Classical Education Symposium 2025 K-12 Workshops
K-5 WORKSHOPS:
The Socratic K-5 Classroom 1.0: An Introduction
Jerilyn Olson
K-5 teachers often wonder how the Socratic Method applies in a K-5 classroom – are kindergartners really supposed to seminar on Aristotle? In this workshop, we will discuss lesson planning with inquiry in mind, unit introductions that inspire wonder, and the “sweet-spot” questions that follow. For Great Hearts Staff: Please note that this is the same workshop offered at Great Hearts New Faculty Orientation.
The Wonders of the Wardrobe: Learning from Lewis in Teaching Literature
Meredith Frey
With childlike wonder, we will open the doors of discovery in the world of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia. We will unlock and explore the adventures of the unknown in learning. We will gain insights into how to spark curiosity in students, use imagination in the classroom, and live daily life in wonder as educators through engaging with Lewis’ literature and in the world beyond the wardrobe.
The Wonder Years: Science Through the Eyes of a Child
Karly Barksdale
How can we inspire young learners to see the world with curiosity and awe? In this breakout session, we will explore strategies to cultivate wonder in the K-5 science classroom by embracing the natural inquisitiveness of children. Participants will discover practical ways to design lessons that encourage observation, inquiry, and discovery while aligning with the classical education model.
Through hands-on activities, discussion, and examples, this workshop will demonstrate how to transform everyday science topics into moments of wonder that spark a lifelong love of learning. Whether you’re a seasoned teacher or new to the classroom, you’ll leave with fresh ideas and resources to create a classroom environment where students see science as a thrilling adventure. Together, we’ll celebrate the joy of learning science through the eyes of a child.
The Wonder of the Past
Andrew Zwerneman
“Historians look for differences in the past and for how those differences changed and evolved to create the world we know, which contains, however deeply buried, the residues of those past worlds.” —Bernard Bailyn
“History, it seems to me, is the most useful key we have to open the mysteries of the human predicament.” —Donald Kagan
Aristotle says that all knowledge begins in wonder. What is it about the past that makes us wonder? How does wondering about the past lead to knowledge and understanding? The past is different from the present. Historians observe past events carefully until what is different, eruptive, and enduring emerges. Like the future, the past does not exist; yet, it has a great hold on our memories and shapes our sympathies. How do teachers of history lead students to wonder about the past? We will explore three facets of history as an occasion to wonder: how historical narratives work on us; what we learn of ourselves by observing our forebears; and how human memory collects the most important features of our life together—what we know and what we love. For each of the three facets, workshop participants will examine historical artifacts—the very kinds of materials that historians work up: imagery (maps and photography), data (GDPs and emigration demographics), individual and group narratives (eye witness accounts), and social structures (laws, military strategies, and public programs). Through it all, we will discuss ways for our students to see what the past frees them to see: that we live under history; that we are bound to the dead, the living, and the yet to be born; and that remembering the past is key to knowing who we are and how we ought to live together in society.
Unlocking Curiosity: The Power of Math Anchor Tasks
Jessica Kaminski
Explore how anchor tasks ignite curiosity and cultivate wonder in the math classroom using Singapore’s approach to mathematics. By connecting students’ prior knowledge to new conceptual learning, these opening tasks serve as powerful tools for deeper understanding. Participants will analyze student work and discover how to refine their own teaching craft, customizing lessons that showcase and elevate student thinking. Participants will learn to implement anchor tasks that inspire engagement through various research-based methods and drive conceptual growth for a variety of learners.
Mathematical Wonder: Verum, Bonum, Pulchrum
Jake Tawney
The arts of number make up four-sevenths of the liberal arts. More than that, there is something unique in the human soul that can only be satisfied by wondering about mathematics. Why is it then that a “classical approach” to mathematics seems to be an enigma for many schools? This talk seeks to begin the conversation by outlining a few principles of curriculum and pedagogy for the discipline. With any luck, it will do more than that. It will also bring the audience along a journey through the discipline using the lens of truth, goodness, and beauty, and leave all of them wanting to become teachers of mathematics, thereby also solving the teacher pipeline problem.
The Lost Art of Handwriting
Bridget Doughty & Christen Arbogast
Taking the time to teach and reinforce beautiful handwriting has decreased in favor of efficiency and technology in the classroom. This workshop seeks to explore the origins, progression, value, the essential physical connection to the brain for learning and transposing content, and the state of handwriting as an art form in the classical classroom.
