When I was a student, I thought I was a top tier reader. My teacher didn’t do numbers for our reading groups. She chose large cats. But I knew that it was better to be a Lion than an Ocelot. I knew my reading level. I rushed through the novels and short chapter books and flew through the comprehension questions in a competition against my peers. I believed, at the time, that learning was all about speed and accuracy.

On the other hand, I never passed a timed reading test. My computational fluency was awful. And while we didn’t have feline-based small groups to prove my status, I would watch kids finish the test with time to spare while I remained stuck. I defined myself as being bad at math.

Years later, at the university level, I thrived in upper level math that required rethinking and reformulating ideas. I had the stamina to slow down and wrestle with problems. I loved doing fewer problems that were more challenging. Meanwhile, I had to learn how to close read in some of my advanced history courses because I often read too quickly and missed key details.

The Invisible Pressure to Go Faster

I watched one of the teachers in my cohort stand at the front of her classroom, clutching the pacing guide like a lifeline. Her eyes darted across the pages, scanning dates and objectives. She tried to exhude calm but she was quietly panicking at how far behind she had become. It was already week six and she was still slogging through week four of the pacing guide.

The pressure was everywhere. Finish the unit. Prep for the AP test. Hit the benchmark scores. But as I looked around the room, I could see it in the students’ faces. They were moving fast, racing through content, but it was clear they were not holding on to much. She kept having to reteach key ideas. They were covering material but they weren’t mastering it.  The urgency to keep pace was squeezing out the chance to slow down, wrestle with ideas, and build the kind of understanding that actually lasts.

And the end result? Everyone seemed stressed. And yet, this wasn’t her fault. She was working against three critical forces that pushed speed over mastery.

1. Cultural Forces

It’s no secret we live in a fast era. Efficiency has become the default value in our culture. We have speed reading, speed dating, 2x playback speed on podcasts. We added a pitch clock to baseball (which I admittedly enjoy). We scroll through short videos on TikTok and Instagram.

We have become a culture of quick dopamine hits. Every notification, like, and swipe gives us a tiny surge of pleasure, training our brains to crave constant novelty. It can make sustained focus feel almost unnatural. When everything moves at lightning speed, we risk losing our capacity for patience, curiosity, and the kind of slow, steady thinking that leads to lasting understanding.

 

2. Panic About Being Behind

In education, we love to toss around the phrase “lifelong learning” when we talk about students. And yet, we also tend to create policies that focus on speed. Every time we go back to school, there are alarmist news reports about “summer learning loss.” We hear dire reports about kids being behind in reading and math. In the US (where I live) our two biggest initiatives were No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. Again, speed.

It’s no wonder that the interventions have been speed-based as well. Pull kids out of music, art, and PE to do worksheet-based reading intervention. Rush students through content like they’re sprinting to some imaginary finish line. We pile on the standards, cram for the tests, and move on to the next unit before the learning has the time to sink in. Now, with adaptive learning AI programs, students recieve instant feedback loops without the time for deep processing.

 

3. False Equivalencies

These last two factors have led to critical false equivalencies that students internalize. Finishing doesn’t always mean understanding. Covering content doesn’t always mean students actually connect with it.  A fast-paced lesson might check all the boxes, but does that matter if students forget it a week later? These are false equivalencies we slip into when we let speed or surface-level outcomes drive the work. True learning digs deeper. It takes time for ideas to click, for questions to form, and for students to see how something fits into their own lives or the larger world. Just because we completed the lesson does not mean the learning really happened.

A Tale of Two Classes

When I was in high school, I took a Pre-Calculus course that moved at a break-neck speed. The teacher would explain how to solve a specific type of math problem, and we would then practice doing 3-5 similar problems on our own in class. We would then solve an additional thirty problems at home. The class was challenging, but I studied each week for the Friday quiz and managed to maintain a solid 92%.

And yet, when I received a study guide for the final exam, I felt lost. I struggled with the sample word problems, not because of vocabulary or language, but because I didn’t understand how the math at a conceptual level. I had spent a semester cramming for the test every Thursday night, only to forget the information when we moved on.

