In a world saturated with disruption, secondary History teachers stand on the threshold of profound change.
The rapid evolution of AI offers breathtaking opportunities — but also daunting challenges. Amid the noise, a quieter revolution calls to us: the turn toward slow, connected, values-based teaching.
Slow teaching in History isn’t about doing more — it’s about being more.
It calls us to be more present, more authentic, more attentive to student voice.
It invites us to be more connected — to our histories, to our students, to our communities, and to ourselves.
It challenges us to be more reparative, more generative, more hopeful, and more fully human.
If we truly want to implement an AI-infused slow pedagogy for History, we must recognise a simple but radical truth: teachers themselves must be resourced, empowered, and supported to transform — not just in what they do, but in who they are becoming as educators.
Capacity Training for a New Era
The slow teaching movement is not simply another model to be bolted onto old structures; it requires a paradigm shift in how we think about teachers, teaching, and the purposes of schooling itself.
To teach slowly — with presence, relational depth, and ethical courage — is not intuitive within industrial era systems of education built for compliance, and “efficiency”performativity”.
Teachers must be deliberately trained, supported, and resourced to work in the ways of slow teaching. This is not remedial upskilling — it is capacity training for a new professional reality.
Teachers must be supported to become. To become.
- To become more personally grounded: Cultivating reflection, self-awareness, resilience, vision, and purpose — along with the courage to innovate, push the edges of practice, and take ethical risks in pursuit of learning that matters.
- To become more interpersonally connected: Building the capacity for empathy, vulnerability, deep listening, ethical judgement, and authentic human dialogue.
- To become more professionally expansive: Deepening their disciplinary and pedagogical knowledge — including mastery of historical inquiry, civic and global historical thinking, and the thoughtful integration of digital and AI technologies through UDL-informed approaches.
Slow teaching demands deep, meaningful connection — to self, to students, to history, and to the possible futures we are tasked to imagine. It is not a call for greater output.
It is an invitation to greater presence.
Maurice Holt’s vision for a “slow school movement” emphasises the need to reclaim education from fast, mechanised models. Slow schools are spaces where inquiry, imagination, tradition, ethical judgement, and cultural responsiveness thrive — even if these qualities cannot be instantly measured. Slow schools are simply not slower versions of existing systems; they are fundamentally different spaces. Spaces where inquiry, imagination, cultural responsiveness, and ethical judgement take precedence over standardisation, and superficial performance.
The Crisis of Schooling Structures
Slow teaching does not unfold in a vacuum. It must contend with — and perhaps subvert — structures built for something else entirely.
Today’s schools operate under intense pressure to produce data-driven results, driven by policy frameworks shaped more by managerialism than pedagogy. The educational burgers must be flipped. The language of learning has been replaced by the language of assessment – perhaps the lived language is one of compliance. Teachers, and students, are not asked to truly reflect or learn; they are asked to perform and be measured. Do you want fries with that?
Modern secondary schooling, as Pip Cleaves observes, isn’t broken because it fails at its design — it’s broken because it succeeds at a design that no longer serves us.
It was built as a sorting machine, not a growing place; a structure that ranks rather than nurtures; a system that silences rather than listens.
Secondary schooling as a structural environment, built on a logic of performativity and metrics, actively undermines the conditions required for slow, ethical, inquiry-based education. We are witnessing, in an educational context, what Daniel Yankelovich famously named the McNamara Fallacy:
When the McNamara discipline is applied too literally, the first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. The second step is to disregard that which can’t easily be measured or given a quantitative value. The third step is to presume that what can’t be measured easily really isn’t important. The forth step is to say that what can’t be easily measured really doesn’t exist…
It prepares students for a world that’s already gone — while punishing those who live in the world that’s emerging. Within this paradigm, the slow teacher is a problem — too relational, too questioning, too inefficient. But in reality, the slow teacher is exactly what these disrupted times demand.
As Bruggeman writes, history classrooms must become “laboratories of ethical imagining” — spaces where students learn to ask, interpret, challenge, generate and repair. This kind of work is slow, relational, unpredictable — and it resists easy measurement.