Reading Between the Lines: Empowering Students to Master Math Word Problems
Jessica Kaminski
In this session, participants investigated strategies to help students actively engage with word problems by connecting to the natural curiosity of children using the context of the problem. Teachers will learn how to guide students to ask their own questions, visualize the scenario, and become invested in the learning process through reading for information. By incorporating visual bar models to solve the problem, students will break down complex problems even further, making them easier to solve. Using these strategies, students will actually want to solve word problems and even write their own.
6-12 WORKSHOPS:
Mysteries and Myths of Mathematics
Satyan Devadoss
Mathematicians have done a good job of showcasing the usefulness of mathematics. Ironically, this very feature of math is its greatest weakness, for touting the usefulness of math destroys its innate wonder. Happily, we can unlock mathematical pleasures by seeking out the unexplored, the unknown, the undiscovered.
Learning from the “Talented Tenth”: Teaching Sensitive Racial Topics in History and Literature
Tammy Morrow
As the name implies, the end of a liberal arts education is freedom. One who is liberally educated is freed from prejudice and a servile dependence upon a teacher. Such an education trains its students to become better citizens and better neighbors. For the American, training in the liberal arts necessarily engages the student in the Great Conversation of the West. This conversation by its nature is liberating to all who hear it. When Aristotle tells us that the pursuit of virtue and contemplation frees the soul for a truly human life, we do not question the freedom such a life affords. However, other voices in the Great Conversation seem vicious rather than virtuous, for they seem to reinforce the very prejudice from which a liberal education intends to free us. Yet I would argue that these apparently discordant voices are as essential to the liberating work of this education as any other.
In this workshop, we will explore why we should teach imaginative fiction like Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which is notorious for its offensive racial slurs and for its portrayal of dehumanizing language and behavior. How can such literature free our students, especially our African American students? As we consider race and our American story, we will explore the principles that govern the stories we should read in our literature courses and the stories we should tell in our history courses. We will take time to listen to the Talented Tenth and others who have joined the Great Conversation to teach us why reading these painful and violent stories in our nation’s history can help us all become more virtuous citizens and more loving neighbors.
Questions No One Asks
Chris Swanson
When I studied physics in school, the theories and equations I was taught were always sure and confirmed. We were not invited to wonder. But right at the heart of those theories, there are deep questions that are never asked. Raising these questions engages the imagination and brings life to physics. It allows students to consider physics as a field which is open and interesting, not fixed and final.
Cultivating Wonder through Logic
Gary Hartenburg
According to Socrates, wonder is the only starting point for the love of wisdom. Thankfully, there are many ways to call forth wonder, one of which is logic, a fact recognized in classical education by the central place given to the study of logic in the curriculum. But logic evokes wonder only if it is taught dialectically through discussion centered on the ancient practice of question and answer. Students who learn logic dialectically become full of wonder because they learn to recognize and work with valid deduction, a fundamental feature of the world inaccessible to our sense perception. It is preeminently in the study of logic, properly taught, that students exercise their rational capacity for wonder and begin to take their first steps into the life of the mind.
This presentation will explain why logic has been and should continue to be a central part of classical education, how it should be taught, and how the study of it can be integrated across a liberal arts curriculum. It will be of interest to teachers at every level and subject (though of primary interest to teachers of logic) as well as educators who are responsible for curriculum design. It will also include practical suggestions of how to teach logic and how all teachers can include dialectical education in their subjects.
The Wonder of Great Seminars
Jeannette DeCelles-Zwerneman
“Everyone who enters our world of culture seeks for guidance. But the guidance is there in the culture itself. . . [T]he pupil must acquire, as soon as possible, the idea of a classic—a ‘touchstone,’ as Arnold called it—in other words, a work whose significance endures across generations and provides a point of comparison for other and lesser creations.”
—Roger Scruton
Humane letters, the heart of our students’ cultural heritage, open up the world for young readers. Classic expository texts bring them face to face to wonder about what is mysterious and difficult to understand. Students are challenged to wonder why it is so hard for the young interlocutors in Plato’s Republic to see whether it is better to live justly or unjustly? What is it in the city in speech that frees them to see what they could not otherwise see? The great imaginative works turn our students’ attention to the many oscillations in the human heart. What motivates Dante early in the Inferno to eagerly ask of the souls their stories? What is it about his accrued experience that prepares him for the lower circles and motivates him to treat the souls he finds there with a firmer line of interrogation? These are the kinds of inquiries that the great texts afford our students.
