What does it take to lead a Class of Life-long Learners?

In CCE (Christian classical education) we regularly espouse the ideal of cultivating life-long learners by gifting children with the seven liberal arts.  This is what we are seeking to do.  My question for this meditation is then related and simple: “What kind of person is best suited to lead students to such a place in [...]

Winning the Whole Family – how to win parents and influence students

There are a number of ways in which parents and teachers can be set at odds with each other, and those paths are all too well defined.  But there are as well many ways in which the two can be led closer to one another, and that is the map I wish to look at [...]

HowdoUTeach Reading?

First we need to talk about our ends in teaching students to read. Why do we want students to read? This can produce a quick and veritable laundry list of reasons:
1. To read the Word of God.
2. To learn, as reading is fundamental to learning from others mediately. It is a major form of human [...]

HowdoUTeach?

I started this blog quite awhile back now, and post irregularly like I promised when I started it. But I am getting a lot of push to try something that I don’t think anyone can do: to write practical pieces on the means of teaching. The title of the blog does imply that [...]

Teachers with drive

Another of Buckalew’s points has to do with being driven to stay current. I would twist this around to say that a teacher must be a learner. It is not acceptable to ever reach a plateau of knowledge, level off, and stop learning or you thwart the intrinsic ethos that makes a teacher [...]

Teachers as those who lead out…part 1

I just posted a whole list of things that Walker Buckalew had stated were characteristics of “teachers whose approaches are associated with high levels of student performance in moderate stress contexts.” In my own words, teachers who lead students to high performance without stressing them out. He is not saying education can be [...]

From “Teachers as Leaders”

I have been looking over some material from Independent School Management, Inc. (isminc.org) on Teacher Evaluation and development. Here is an interesting list they have put together on what makes the best teachers: (from “Twenty Principles for Teaching Excellence” by M. Walker Buckalew, pp. 39-40)
“Many of the most obvious characteristics of teachers whose approaches [...]

HowdoURoleplay?

Teaching mainly teachers these days is a challenge in a very good way. All teachers have a fear of being less than they ought to be. And as we are all idealists of the first rank, we often have a great deal of guilt following us around. Thus, when you are trying [...]

Guorian, Chapter 1

The following ideas came out of our first (and only formal) discussion of “Tending the Heart of Virtue.” I may not have remembered them all, so by all means, faculty, chime in using the “Comments” section.
We started by reading the recent blog by Andrew Kern on Fairy Tales
We wondered together about common objections to [...]

Tending a Garden of Virtue

If you are not familiar with Vigen Guorian’s work, Tending the Heart of Virtue, read it. Now.
If you are, then you may be interested to check back in from time to time here as I blog on the experience of taking my faculty through Vigen’s book. We have chosen up teams of three [...]