Ten Essential Principles of Classical Pedagogy

How to Be a Good Teacher by Following Great Principles

As many of you have heard, I am at work writing a book on classical pedagogy with my co-author, Carrie Eben. The book is a work in progress, but we have tentatively assigned it the title of The Good Teacher: Ten Essential Pedagogies of Truly Great Teaching. That title might change, and so might the icon wheel you see embedded with this post. Our hope is to help teachers be good teachers by employing great pedagogical principles. If all goes as planned, we hope to release the book in the winter of 2025.

I have written on several of these principles here on Substack and also recorded short podcasts for most of them (also available on my podcast here on Substack).

Yesterday I gave a one-hour overview of the ten principles in the book at the Great Homeschooling Convention in Texas. Someone in the crowd asked if I would make my PowerPoint deck available to those who attended—and I promised to do so on my Substack newsletter. If you would like to download these slides—you are welcome to by clicking the link below.

Ten Essential Principles Slide Deck

Here also is brief description of each of these principles. We plan to include this summary (subject to change and enhancement) as an appendix in the forthcoming book. Please note that these descriptions are first drafts that have not been edited.

The 10 Principles on Two Pages

THE GOAL OF ALL EDUCATION: WISDOM AND VIRTUE

By employing the following principles, teachers will naturally cultivate virtues of love, humility, fortitude,  diligence, constancy and temperance in the lives of their students. The result is the full formation of a human being.

1. Festina Lente / Make Haste Slowly: Taking Time to Master Each Step

It is best to master each step rather than to rush through content; the quickest way forward is to ensure that you take the time needed to master each step of learning. To make haste slowly is to set a pace that is fitting for the time that is available and that ensures students master what you teach them. Because students deeply learn what is taught, they are able to proceed more quickly to what is next because they do not forget previous study.

2. Multum non Multa / Much Not Many: Going Deep not Wide 

It is better to master a few things than to cursorily cover content that will be forgotten; it is better to study fewer things but study them well; it is better to deeply understand a single book than to superficially read several books that will not be loved nor remembered; it is better to study deeply the truly best things available than to divide attention and comprehension among several good things. 

3. Repetitio Mater Memoriae / Repetition the Mother of Memory: Memory is the Mother of the Muses but Repetition is the Mother of Memory

Re-visiting and re-viewing is not rote learning but deepening love, affection and understanding of something true, good, and beautiful. It is kissing the photo of a beloved. Important skills, ideas, facts, persons, stories, and books should be revisited in regular and fresh ways that deepen understanding, retention, and delight.

4. Songs, Chants, and Jingles: The One Who Loves Can Sing and Remember

We sing when we love; and we remember what we love and sing. Children (up to about age 12) delight to sing and chant ideas and facts that they have come to know and treasure. Regular singing and chanting delights students, employing their bodies, voices, sight, and hearing, deepening learning and making it permanent.

5. Wonder and Curiosity: The Best Way to Commence Learning that Will Last

Wonder is an astonishing encounter with reality that sparks love and study. When a student has been captivated by something true, good, and beautiful, the most engaged form of learning begins because the student has become enchanted with an earnest desire to know and becomes his own teacher. This wonder is modeled by teachers; students are inspired and imitate their teachers.

6. Scholé and Contemplation: Ordering Time and Space for Deep Thought

Scholé provides the condition for the deep, sustained contemplation of reality that wonder initiates. Because we long to “see” we long for a place without clutter, distraction, and noise. And we long to see and contemplate with our friends. Scholé is the condition, atmosphere, and set-apart, sacred space and time that enables students to see together. Wonder certainly stimulates contemplation but scholé provides the condition for it to continue and spread.

7. Embodied and Liturgical Learning: Creating Academic Rhythm and Harmony 

Because humans are bodies as well as souls, creating academic, sensory, bodily rhythms modulates and deepens learning. Students as bodies learn through all five senses; embodied learning honors learning through the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and hands. Embodied rhythms, practices, liturgies, and routines cultivate the desire and longing among students to be in harmony with the beauty in the world. 

8. Docendo Discimus / By Teaching We Learn: When Students Teach Learning Multiplies

Students want to teach what they have come to know, and when they do their friends pay particular attention and are inspired to learn themselves. Knowledge taught is twice learned. Peers can teach peers; older students can teach younger students; students when they teach become filled with greater desire to learn, they become better students.

9. Optimus Magister Bonus Liber Est / The Best Teacher Is a Good Book: Finding The Wisest Friends That Never Leave

The voices of great teachers in the great books never stop beckoning, inspiring, teaching. They will teach us again and again with infinite patience that makes us who we are. The best book is by a great author and is a book wisely selected (usually by a teacher) for a particular student at a fitting time. One who guides a student through a study of a great book is a tutor, the teacher is the author. Together the author (teacher), tutor, and student engage in a three-way conversation that remarkably educates.

10. Conversation: Learning in Community with Sympathy and Fellowship

We go nowhere alone, but travel to good places only with friends and colleagues; ongoing conversation with teachers and fellow students creates a friendship of the soul that gives birth to learning that is personal, mutual, delightful, and deep. In ongoing exchange and conversation over long spans of time, the teacher forms the student in his likeness but the student as well renews and refreshes the love of learning in the teacher. Academic conversation characterizes all learning; and both the student and teacher seek the true, good, and beautiful together as academic friends and fellows.

ONGOING PROCESS: ASSESSMENT

Teachers will regularly assess how their students are doing as they employ each of these principles. While employing each principle the teacher will constantly ask: What lesson, activity, or assignment should I employ to help this student progress to mastery?