Seminars are the perfect environment to wrestle with these weighty matters in search of adequate answers, driven by excellent questions. Questions are the foundational method for eliciting wonder. This workshop will introduce participants to the seminar. Then, we will try our hand at two examples of eliciting wonder concerning two different classic works: one expository, one imaginative (TBA). Each participant will receive a complimentary copy of Cana Academy’s guide, A Lively Kind of Learning: Mastering the Seminar Method.
Practical Ways to Employ Poetry More Often to Inspire Wonder in Scholars
Alexandra Umlas
According to Robert Frost’s “The Figure a Poem Makes,” a poem offers “a momentary stay against confusion,” not because it tells us what to think but paradoxically because it does not. Poetry offers students multiple ways to wonder— but is poetry a small part of our classrooms, or is it a part of our daily instruction? This session gives educators practical ways to employ poetry more often to inspire wonder in scholars. We will use Frost’s ideas in “Education by Poetry” as a jumping-off point to explore how poetry allows students to explore and comprehend the magical nature of metaphor, helps to give them an appreciation of music, beauty, and ambiguity, and provides a vehicle for discussions of morality, community, and other important themes. We will look at how a poem can provide valuable lessons in close reading and how a poem can take us from delight to wisdom through wonder, questioning, and Socratic discussion. Resources will be available for all subjects, including science, art, languages, history, and math. We will delight in the idea that the process of reading poetry with wonder can be a powerful classroom tool and can help our scholars foster what Keats described as “Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
Cultivating Wonder Through Observation in Science
John Mays
The way to ruin science education is to act like we actually know what we are talking about. In fact, the mystery in nature far outdistances what we think we have figured out! When we anchor instruction in the places where mystery is found—the wonderful—we create an exciting environment that motivates learning and makes learning a joy. Observation has always been one of the major tools of scientists. Observation is also a place where teachers can tap into the wonders of the natural world. In this talk, we explore how observation can go beyond the mundane and tap into the wonderful.
Shakespeare: From Page to Stage
Nick Hutchison
Transform your teaching of Shakespeare and your students’ investment in him! In this lively, interactive workshop acclaimed British director and educator Nick Hutchison (Shakespeare’s Globe, LAMDA, RADA) strips away 400 years of dusty scholarship to reveal why Shakespeare wrote the way he did and how that speaks to us in the 21st century. Examining (and demonstrating) the playing conditions of the 16/17th centuries he shows how the actors of the time worked in an completely (and excitingly) different way to modern theatre, and how we can glean the clues for performance in the text of the plays. Prepare to see Shakespeare in a totally different and more accessible light, bringing the excitement of the staged performance back to your classroom, and making the texts of centuries ago live again.
Fostering Curiosity and Wonder Through Teacher Writing
Eric Daniels
In this workshop, Dr. Eric Daniels will discuss the value of teacher writing in developing crucial traits of successful schools and intellectual cultures. Using the Lyceum Scholars program as a model, he will discuss how community discussion of the Great Books, the great ideas, and how we teach those books and ideas has helped lead a culture of engagement and intellectual growth. The session will focus especially on how the public-facing writing of Lyceum professors has helped develop their engagement with texts and created a platform for deeper engagement of the students that they teach. Daniels will bring some sample materials from the Lyceum program’s public writing for participants to discuss.
K-12 WORKSHOPS:
An Introduction to the Liberal Arts and Classical Education
Jake Tawney
With more and more classical schools coming into existence, there is an increased need to answer the basic question: What is classical education? Although there are notable differences from one implementation to another, there are also key core characteristics. Join Jake Tawney, Chief Academic Officer for Great Hearts Academies, on a tour through the seven liberal arts, the foundation of classical education, and the basic principle guiding the content and pedagogy of each discipline.
▶️ Video Coming Soon
Whose Shakespeare is it Anyway?