I had been engaging in shallow learning without developing any enduring understanding of math. I don’t blame the teacher. We had a required textbook that valued quantity over quality. But I also blame myself. I engaged in the previously mentioned Continuous Partial Attention by drawing comic strips during direct instruction. Yeah, I was that kid. But I also worked really hard at studying the content each week.

The next year, I took AP Statistics. This class felt slower and more deliberate. We focused on quality rather than quantity. The teacher asked us to analyze our work to determine what we knew, what we didn’t know, and what we needed to figure out next. We compared and contrasted strategies. He still used direct instruction, and we still had homework. But he would also provide us with multiple scenarios and ask us to apply statistical thinking as we determined p-values and z-scores. I often felt confused when we had to combine approaches or try a new strategy that we hadn’t figured out yet.

Although I often worried that I was failing the class, I scored a solid 94%. But I also remembered the content. I knew statistics inside and out. I started thinking about statistics in my daily life. I would watch the news and grow angry at a “change in the momentum” of 1.5% in an election poll when the standard deviation was 4.2%. I enjoyed statistics (and I still do). Although this was technically an Advanced Placement course, I felt like the goal of the course went beyond college. Our teacher wanted us to think statistically in life.

 

Why We Need a “Snailed It” Mindset 

A few years ago, my son designed a t-shirt with the words “Snailed It” and a cartoon image of a pretty chill-looking snail. While this started as a silly joke, it has grown into a phrase I use all the time. It has grown from a t-shirt to a phrase into a mantra and now a mindset I try to embrace.

Snailed It is a reminder that success is about faithfulness. It’s about continuing to try even when progress feels painfully slow. And sometimes it feels like you’re progressing at, well, a snail’s pace. But that’s okay because when you’re snailing it, you’re looking past the urgent and focusing on your long-term goals. Snailed It is a rejection of perfectionism. It’s a reminder that creativity is less about inspiration than iteration.

This mindset ultimately helps me with the slow pace of growth in learning a new skill or understanding a concept. It’s okay to master a skill incrementally and to understand a concept slowly over time.

It might seem counterintuive to choose a slow path when the world is moving at a breakneck speed.  After all, machine learning generates solutions within seconds. Meanwhile, changes happen quickly and we need to be adapable. But counterintuitively, when we embrace a Snailed It mindset, we actually have an advantage in a rapidly changing landscape.

On academic level, a Snailed It approach helps us avoid the pitfalls of shallow learning because it focuses on retention rather than speed. When students take their time to wrestle with ideas, make mistakes, and revisit concepts, they build stronger mental pathways. It is like letting cement cure instead of trying to walk on it too soon. The knowledge settles in, connects to other things they know, and becomes something they can truly use later. Quick learning might look impressive on the surface, but slow learning runs deeper. This slower approach allows for more rehearsal and retrieval.

Because the learning sticks, students can then dive deeper. With better background knowledge, they can apply their knowledge to new contexts as they engage in meaningful problem-solving. They can refine their skills incrementally over time. They can wrestle with big ideas.

Mastery is not a straight line. It’s a spiral with revisits, detours, and resets. This has an added benefit of developing resilience as students learn to work and rework ideas or continually, incrementally improve their skills.

But this slower approach will also help students with those hard, durable skills (note that I don’t call them soft skills) that they’ll need as they navigate a complex world. Sometimes I think of these skills as Yeti Skills. I’m not sure if you’ve ever used a Yeti ice chest (we don’t because we didn’t feel the need to get a second mortgage to buy ice chests) but they are virtually indestructible.

Cal Newport describes this approach as “slow productivity” based on deep, focused work for sustained periods of time. Slow Productivity encourages us to engage in more intentional, creative, and intellectually challenging pursuits that machines can’t replicate.

Note that slowing down doesn’t mean slacking. It means committing to intentional repetition, depth, and reflection. It requires longer periods of deep focus. Along the way, it helps improve metacognition:

 

Speed Matters But at What Cost?

So does this mean we avoid testing for reading fluency in ELA or computational fluency in math? Not at all. It is easy to swing the pendulum too far and dismiss the value of quick checks or timed tasks simply because we are concerned about shallow learning. Some nuance here. It is not the testing itself that is the problem. It is how we use it, how often we use it, and whether we reduce a student’s entire identity as a reader or mathematician to a speed metric. When done thoughtfully, fluency assessments give us a snapshot that can guide next steps, not a verdict on a child’s worth or capability.

