Jamie Thom, in last week’s Tes, drew attention to the professional and pedagogical benefits that would surely follow if we allowed ourselves to simply slow down. The agents of acceleration include growing workload and expectations (not least around marking and reporting), the fecundity of curriculum content, and the temptation to judge lessons in terms of almost-instantaneous outcomes (as in pupils being seen to have made “rapid progress” within the confines of a single lesson).

Pedagogically, the fixation with speed threatens to undermine any focus on teaching for retention, on intellectual development over the longer term, and on asking questions that invite - and allow time for - reflection.

Thom’s plea fits well with voices raised in support of the ”Slow Education” initiative, which itself grew out of exasperation about proliferating course content and standardised testing, and which seeks to disassociate schools from the broader psychological and societal consequences of what Robert Colvile called The Great Acceleration.

This movement contends that process is central to the learning experience, or, to put it another way, how we teach is as important as what we teach. Learning is likened to a journey, and the richness and depth of the experience might be compromised if we always opt for the shortcut.

Taking things more slowly is not something that comes easily given the assumption of a causal relationship between pace and engagement. Fears abound that a slower pace invites boredom and distraction. But slower strategies might, paradoxically, entail short-cuts if all we are doing is padding - lengthening discussion time, spending more time in teacher talk mode, spinning out student activities. For all these reasons, there is no simple relationship between pace and engagement, let alone learning.

Still, the analogy at the heart of the slow education movement is worthy of critique. Is speed (whether fast or slow) what we should really be focusing on? Someone observing a lesson and looking for rapid progress might assume that all that matters is the distance (intellectual activity?) covered by an object (pupil?) in unit time (length of lesson?). Maybe instead, we should focus not so much on the distance covered in the time available, but on the overall direction of travel.

Physicists define velocity as the rate at which an object changes its position. I understand this to mean that if a car moving at breakneck speed takes a circular route back to its starting position, its average velocity would turn out to be zero.

A lesson characterised by frenetic energy involves movement, but not necessarily direction; it might have speed but not velocity. But neither would continually stepping forward and then back, however slowly and deliberately, take us to a different place.

In defining the ideal learning “journey” we should worry less about speed, or even total “distance” travelled. Rather, we should consider the idea of displacement - exactly how far the objects (those pesky pupils again) have traveled (intellectually) from their starting point in unit time. Effective learning, like velocity but unlike speed, has a directional component.