Sir Jonathan Bate & Nick Hutchison
After the success of this workshop at the 2024 Symposium, eminent Shakespearean editor, and ASU Regents Professor Sir Jonathan Bate, and LAMDA Course Leader and renowned theatre Director Nick Hutchison present a further dynamic, interactive workshop on editorial choices across the centuries since the First Folio of 1623, how those choices have illuminated or dimmed our understanding of the plays, and how those choices play out on a stage. Revisiting some of this year’s texts, and approaching a variety of new ones, this is a Shakespearean masterclass for returning symposiasts and freshmen alike.
“As Kingfishers Catch Fire” Poetry Seminar
Michael Austin & Cammie Passey
Mike Austin (upper schools) and Cammie Passey (lower schools), National Directors of Curriculum for Great Hearts Academies, will host a seminar on “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Come kick off your Great Hearts Classical Education Symposium experience by engaging in enriching conversation centered on this beautiful text.
Character Begins in Wonder
Daniel Scoggin
This workshop explores the relationship between the moral formation of students and their experience of wonder. How can we teachers and school leaders cultivate a culture at our schools that allows students to have profound and ineffable encounters with the nature of reality, truth, and beauty? And, in turn, how does this culture of wonder serve as the seedbed of forming virtue in young hearts and minds? What is the relationship between wonder and prudence, the first of the cardinal virtues, and how are the moral virtues habituated by frequent and meaningful encounters with the best that has been thought, said, and created in the Western Tradition? This workshop will provide practical strategies and tips for teachers and school leaders who seek to increase the wonder index of their classrooms and campuses to the end of graduating students with strong moral character.
Wonder and Cognitive Load
Mary Chin
Teachers are crucial arbiters of wonder and tone in their classrooms. In this session, participants will consider the balance of cognitive load amongst teacher and students, and how and when should we reduce cognitive load. By utilizing strategies like generation, retrieval, and elaboration, we not only ensure that students are encoding learning to long-term memory, but also make space for further wondering.
The Role of Wonder in Lesson Planning
William Perales
What is the role of wonder in lessons? While philosophy may begin in wonder, why should lessons do so? This session focuses on the importance of awakening wonder at the beginning of lessons usually through a sensory-based experience. Building upon that, we then sustain the wonder as we lead students to know and remember, think more deeply, and then communicate eloquently and persuasively.
The Spark of Creative Wonder and Transformative Power of Making
Brighton Demerest-Smith
In this hands-on workshop you will get your hands dirty and draw with charcoal and engage in the wonder of creating. Brighton Demerest-Smith will be on hand to guide and direct participants toward wonder through learning to see well and translate that sight into a drawing. This workshop is for anyone who wants to draw, regardless of skill or past experience.
How to Teach Latin: Grammar Translation vs. Active/Communicative Methods
Luke Patient, J. Sebastian Pagani, Erik Ellis, & Laura Eidt
The question of how Latin should be taught is often fiercely debated on social media. On one side of the debate are those who believe that grammar must first be thoroughly mastered in isolation, and that the goal of learning Latin is to translate classical texts from Latin into English. On the other side are those who draw on principles of Second Language Acquisition, emphasizing that to master a language, students need ample comprehensible and compelling input as well as opportunities for meaningfully interacting in the language. But in many ways, this issue is not debated widely enough in classical education circles. Latin is often simply offered because it’s a “must have” for a classical school, and Latin teachers often teach the way they do only because that’s how they learned it. Questions such as what it means to teach Latin classically, what constitutes appropriate goals for studying Latin, and what the best ways are to achieve those goals are seldom discussed at length.
This panel provides an opportunity for a collegial discussion of this topic. Each panelist will give a 5-minute “credo” on the topic, then briefly respond to each other, and then open the discussion to include participants.
The True, the Good, and the Musical: Integrating Music into Classical Studies
Junius Johnson
The transcendental properties of being (true, good, and beautiful) are frequent topics of conversation in classical circles: they are properties that attach to every being by virtue of having being. Likewise, we are accustomed to approach classical education with a couple of transcendental properties: it is education in the virtues, and so concerned about the Good; it is mimetic, and therefore concerned with questions of correspondence (True). And…what comes next? I would argue that it aims at harmony in the soul, which is its connection to the Beautiful. In this session, I propose to take the notion of harmony seriously and argue that music is able to do the work of promoting that harmony by a kind of sympathetic action; not just or even primarily in the music classroom, but in every subject. Part demonstration and part lecture, we will explore how, with no more musical qualifications than a patient and attentive ear, it is possible to use music to bring cohesion and compellingness to any humanities classroom.
