Learning. Since then I have been devouring the book, and there

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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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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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