Paideia programs

Paideia was essentially a liberal arts education. My own skills improved because I got regular, direct feedback from peers and my professor. Read an article , written by Association of American Colleges and Universities, that features the shared learning experiences of Luther's Paideia program!

J-Term Abroad Each year there are several off-campus Paideia courses offered. Paideia Ethical Choices Paideia courses pay special attention to the nature of moral decision-making through discussion and the continued development of student's writing. Writing Center The Writing Center is staffed by peer tutors who are available to all Luther students who seek assistance in any stage of the writing process for assignments and applications. View All Blog Posts. View All Events. In the News. The SNF Paideia Program and partners featured Ernesto Pujol and Aaron Levy, an artist and an interdisciplinary scholar who have transformed both what it means to listen and what the act of listening can achieve as part of a lecture and workshops.

Learn More. View All. Have an idea about dialogue on campus? Share topics and questions that are on your mind. These seemingly contradictory ideas—intellectual rigor and equal access to a quality education—are the bedrock upon which successful Paideia schools have been built.

Perhaps the most important reason for Paideia's steady growth is that the program includes all subjects and embraces important curriculum from diverse cultures. Increasingly, the National Paideia Center has provided schools with curricular information on how to use Paideia instructional techniques in mathematics, science, music, literature, writing, and physical education—all the subjects in a strong core curriculum.

In addition, the center has broadened the use of the term classical to include the study of texts by African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and representatives of other cultures. The recent work of the National Paideia Center is based on a mix of teaching strategies called the "three columns" of teaching. They are made up of the didactic instruction of curricular information, intellectual coaching of the skills necessary to manipulate and apply information, and seminar discussion of the ideas and values inherent to that information.

Paideia does not require a specific curriculum, but rather provides a system for fostering student engagement with the standard curriculum of a state or district. In contrast to the heavy use of teacher-centered, didactic instruction characterizing traditional American schools, the Paideia program focuses on limiting didactic instruction to less that 15 percent of classroom time and devoting the remaining 85 to 90 percent to increased student learning activity.

Typically, in the first year of partnership with the center, a school focuses on implementing the Paideia seminar schoolwide. The Paideia seminar is a formal discussion of a text in which the leader of the seminar the teacher simply asks open-ended questions, leaving it up to the students to generate a dialogue about the ideas and values inherent to the text.

The text may be a map or historical document, a chart or skeleton, a math problem or a poem, a photograph or painting. In this way, students are brought into active engagement with the conceptual framework behind the curriculum.