In literacy cycles built around Paideia seminars, students practice thinking as a function of reading, speaking, listening, and writing.
Teachers seeking ways to motivate their students and to make the curriculum more relevant have found an answer in the Paideia Coached Project. When students know that their project or performance will be presented to an audience outside the classroom, are inspired to produce work of the highest quality. DURING THE past decade, the staff at the National Paideia Center has done an increasing amount of survey and interview research with the individuals and schools that have chosen to implement the Paideia Programs. This work often involves asking teachers what frustrates them most about their dealings with students. Across the country, teachers almost universally cite the lack of student motivation for learning as the single most serious issue face. Simply put, said one honest teacher, they don't find what we have to offer all that relevant to their lives. How do you present a sterile, standardized curriculum in a way that students can care about it? Our attempts to answer that question have led us to create the Paideia Coached Project. A coached project is a unit of study that leads to a student production or performance that demonstrates mastery of a subject to an audience outside the classroom. It is designed to provide students with a strong, experiential connection to the curriculum, thereby making the curriculum both more relevant and more interesting. Ideally, the coached project provides both teachers and students the opportunity to produce rigorous, relevant work and to measure the quality of that work against authentic standards. For teachers who are used to a more traditional approach to teaching and learning, it can be challenging to rethink the many aspects of how deliver their curriculum. For those who do, however, the rewards can be amazing. The Origin of the Paideia Coached Project Paideia, as its derivation (from the Greek pais, paidos, the nurturing of a child) suggests, has to do with the proper upbringing of a child. It has strong connotations of a holistic education that leads to physical, emotional, and spiritual health as well as intellectual health. The Paideia Program is a systemic, whole-school transformation project based on the work of philosopher Mortimer Adler, who argued that American classrooms could be made simultaneously more rigorous and more inclusive.1 In other words, we could raise intellectual standards while at the same time engaging more students. In order to do this, Adler described three types of teaching and learning: didactic instruction to transmit information, coaching in academic skills, and seminar discussion of ideas and values.2 Adler believed that didactic, teacher-centered instruction dominated American classrooms at the expense of the other types of teaching and learning. As a result of this belief, he and his colleagues in the original Paideia Group focused their efforts on defining the Paideia seminar. They were so successful that there still exists a common misconception that the Paideia Program is solely concerned with the use of the seminar. In fact, the seminar takes up only 10% to 20% of teaching time in a Paideia classroom, while the rest is devoted to high-quality didactic instruction and coaching.3 In the mid-1990s, when the staff of the National Paideia Center began to work extensively with whole school communities, it became obvious that we needed to develop a much clearer picture of intellectual coaching and that we needed to show teachers how the three types of instruction could work in concert. The result of our efforts was the Paideia Coached Project, an organized unit that employs all three instructional approaches. As mentioned above, the coached project results in a student production or performance that has authentic value to an audience outside the classroom.4 While designing the Paideia Coached Project, we studied the extensive body of research on learning as well as the work then going on in a number of instructional reform movements. …
