Good Stuff
Workshops, videos, and writings to help parents & teachers understand Imaginative Education, deliberate practice, and Philosophy for Children.
Workshops
Everything is Interesting... But How Do I Help My Kids See It?
(Presented at the Washington Homeschool Organization's 2017 conference. Can be 1-2 hours long.)
How can we help our kids go deep into science? In this workshop, we'll show you how to spark interest, memory, and understanding. By learning how to use riddles, metaphors, and epics, you’ll practice a method to fall in love with a topic yourself, and draw your child deep into it.
How Can I Use History to Talk About the Questions That Really Matter?
(Presented at the Washington Homeschool Organization's 2017 conference. Can be 1-2 hours long.)
What’s more important: freedom or safety? Being fair or being right? Simple answers fail us: we need to help our kids develop complex stances. History can be a flight simulator for life. In this workshop, we'll show you how to turn world history into short, compelling stories and conduct powerful discussions around the questions that matter.
How Can I Cultivate Complex Moral Thinking?
How can we raise kids who can think through complex moral issues? What’s more important: freedom or safety? Being fair... or being right? Our brains are often suckered into simple answers. In this workshop, we'll show you how to take any story (a novel, a movie, or a history story) and use the "Philosophy Fight" game to probe its values, and gain wisdom.
Videos
How to Help Anybody Understand (Almost) Anything
(Talk begins at 2 minutes and 30 seconds.)
This 15-or-so-minute talk was given an a Toastmasters conference, and so opens by talking a lot about public speaking — but then shifts to talk about Imaginative Education's tools of riddle, metaphor, and epic story.
Why do Onions Hurt?
This is a run-through of the first half of a speech we gave at Seattle's Darwin Day 2017. It's a good example of teaching through riddles, metaphors, and epics — and is, to boot, a good example of how to teach natural selection.
How to Help Anyone Fall in Love with Evolution (part 2 of "Why Do Onions Hurt?")
Why do nearly 50% of Americans reject the idea of evolution? Not for the reasons you think. This talk touches on how our programs de-tribalize the issues adults love to fight over, and help bring kids into the weirdness of science.
The Story of the Buddha
This was a run-through of the Buddha story that we eventually taught in Young Philosophers. It's in four parts (here are parts two, three, and four), and gives a good sense of how we approach talking about religion in our teaching.
Writings
How Imaginative Education (IE) Tricked Us Into Teaching Atomic Physics…To Squirrely 7-Year-Olds
Posted on ImaginEd: Education that Inspires.
Our Signature Curriculum
Life is fun for us, because we get to cobble together the weirdest ideas in education! Here's one attempt to put all of 'em together in one place.
Archived Blog Posts
We've written a lot on our blog, but haven't updated it in a while. (Happily, we've been too busy doing stuff!) If you'd like to understand the deep ideas that are behind Schools for Humans, you might like to root through here!