The irony is that in many cases, it is in fast teaching that deep learning happens least, while it is in slow teaching that learning — real, transformative learning — takes root. Given the dissatisfaction of so many, the disengagement of so many, and the research by so many, it’s time to discard the industrial models of fast schooling and to imagine something radically better.
Resourcing Slow Teaching
If we want our schools to genuinely be places in which slow teaching flourishes, then those who control our systems must do more than, at best, endorse the sense in the pedagogical values of slow teaching. They must resource change — structurally, relationally, and strategically.
Slow teaching demands time: time to reflect, to prepare, to listen, to experiment, to be.
But time is not a philosophical abstraction — it is a structural condition.
Time must be created. Bought. Protected.
That means system-wide commitments to: more teachers, reduced class sizes, co-teaching models, collaborative planning time, fewer face-to-face teaching hours, and professional learning built around reflection, inquiry, and growth — not compliance or performative credentialism.
Teachers must be prepared not just with skills, but with space to cultivate the capabilities that the AI era demands. This includes:
- Time to reflect — on purpose, pedagogy, and students as complex, whole people.
- Time to prepare — deeply and deliberately, free from the suffocating pace of curriculum coverage and standardised assessment deadlines.
- Time to grow — through coaching, mentoring, networking, and professional inquiry that values experimentation and failure as learning.
- Time to collaborate — to co-create ethical, future-focused learning cultures with colleagues, students, and communities.
- Time to rest — because slow teaching is emotionally demanding, intellectually tiring, and relationally intense.
Just as healthy food habits cannot thrive in fast food restaurants, slow teaching cannot grow in fast schools.
Presence, courage, imagination — these cannot be summoned by goodwill alone.
They must be resourced through meaningful, sustained investment in teacher time, professional development, and personal growth.
This is capacity training in its fullest sense: not just equipping teachers with new strategies, but rebuilding the very conditions that allow transformative teaching and learning to take root.
Reimagining Education in the Age of AI
As generative AI accelerates disruption across every sector, education must ask a deep question. We must move beyond asking how we adapt existing systems to AI.
We need to ask what kind of teaching and learning do we want to fight for?
Slow teaching offers one vision — one rooted in humanity, ethical courage, imagination, and connection. But to realise this, we must confront entrenched systems and outdated assumptions. We must rethink what counts, what gets measured, and what gets resourced.
Pip Cleaves asks pointedly:
“Why do we insist on using GenAI just to prop up an outdated education system? Until we have the courage to rethink how we educate, … superficial uses of AI will remain the norm.”
It’s also time to ask not only what students and teachers need, but what capacities we expect of our school leaders and political leaders in a disrupted world – a world in which we must assume volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.
Do our leaders have ‘the right stuff’? The vision, the ethical clarity, and the systems literacy to lead through disruption — or are they clinging to managerial and performative reflexes of the past?
Transforming education in the age of AI is not simply about adopting new tools.
It’s about building new cultures — of trust, care, courage, and professional integrity.
It’s about clearing the barriers that make slow, purposeful, reparative teaching an exception rather than the norm.
This demands more than tools — it demands capacity building.
The capacity to lead through ambiguity. To trust teachers. To trust students. To co-create meaning. It requires school and system leaders who can navigate complexity with courage, humility, and vision.
It requires political leaders who are not afraid to dismantle what no longer serves and to back educators prepared to innovate with integrity.
Just as healthy food habits cannot thrive in fast food restaurants, slow teaching cannot grow in fast schools.
Presence, courage, imagination — these cannot be summoned by goodwill alone.
They must be resourced through meaningful, sustained investment in teacher time, professional development, and personal growth.
And above all, this work must be trusted.
To paraphrase American football coach Bill Walsh, when a team, when players focus on mastering their craft with care and integrity, “the scoreboard looks after itself.”
The same is true for slow teaching: when presence, authenticity, and relational depth are prioritised, learning outcomes will take care of themselves.
When we prioritise presence, authenticity, and relational depth, the outcomes will follow — because we’ve rehumanised the conditions for learning.
We don’t need to tweak what’s broken.
We need to reimagine the purpose of schooling.
And we need to be brave enough to resource those who will build it.
Disrupted History 