Tag: leadership

Discipleship in the School, Part 2: Spiritual Formation

In my first article in this series, I explored the idea of discipleship and what it means for the Christian school to make disciples. I noted from the offset that the Christian school and local church have different purposes, and therefore, we should expect their discipleship approaches to look different. At the same time, both institutions share a goal to promote the gospel of Jesus Christ. In this regard, there is to be found a shared vision of discipleship, namely, to help others follow Jesus and grow in conformity to his image. I then went on to offer two general

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Discipleship in the School, Part 1: An Introduction

What is discipleship and how does discipleship happen in a Christian school? Like most good questions, we must begin by defining our terms. What is discipleship? According to Mark Dever, a pastor in the Washington D.C. area, we can define discipleship simply as helping someone follow Jesus. As an expanded definition, he writes that discipleship is “…deliberately doing spiritual good to someone so that he or she will be more like Christ” (Discipling, p. 13). Greg Ogden, a pastor who served for many years in the Chicago suburbs, defines discipleship as “walking alongside other disciples in order to encourage, equip,

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Counsels of the Wise, Part 7: Leadership, Liberal Arts, and Prudence

In the previous article we finally laid out a pedagogy for training students in prudence. While there are many preliminary actions that we can take to sow the seeds of prudence and provide for students’ good instruction from sources of moral wisdom, it is nevertheless true that the full acquisition of practical wisdom awaits a student’s later years. In secondary and collegiate education, then, students should study the ethical dimensions of all subjects and be taught through dialectical and rhetorical means to reason about human goods using biblical moral categories.  If our educational renewal movement consistently graduated students well on

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Proclaiming the “True Myth”: Tim Keller’s Ministry and Classical Education 

I was first exposed to the ministry of Dr. Timothy Keller in college while pursuing a degree in philosophy and reading through the western canon of Great Books. Immersed in the intersection of Christian discipleship and the life of the mind, I found in Keller a comforting voice that resonated with many of the questions I was asking.  Keller had a gift for making complex things simple for ordinary people to understand. This made him a great teacher. It did not matter whether he was distilling the philosophical theology of Jonathan Edwards or the secularization analysis of Charles Taylor. He

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An Educational Renaissance for the Development Shop

The purpose of Educational Renaissance is to promote a rebirth of ancient wisdom for the modern era. Through synthesizing the insights of the great philosophers of education across time and place with contemporary findings in modern research, we aspire to serve fellow educators in the worthy calling to educate future generations for the good of society and in service to the church.  If you are new to this blog, you will notice that we typically focus on wisdom and modern research for the classroom or homeschool. As classical Christian educators who have been profoundly influenced by the educational philosophy of

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3 Leadership Books for Teachers

Teachers are the leaders of their classrooms. Now, this may seem obvious (who else would be in charge?), so let me explain. Teachers are responsible for the execution of classroom objectives and the development of their students. In a healthy school, they are given the freedom and responsibility, within a broader structure of administrative oversight, to make key decisions pertaining to how they will empower their students to learn and grow. 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

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So, You Think You Want to be a Principal…

School Principal Job Description Unclogging toilets and mopping up sewage in the restrooms of your new facility Setting up hundreds of chairs for an event on your own because you know you can’t ask any more of your teachers or volunteers Subbing for Calculus one day and Kindergarten the next, outside of your comfort zone and with unclear lesson plans Kindly mediating an hour and a half long meeting with a teacher and an unhappy set of parents who will likely leave the school Trying to keep track of complicated budgets for various areas of the school, when you’ve got

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Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 5: Structuring the Academy for Christian Artistry

In the previous article we explored the need to counter the passion mindset of our current career counseling by replacing it with a craftsman mindset drawn from a proper understanding of apprenticeship in the arts. Apprenticing students in various forms of artistry (including the liberal arts) constitutes the role of the Academy that is most intimately connected to the professional working world. By making real these connections through actual relationships with the practitioners of arts (whether in athletics and sports, common and domestic arts, fine and performing arts, the professions and trades, or the liberal arts themselves) classical Christian schools

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Good to Great: Helping Schools Find Their Hedgehog Concept

In a world of seemingly endless opportunities for educational innovation, it can be difficult for school leaders to know where to focus. Should they prioritize the building of a successful sports program? How about offering generous packages of financial assistance? Will the school be known for its impressive musical productions, rigorous curriculum, or exceptional classroom teachers? And how about the school’s marketplace focus– financial accessibility, academic superiority, or programmatic breadth?1 In Good to Great, author Jim Collins argues from longitudinal research that one reason organizations fail to make the jump from good to great is that they never land on

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Teachers are Leaders: 6 Principles of Leadership for Schools

A teacher is a leader. Truly, a teacher is many things, but my contention in this article is that a teacher is fundamentally a leader. To the extent this contention is true, it behooves us to consider not only what it means to be a leader, but also to clarify a set of leadership principles that can enhance the effectiveness of teachers in fulfilling their calling. Leadership has been studied from many angles in an attempt to delineate all the factors that make great leaders. While there are common threads among all the different schools of thought, a singular definition

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