Building Ratio and Cultivating Wonder using Teach Like a Champion Techniques
Jennifer Ramirez
In this workshop, participants will learn about several Teach Like a Champion (TLAC) techniques that help build ratio through questioning, writing, and discussion. We will explore how incorporating the techniques will not only shift the load of learning to the students but will also contribute to cultivation of wonder across the content areas. Attendees are encouraged to bring an upcoming lesson plan (either in paper or downloaded digitally) to share/discuss during the small group time, leaving with annotations on possible ideas on how to incorporate the learning from the session.
Embodying Wonder through a Classical Approach to Physical Education and Athletics
Christopher Reynolds
Often enslaved to emotions and appetites, students and instructors alike are guided by society to embrace these masters as the best guide to happiness or self actualization. C.S. Lewis describes this part of the human experience quite differently: “The head rules the belly through the chest–the seat of… Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments…it may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal…Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism…We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.” In the midst of this cultural moment, Lewis offers us an idea that might astonish our students, cultivating habits and disciplining our appetites might bring the most joy. A classically-oriented approach to physical education and athletics affirms the idea that the purpose of any curriculum ought to be directing students toward a sturdy foundation for a flourishing life. This flourishing is not the modern conception of following one’s desires as the sole arbiter of what is good and true—rather it ought to be crafting correct desires in the learner. Helping our students to be present in physical reality, train the body, and practice virtue through sport are an antidote to a new sort of Gnosticism and enslavement to the “animal appetites.”
Redeeming Intellectual Virtue: Teaching and Assessing in the Age of AI
Carrie Eben
At the end of 2022, the advent of ChatGPT caused many teachers to second-guess the authenticity of a student’s creative artifact. How can teachers wisely teach and assess in the Age of AI and encourage their students to faithfully wrestle and wonder well with skills and ideas? While ChatGPT and other AI platforms provide humans with time-saving tools, they should not preemptively satiate wonder, substitute skill development, or subdue the struggle of creative process. This session will investigate teaching and evaluation practices in the upper school classroom which direct students to love the virtues of learning.
A Reading of the Grimms’ Hansel and Gretel
Vigen Guroian
The topic for this year’s Great Hearts Symposium is Wonder, and the cultivation thereof. Need it be said that wonder is the essence of the fairy tale? No dictionary definition of wonder can capture the experience of “fairie.” “Fairie” is wonder. “Once Upon a Time” is an invitation to wonder, to enter through that wicket gate which opens onto mystery and enchantment. But genuine wonder is not mere titillation; it is not an end in itself. The wonder of the great fairy tales lights a way to truths about our humanity that only telling a story can do. The Grimms’ Hansel and Gretel is one of the great fairy tales. We will discuss, not just the story’s pedigree or literary antecedents—an obsession of contemporary literary criticism–but also, and most important, its meaning, that is, what the story reveals to us about ourselves, our place in the world, and even our destiny. In Hansel and Gretel, we have a story that is profoundly wise about childhood and learning right from wrong. Perhaps even more significant, the Grimms’ story carries deep religious, and particularly Christian, meaning, having to do with forging the journey to salvation. While I might be the leader in this discussion, what we learn about the story and the truths within it must be a group endeavor.
The Wonderful Power of Aesthetics in Classroom Teaching
Kerry Lee
Many of us use some kind of art (music, illustrations, poetry) as part of our pedagogical toolbelt. I suspect teachers often think of these techniques simply as mnemonic devices: tricks to make knowledge stickier through association with some other domain in the brain (melody, image, rhyme). While this may be true as far as it goes, the role of aesthetics in knowledge retention and student engagement appears to go much deeper than mere memory hacks. This talk will present logic- and research-based arguments for two propositions: (1) students are more engaged and retain more when they are emotionally engaged, and (2) the more beautiful the form of the teaching, the more evocative of students’ emotions the subject becomes. Whereas a song can help a student remember facts, a beautiful song invests that knowledge with emotional content, allowing us not simply to hack the memory but to habituate the affections. Through the talk and through examination of teaching materials of varying aesthetic standards, attendees will receive theoretical and practical guidance and encouragement toward raising the aesthetic bar in their own teaching. The session will conclude with a short time to brainstorm and share ideas.