The Literature retreat is designed to be applicable for teachers or homeschoolers who:

• Teach classic literature to high school students.

• Teach philosophy, theology, or history to students using classic texts.

• Teach elementary school but would like to become high school teachers.

• Teach college but would like to become high school teachers.

General familiarity with the book is helpful, but it does not need to be read in entirety in advance - attendees are welcome to experience the work being taught in the same manner as a typical student.

Notes from Joshua Gibbs:

On Thursday evening, attendees are invited to the Gibbs home for a reception and orientation. This is the time to share a glass of wine, meet fellow attendees, tell others where you’re from and what you teach. The reception is really an open house, so you can drop by any time before ten and stay for as long as you like.

On Friday morning, attendees will gather on The Ambrose School campus at 8:00 am and class will begin. When I say “class will begin,” that’s exactly what I mean! A day of school, six classes in all, with an hour for lunch and five-minute breaks between each period.

All six classes in a literature retreat revolve around just one book. In each of these classes, my goal is to let attendees see many different strategies for teaching that book. Teaching a work like Paradise Lost well requires a great many tools. A well-prepared teacher knows when to lecture and when to lead a discussion—but also when to assess, when to provoke, when to open the floor for questions, when to answer questions that students are struggling with, when to suggest a hypothetical situation and give students a few minutes to play around in it, when to encourage or exhort, and so on.

What’s more, knowing “how to lecture” means knowing when to give a sixty-second lecture, a three-minute lecture, a five-minute lecture, a twenty-minute lecture, and when to drop everything and tell a long story born of personal experience. Some of this can be planned, but much of it is determined on the fly by the shifting moods and interests of the students, their abilities, their weaknesses, and their ability to both understand and accept difficult truths. Over the course of the six class periods we have together, I want to show you how and when to do as many of these things as possible.

While it’s not necessary for attendees to read every word of the retreat book, it’s helpful if they’re well acquainted with it. I will be reading a number of important passages from our text out loud (and I encourage teachers to read as much of a book out loud as possible to their own students), but we won't have enough time to read the entire book at the retreat. By the end of the day, however, attendees will understand what it means to slowly read and discuss a classic text. They will have received a model for taking up a classic, picking up where the class finished yesterday, and reading out loud until something significant occurs—something which demands an explanation, a conversation, a diatribe, a writing exercise, and so forth.

Students are encouraged to ask questions about the text on Friday but to save questions about method, theory, and practice until Saturday.

On Friday afternoon, class will dismiss at 3:30 pm and attendees will have several hours to themselves before dinner. At 6:00 pm, a dinner will be held at the Gibbs home for all who want to attend (anyone who would prefer to go out to eat with a few fellow attendees is welcome to do so).

On Saturday morning, the half-day session will begin at 9:00 am and go until noon. During this time, attendees are invited to ask questions about everything they saw and heard on the previous day, including how to incorporate what you saw and heard into your own classes.