Tutoring: The Human Superpower

gilesleeper

Giles Leeper uses science and storytelling to expose the exciting possibilities that arise from recognizing that tutoring and not classroom teaching is how human brains are uniquely designed to teach and learn.

  1. 12/17/2025

    What are Music Lessons Really About? Interview with Bella Issakova

    In this episode, I interview Bella Issakova who has been a violin tutor for the last 30 years and has had a relationship with tutoring going back to when she was 4 and a half learning music in Bulgaria. She has a rich and deep relationship with tutoring in general and violin lessons specifically. I interviewed her because I've learned a great deal about tutoring itself from watching the intentional way she approaches it. And, as will become clear, violin tutoring is about way more than the violin.

    31 min

  2. 10/21/2025

    Dutch Rise and Fall, American Rise and Fall--Part 1

    Why is the rise and the decline of the USA so much like the rise and the decline of the Dutch Republic in the 1600s? The 1900s will probably always be remembered by historians as the American Century. But the 1600s was the Dutch Century. Both of these nations had their exceptional rises, their amazing zeniths, and then their declines. But historians have noticed that the details and particulars of both the rise and the decline phases are eerily similar. The symptoms of decline that we're experiencing right now--rising inequality, stagnant wages, polarization, elite infighting--are only "new" to us if we don't study history. But if we do study the trends, maybe learn more about the cycle we're stuck in. This episode is about the rise of the sunnier more optimistic rising periods of both the Dutch and the American Century. The next episode will be about the darker phase: the decline.

    21 min

  3. 09/15/2025

    Why did Italy Give Us the Renaissance.... and Fascism?

    Watch on Youtube for those who prefer visual aids to go with the audio. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2iR9d8XVuE How can the same country that gave us the Renaissance also give us Fascism? Naturally, there are more than one explanation. Yet, if we look through the education lens, we can’t help but notice that Italy gave us the Renaissance when its north was the most educated region in all of Western Europe... BUT it gave us Fascism after centuries of educational stagnation made it into Europe’s worst education laggard. Is this just a coincidence? If not, it could have dire implications for our future as we continue to adhere to the 20th education system for the entire 21st century.

    18 min

  4. 08/15/2025

    What Explains China's Rise, Fall, and Rise Again?

    Check out the YouTube video here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlTBjsYuZWI In this series, we're taking a big step back in order to look at education as a force in the big picture of humanity. We're investigating the stories of the civilizations that have spent time in the last 1,000 years as the most educated civilization on the planet--China, Italy, Netherlands, Great Britain, and the USA. They were the ones who pushed the education needle forward. 1,000 years ago, the most literate civilization on planet Earth was China. But the Chinese educated class then deliberately stagnated its education system for a very long time. Understanding China's ups and downs... and ups can help to shed some light on the powerful forces of educational expansion and educational stagnation in completely different times and places. This first episode can shed light on what's at stake when we consider how aggressive to be about our own educational progress.

    16 min

  5. 07/02/2025

    Did Americans Really Stop Getting Smarter?

    This episode is also on youtube. You can view that video at this link: https://youtu.be/B8B7pdyLWvk Since 1980, have Americans been getting more educated, less educated, or just holding steady? How would you even answer that question? Literacy and math test scores? Trends in our rising or falling IQ scores? The number of years average Americans are spending in school. Changes in our number of high school and college graduates? Actually, in this episode, we’re going to look at all of that at more. Educational progress in the USA–or lack thereof–matters a lot to the theme of this mini-series of episodes, in which we’re looking at all the nations that, like the USA, became the most educated civilization in the world at some point in the last 1,000 years. We need to look at the science. Did Americans really stop getting smarter?

    22 min

  6. 05/28/2025

    The Pattern

    It seems like we're in unprecedented times. And yet, if we stand back and look at the bigger picture, our historical moment is not nearly as unique as we think it is. The USA and much of the western world is stuck in a recurring pattern. And this pattern has everything to do with our shared blindness to the power of sharing education ever more widely within the society. This episode introduces a mini-series of episodes on the recurring nature of this pattern. In it we'll cover some of the other countries we share this pattern with. We're going to look deeply into the educational histories of China, Italy, the Netherlands, the UK, and then we'll return to the USA again.

    13 min

  7. 10/24/2024

    Kindezi Reflections

    In 2010, Kathleen Jones and I, Giles Leeper, cofounded a charter school in Atlanta called The Kindezi School. By having just six students per class and splitting them into smaller groups, this school attempted to make tutoring a bedrock of its path to success, while only using the funding levels available to public schools. Kathleen became a teacher and I became its principal. So we had two different experiences of the school we started. Did we accomplish something meaningfully different? Did we do something that could be considered a paradigm shift or “unleashing our superpower”? How much did Kathleen’s experience of tutoring at The Kindezi School align with what we’ve learned about the science and psychology of tutoring? Is it possible for you or any individual to do something truly transcendent by starting a charter school? These are some of the questions we reflect on in this episode.

    30 min

  8. 10/09/2024

    Our Superpower in a Time of Crisis

    The teen suicide rate rose by 57% in the decade before the COVID19 pandemic. The US Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, thinks "the defining health crisis of our time" is not COVID: it's the mental health crisis, especially the youth mental health crisis. In 2020, he published a book called, Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World. It's about this crisis and how connecting with one another through conversation and quality time together is our path of healing what in many ways a loneliness epidemic. Although he is not a guest today, I was surprisingly reminded of his work two Fridays ago as I woke up to the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in the devastated city of Asheville, North Carolina. This episode is about how the way we are using our superpower...and not using it... is helping to create the youth mental health crisis and the role that our superpower could play in recovering from it. https://www.amazon.com/Together-Connection-Performance-Greater-Happiness/dp/0062913298

    24 min
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About

Giles Leeper uses science and storytelling to expose the exciting possibilities that arise from recognizing that tutoring and not classroom teaching is how human brains are uniquely designed to teach and learn.

Information

  • Creator
    gilesleeper
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2025
  • Episodes
    18
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2024 All rights reserved.
  • Show Website
    Tutoring: The Human Superpower