Our Mission
The Classical Teaching Institute exists to show teachers how to teach.
Classical Christian schools need qualified, confident teachers who enjoy their work and do it well. The goal of the Institute is to help to meet this need by demonstrating the tools of good pedagogy in ways that teachers find immediately applicable and relevant.
A good class demands a balance of dramatic reading, exposition, paraphrasing, catechesis, lecture, open dialogue, Socratic discussion, games, and illustrations—but it is one thing to tell this to young teachers and another thing entirely to show them. At The Classical Teaching Institute, we show teachers how to incorporate a wide variety of pedagogical practices by giving them the opportunity to sit under an experienced, accomplished classical educator and observe lessons being taught in the same manner that they themselves can teach them.
Maybe you’re a classical teacher who had a public school education, so you now find yourself trying to teach subjects you never learned—or you learned them from a very different perspective. Or maybe you had some great college professors, but when you try to model their lectures for students, the concepts fly over their heads. Maybe you can lead a great Socratic discussion with your peers, but you have no idea how to make seventh grade boys take you seriously.
What new teachers need is a chance to see how someone with experience would handle their material, and that’s what the Institute is here to provide.
Our Motto
Show, Don’t Tell
The motto for The Classical Teaching Institute is “Show, don’t tell,” which is the oldest and most venerable principle of good storytelling. Don’t tell the audience a character is courageous, show them his acts of courage. Don’t tell the reader that a palace is beautiful, describe the columns, landscaping, and furniture in such detail that readers can judge the beauty of the palace for themselves.
Up to this point, training for classical Christian educators has tended toward the theoretical, not the experiential. Why? Because theory is inexpensive and experience is costly. You can tell someone that Lake Geneva is beautiful, or you can pay for them to fly to Lake Geneva so they can judge for themselves. Talk is cheap, as they say.
Of course, talk definitely has its place, as does theory. And yet the Christian tradition is ripe with the gratuitous, overabundant, experienced beauty of God—and this is the model of reality Christians are called to follow. Beauty is different from truth and goodness: we can accept claims of truth and goodness from a witness, but in order to judge a thing beautiful, we must experience it directly.
It is for this reason that the Psalmist’s offer to “taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8) is so important. Our knowledge of God is not staked in abstractions but in experience. Christ became a man and was “like us in all ways except for sin,” as the Chalcedonian Creed states. Thus, we don’t just hear about God’s humility, we see it. We don’t just listen to stories of God’s generosity, we eat the food He prepares for us. Every day, the splendor and majesty of God is before us in His creation, and we experience it with our senses.
The Classical Teaching Institute aims to follow in the Christian tradition by offering experience, not just theories. If you haven’t experienced much good teaching, you don’t know even know what you’re missing.
Our Story
Since the late 1990s, the rapid growth of classical Christian schools has outpaced the training of qualified, classically-minded teachers. Many classical schools hope and intend to train their teachers better, but the training opportunities have been largely theoretical up to this point: books about teaching, lectures about classroom management, pedagogy-themed conference talks. While such training has value, teachers who want to give their students a classical education must experience a classical education for themselves. It’s not enough to be told about it.
It is difficult for anyone to perform a task without a clear model for how it can be done well, and teachers are no different. Many classical teachers have never seen a good role model for what they need to do: stand at the front of the room and offer elementary, middle school, or high school students a very specific type of education. Knowing what you want to accomplish and knowing how to do it are two different things, and a number of new teachers get stuck in the gap between good intentions and teaching a successful lesson.
After observing the shortage of training opportunities and listening to a number of teachers express the desire for a different type of instruction, Joshua Gibbs and Wade Ortego developed a training program with a very specific goal: to offer an immersive classroom experience to classical Christian teachers who don’t have a strong model for how to teach well.
Thanks to the vision and generosity of The Ambrose School’s Board of Directors, The Classical Training Institute at the Ambrose School was founded in Spring 2024 to carry out this mission.
Our Symbols
The Bee & The Chi-Rho
The bee has long been a symbol of contemplation in the Christian tradition. During the Middle Ages, monks often drew bees in the margins of texts they transcribed as a reminder to dwell deeply on the wisdom of the ages. As bees collect pollen, so the student collects the words of a text. After sitting with the text for a long time, brooding over it, and ruminating upon it, the wisdom of that text is drawn out as honey—as wise deeds, obedience, virtue, joy.
Likewise, The Classical Teaching Institute is pleased to offer instructors who have brooded over classical texts for many years and have both right ideas and right teaching to offer their students. The bee is also a symbol of St. Ambrose of Milan, the namesake of The Ambrose School in Meridian, Idaho.
Our emblem also features the Chi-Rho symbol, named after the first two Greek letters in the name "Christ." In the early church, the Chi-Rho was a secret sign for Christians to identify themselves to each other, as shown on the walls of the catacombs, sarcophagi, jewelry, mosaics, and other objects. The symbol took on greater importance after the Emperor Constantine added it to his military standard in 312, and famous examples of its usage include intricately decorated pages in the Lindisfarne Gospels and Book of Kells.
The Chi-Rho is a visual reminder that Christ is the foundation on which all our work rests.