Coupland, Daniel. Tried & True: A Primer on Sound Pedagogy. Hillsdale College Press, 2022
The four essential principles of law, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, are that it is an ordinance of reason, it is made for the common good, it is made by one who is in charge of the community—that is, there is force behind it—and it is promulgated. These are also essential principles of classroom order. Teaching is a kind of lawgiving, a sort of rule. Teachers, whether they know it or not, exercise a ruling office; they are representatives and administrators of an order, and they make and enforce law in their own classrooms. They must take up this responsibility with deliberation and prudence, but ultimately with decision and action. Even prudence, which would seem to allow some flexibility in the law to take into account particular circumstances, is ultimately a virtue related to decision and action. It is part of the character of a well-formed person, a virtue teachers should aim to cultivate in their students. In the classroom, however, it belongs particularly to the teacher, the lawgiver, the one who must decide and act, and not primarily to the student. Insisting on prudence for everyone—or to put it in less classical terms, to ask every individual to decide everything for himself—would be to fail as a lawgiver, and it is to fail as a teacher. In a K-12 classroom, such an insistence would be a failure to take the teacher’s responsibility seriously.
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This is not a vice of Daniel Coupland’s Tried & True: A Primer on Sound Pedagogy. “This is the job. You must lead,” he writes. “If you are unable or unwilling to embrace your role as classroom leader or if you lack the potential to grow into that role within the first few years of teaching, you have no business being a teacher.” Repeatedly he stresses the “responsibility” of the teacher. The book is clear, blunt, and direct, eschewing vague platitudes and warmed-over nostrums in favor of unambiguous commands: “Speak clearly”; “Keep it brief”; “Choose wisely.” What is the teacher’s responsibility, exactly? Tried & True is not a comprehensive account of this. It is a “primer” (rhymes with “simmer”) containing fourteen principles or rules, written as “imperative statements,” designed especially for the new teacher. There’s no “teaching is an art” or “there is no right way to teach” or “every great teacher is different” here, but these ideas aren’t necessarily contradicted, either. Rather than aim to describe great teaching, which can be idiosyncratic, it describes “sound pedagogy,” merely good teaching, the floor, as it were, rather than the ceiling, of education. It is likely that every great teacher is also a good teacher in Professor Coupland’s sense, although readers will find his rules most applicable to the classroom context, where one teacher has the responsibility for instructing multiple students, usually 20 or more, at the same time in one subject.
This is not an easy thing to do. It is not enough just to be enthusiastic or to love your subject, or to have good, diligent students. Going into teaching with expectations like these is a recipe for exhaustion, frustration, disillusionment, and a short career in education. New teachers need focus; they need to know how to use their energy intelligently. In the past, they have turned to Teach Like a Champion, which is full of helpful tips and techniques for running a class effectively. But that book is colored by assumptions about the purpose of education that are far from classical, and it’s also too long and detailed to be a quick read and a quick reference. Tried & True bridges this gap; it is not groundbreaking, but it is unprecedented: a short, simple work that, hopefully, will be disseminated widely in new classical schools, among new and established teachers alike.
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Classical educators who read this primer may ask, ‘Where is the wonder? Where is the truth and beauty and goodness?’ They might also push back on the work’s insistence that lessons have clearly-defined objectives and unit goals, and that these should be aligned with assessments. But these, part of the practical floor of good teaching and sound pedagogy, are what new classical teachers need most, not another painting of the ceiling, the vision of which already inspires them. This is a book written with a boldness and simplicity borne of long experience, and precisely what the idealistic young teacher, marking up every paper with comments everywhere, needs to hear: “Teachers often do work that students could do for themselves.” In fact, much of its advice—its laws—are about students: what they want, what they need, and what the teacher must do for them. In this respect especially it will be most helpful to classical teachers.
John M. Peterson is Assistant Dean, Graduate Director of American Studies, and Director of Classical Education in the Braniff School of Liberal Arts at the University of Dallas. He tweets @thejohnpeterson