A Slow Circle

What if school prepared students to be experts?  Learning in Depth  is a program aimed at answering this question. The idea is simple: at the beginning of primary school each student is randomly assigned a different topic that they will study for the next 12 years. Here is Kieran Egan introducing the idea: If you have any passing familiarity with either children or pedagogy I imagine your face is now frozen in horror, a scream of WHY? or perhaps NOOO! on your lips. Why Learning in Depth? Let me answer the ‘WHY?’ first: Students are taught about all sorts of topics in school but they are  unable to remember  much of what they ‘learned’. There are all sorts of explanations for this problem, from bad teachers to bad students to stupid curriculum to poor delivery. The list of ailments goes on. Kieran Egan posits that students are failing because they never achieve sufficient depth of knowledge to make subjects come alive. Because they barely scratch the surface of most s...

Have you ever had the experience of thinking back to a fondly-remembered book or film or personal experience only to come away with the realization that you don’t remember anything about it? It was a great story: What was that character’s name? I find these types of lapses disturbing because one of the great feelings when reading is the feeling of accreting knowledge, of gradually improving my understanding. I hate the sneaking suspicion that I’ll forget everything in a few months. I’ve made some progress but forgetting is always going to be an issue. I’m writing down my current learning habits so that I can hopefully continue to improve on them in the future. I’m not sure how entertaining this will be to read, so apologies if it’s a bore. New content and discovery: I tend to get a lot of information from blog posts. I aggregate this mostly via Blogger and Substack. I like that the blogs I choose to follow are highly intentional sources and the quality of information they provide tends...

I have started a blog over of substack where I am collecting all of the education content posted here. If you read this blog for and aren't interested in gaming, RPGs, worldbuilding or sundry book reviews you would probably be better off subscribing to that blog:  https://aslowcircle.substack.com/ . Currently, I plan to continue posting everything I write here, so if you're happy to filter according to your own interests then by all means carry on reading.

What is the role of imagination in education and learning? Certainly imagination is desirable for educators who would like their young students to grow into creative, interesting adults. Imagination is probably also desirable for students who have a great wish not to be bored to death. But could it be more than just an antidote to classroom doldrums and later-life ennui? I have a friend and colleague currently doing a teacher training course in which he was given an assignment to write on the topic, "What is reflection? How can reflection help teachers?". The question was enraging. Indeed, reflection seems like it might be a useful practice for teachers. How might thinking  help teachers? How might breathing help teachers? This is the kind of pablum that passes for teacher training.¹ If gaining a license to teach is school is simply intended as a costly signal then perhaps this kind of generic busywork is fine, but what if teacher training could be more effective? Allow me t...