At a skill level, we need fluency so students can reach automaticity and avoid the frustration that comes from everything feeling like a heavy lift. We need long, extended periods of choice-based reading in a way that sometimes moves quickly. When students have to decode each word or grind through basic math facts one slow moment at a time, it drains their energy and leads to cognitive overload. They have less brain space left for comprehension, for problem-solving, or for genuine curiosity. Fluency frees up the mind to tackle richer, more meaningful tasks. It is like learning to drive. At first, every turn signal and brake press requires focus. Later, it becomes second nature, and they can look around and take in the world.

We also need to learn facts at a faster pace sometimes. Sometimes students need to cover larger swaths of content at a shallower level in order to build the background knowledge for depth. We need breadth as well as depth. Surveying a wide range of ideas builds background knowledge, sparks unexpected interests, and creates a network of connections they can return to later with more intensity.

I like to think of it like interval training. Sometimes students go fast and sometimes they slow down. Sometimes they go for breadth in order to take a deeper dive. Sometimes they do extended reading followed by tight close reading. Sometimes they do quick writes with no revision and sometimes they spend days revising a draft. Sometimes we go slow and deliberate. Sometimes we go quick and expansive. Both are essential for deeper learning.

You Don’t Have to Speed Up to Keep Up

This sounds great but what about the crowded curriculum maps and the pressure to pass the high stakes tests? As educators, we can’t always control how many standards we teach, but we can prioritize key standards. Some call these “power standards” or “essential standards,” but the idea is to spend time teaching the most important standards. We can ask, “Which standards do students need for future success in this content area?” or “Which standards will be most relevant to life?”

Another approach is to slow down by teaching standards in a more connected way. This might include combining social studies and ELA standards in an assignment. It might also involve practicing skill-based standards while learning conceptual standards at a deeper level. In first grade, you might have students master a fluency standard while also doing reading comprehension and focusing on learning the basics of sequencing. In social studies, students might practice historical methods while learning key facts and understanding history’s larger concepts

On some level, we can’t escape the reality of a crowded curriculum map. However, we can reduce the clutter for each student through a process called compacting. With compacting, we allow students to “test out” content that they have already mastered so they can spend more time on standards they haven’t mastered. This is often called Competency-Based Learning as well.

When I taught eighth grade self-contained (all subjects), my students all experienced significant growth. So, the Falls Far Below students moved to Approaches and often Meets. The Approaches students often moved toward Exceeds. It was nothing magical. I had simply incorporated compacting and competency-based learning into two days a week and I used compacting for all homework. I wasn’t a great math teacher but I was able to buy time and allow students the space to master the content. They grew more confident and resilient as a result.

 

What Does This Mean for Our Students

It’s easy to beat yourself up about falling behind on the pacing guide. And there is some truth to the need to cover all the standards well. But I also think it helps to recognize that you’re not falling behind when you slow down. You’re building something that lasts.

Whether it’s compacting or layering your standards or simply prioritizing the standards that matter the most, it’s okay to go slow. It’s okay to pause for reflection. It’s okay to “Snail It.” Because when this happens, students learn the content at a deeper level. There’s more transfer of the knowledge as they engage in deeper problem-solving. They persevere and develop resilience. And the vibe is different. It’s more relaxed. Meanwhile, this process help students grow more focused in a culture of distraction.

Interested in Learning More?

These ideas (and a few of the stories) can be found in chapter 2 and 3 of my newest book The Depth Advantage. In this book, I share stories, tools, and practical shifts that support the kind of teaching that leads to deeper focus, retention, and learning. I know that we are in challenging times. Students seem to lack resilience and self-direction. They struggle with focus. But that’s why these big challenges call for big solutions. Here’s a quick preview video

If you’re interested in the book but still not sure about it, you might want to check out Chapter 1. Simply sign up below and you’ll have access to this chapter along with my newsletter where I share my latest articles, podcasts, and free resources.

Download Chapter One of The Depth Advantage, titled “Depth Over Distraction,” and use it in whatever way is helpful. You can grab it below. Also, check out the free deeper learning resources at depthadvantage.com.