Below is the opening from my recent ACCS talk at Repairing the Ruins 2025 in Dallas, TX. I’m going to work on the essay further and plan to do something with it (publication somewhere, perhaps). But there has been some interest from folks who weren’t there, so I thought I could at least provide this tidbit.
“Classical teachers don’t grow on trees.” This is a common refrain that I have heard many times over the course of the last fifteen years. The sentiment is one that everyone here will recognize with ease and it goes something like this: “the kind of teachers we want are not being produced by colleges. In fact, college educated teachers often need to unlearn some things to be a good fit at a classical school. So, we must treat all teachers as though they need training into this thing we’re offering, this tradition we are attempting to reclaim.”
Some of you may have seen Josh Gibbs’s thoughts on professional development recently, where he decried the implementation of after school professional development, encouraging more schools to instead sit around good food and good drink, to build a culture that is more “stable.”1 On the one hand, I want to merely say, “do that!” and send you all on your merry way. I’d like to be upfront this afternoon and explain that I, like Gibbs, am convinced that most professional development programs at schools are largely a waste of time.
This isn’t to say they have no value, or that teachers who might have been otherwise lost during their first year enjoyed zero benefits from these haphazard programs. Yet, if even a blind squirrel may find a nut, should these minor successes justify such programs? What would it look like to provide a development program that not only satisfied the requirements, such as those for ACCS accreditation or the approval of stakeholders, but would also embody the same Classical and Christian ethos that our schools desire to give to students? I think the answer to this question does not lie in looking at modern trends but rather will be found by a return to the Medievals.
This may seem counterintuitive, but I think it is best to begin by looking at the modern world of education before we get too deeply into the Medieval era. A good place to begin is looking into the key words which are most common in the field of educational research. While many in the Classical Christian world may think that formal education research has little to do with CCE, that would be a mistake as Education is one of the few disciplines of study that continues to have an enormous effect on actual policy and other trickle-down arenas.
The growing number of educational choice programs, including the recent Texas legislature’s decision, are often driven by the research that universities are conducting within their education departments. There is in fact an indexing system for how effective educational researchers are and corresponding awards that consider how many governmental policies cited your work with their latest initiative. What’s more, these concepts do eventually make their way to Classical Christian schools.
For instance, a growing number of schools have begun publishing a “Curriculum Map” which seeks to provide “horizontal and vertical alignment” across the curriculum, as well as “subject area and interdisciplinary coherence.” But where did the practice come from? While the term “curriculum mapping” began to be seen in the late 90s through various educational publications, it gained immense traction in the early aughts as more and more education professors advocated for the practice in their scholarly work. R. M. Harden’s 2001 article which explained that curriculum mapping was the best tool for “transparency” in schools (whatever that means) has been cited over 700 times since its publication.2
Fast forward twenty years, and curriculum mapping has become common in Classical Christian schools in the U. S. and I bet many of you here present have either sat in a session explaining the curriculum map or seen the one your own school has produced. This thread could be followed ad nauseum, but I think the point is sufficiently made. The topics that researchers at educational departments around the world study and publish eventually makes its way to even the smallest of Classical Christian schools. And I think this is what has happened in many professional development programs . . .
I’ll update here with a link if it is ever published in full. Or you can head over to the ACCS Member Resource Center to listen to the recording when it is released.
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7330982142107152385/
R. M. Harden, “AMEE Guide No. 21: Curriculum Mapping; a Tool for Transparent and Authentic Teaching and Learning.” Medical Teacher 23, no. 2 (2001): 123–37.
I wonder if the problem of finding suitable classical educators is one that simply needs to work itself out over time. As classical schools produce more and more graduates, the pool of potential teachers in those schools will grow correspondingly larger. These young people will (theoretically at least) bring to the school more of the ethos and practice of classical pedagogy than can likely be conveyed in a morning professional development session. At least, that's the hope.