The members of the Charlotte Latin School faculty aren’t just teachers — they’re also learners. And so, as Charlotte Latin’s teachers prepared last week to welcome students back to the campus for the 2026–27 school year, they gathered in Thies Auditorium for a keynote address from Daniel Willingham, Professor of Psychology and Fundamental Neuroscience at the University of Virginia.

Willingham, author of books such as The Reading Mind, Why Don’t Students Like School? and Outsmart Your Brain, specializes in translating rigorous cognitive science into effective classroom practices. He spent a full day on the Charlotte Latin campus, beginning with a speech to all faculty members that delved into the latest research on how curiosity works. Curiosity is a crucial part of Charlotte Latin’s classroom practice: one of the six attributes of the Portrait of the Latin Leader that the school seeks to instill in its students is Curious Learner.

“Curiosity is a psychological state that we share with many other species,” Willingham said. “The purpose of curiosity is understanding our environment.” To exploit the evolutionary advantage of hard-wired curiosity, he suggested, teachers should devote more time to posing the fundamental questions undergirding what they want students to learn: as he put it, making sure not to provide answers before they ask questions. 

“Capitalize on narrative structure,” he urged the faculty. “The challenge is how to translate that structure into a lesson plan.”

Willingham followed his keynote with a series of sessions for Middle and Upper School teachers on how memory works, how to teach critical thinking, and how to cultivate effective study habits among students (emphasizing their ability to explain a topic rather than superficial reviews that provide them with the illusion of learning). 

Lauren Putman, Middle School Dean of Instruction, first encountered Willingham at a Learning and the Brain conference and found one of his epigrams a particularly useful summary of how the mind works: “Memory is the residue of thought.” 

“We brought Daniel Willingham because he bridges the research and the classroom,” Putman said. “He’s someone that schools are leaning on in terms of reinforcing practices that create a foundation of learning. And to serve our students, we must embrace a growth mindset.”