By Monica R. Martinez & Dennis McGrath

Deeper Learning

• High school stinks, because we have to do what we’re told over and over and over again….I challenge all of you to go to a high school and try to sit next to a student for the entire day as you go from your 42-minute class to your 42-minute class 31-minute lunch, where you shove down the industrial food, to your next 42-minute class. And at the end of the day, I’ll ask you not even to remember the content of your 42 minute class-just remember what subject it was! If you can do that, it’s great. And here’s the other thing, what you’re told to do over and over and over again you have no idea why or how you’re ever going to need it.

A Student’s Perspective

• Frequently dismissed as a minor issue, such dire consequences make it hard to deny that the matter of disengaged students is anything but; close to 30% of students indicate they are bored due to lack of interaction with teachers, and 75% report the material being taught is not interesting.

Disengaged Students

• Avalon School @ St. Paul Minnesota

• Casco Bay High School @ Portland, Maine

• King Middle School @ Portland, Maine

• Impact Academy of Arts & Technology @ Hayward, California

• High Tech High @ San Diego, California

• MC2 STEM High School in Cleveland

• Rochester High School @ Rochester, Indiana

• Science Leadership Academy @ Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Eight Schools explored in Deeper Learning

• The new world is demanding that digital age workers have digital age skills, including the abilities to think critically, collaborate, and work independently.

• Today’s students need much less passive rule following and rote memorization, and much more guidance and support in becoming self-directed learners who are able to take initiative and apply what they learn to a variety of different situations.

• “Deeper Learning” was selected as the term that fully encompasses the educational goals to constitute the foundation for the most important ability for students to achieve: the capacity for learning how to learn.

Deeper Learning

• Establish cohesive, collaborative learning communities that sharply differ from the top-down national norm;

• Empower and encourage students to become more self-directed, creative, and cooperative by getting them out of their chairs and more directly involved in their own education;

• Make curricula more engaging, memorable, and meaningful by integrating subjects and establishing relevance to real-world concerns;

Strategies and Goals of the Eight Schools

• Reach outside classroom walls to extend the idea and purpose of learning beyond school, forming partnership with businesses, organizations, research institutions, and colleges and universities.

• Inspire students by endeavoring to understand their talents and interests, customizing learning whenever possible to discover the motivational “hook” for each young person; and

• Incorporate technology purposefully to enhance, rather than simply automate, learning.

Strategies and Goals of the Eight Schools

Accountability Pressure

Blueprints for Deeper Learning

• The development of strong school communities is essential for students to evolve from playing a passive role in their education to being active, self-directed learners.

• The most effective communities blend support and trust with high expectations and a collective responsibility for learning.

1 CONNECTCreate a Community of Learners

• Useful tactics to build strong learning communities include “dis-orientation” rituals to disrupt past experience; physical environments that reflect a focus on learning, openness, and equality; regular, formal and conspicuous reminder of the community’s aspirations, expectations, and norms; and the involvement of older students as mentor, model and guides.

• Collaborating well is an increasingly necessary skill in our modern world. Teaching it is no simple exercise and requires a range of efforts, including inspiring student to care about each other’s success, establishing norms for constructive feedback, stimulating those who seem less motivated, and knowing when and how to intervene-and when and how to step aside and allow students to find their way.

1 CONNECTCreate a Community of Learners

• Activating meaningful educational experiences are key in helping students reach Deeper Learning goals-and also make a difference in graduation rates, rendering engaged learning experiences as critical component of any plan or process to curb high school dropout rates.

• Schools that embrace Deeper Learning objectives take care to get students doing real-world projects such as completing energy assessments of their homes or designing a new emergency room for a local hospital. School routines that rely on a lot of group and independent work, including project-based learning, can not only help student figure out what they’re good at, but also give teachers and student opportunities not available in traditional classrooms to learn about each other spontaneously and strengthen their relationships to each another and to learning.

2 EMPOWRActivate Students to Lead Their Own Learning

• Practice makes perfect – or, at least, a lot better. Students most efficiently and successfully become deeper learners when their teachers can devote their talent and significant amount of time to devising learning loops that provide useful feedback and opportunities to revise work and practice new skills.

• Guiding student through revisions of their work is a fundamentally important strategy for Deeper Learning.

• Teachers can encourage students to think critically and care more about the quality and impact of their work by requiring oral presentations, ranging from debates and Socratic seminars to student-led parent conferences and public speeches.

2 EMPOWRActivate Students to Lead Their Own Learning

• Evidence supports the fact that learning becomes more efficient – with faster and deeper retention when material is personally relevant and subjects are integrated. Even so, most conventional schools still teach subjects in isolation.

• Teachers can make learning more meaningful and effective by integrating subjects and connecting them to real-world problems, rather than presenting them in a compartmentalized manner only focused on the knowledge and not the application of it.

• Teachers who clearly communicate high expectations for students are better positioned to empower students rise up to them.

• Professional learning communities enable teachers to integrate curricula, with time built into their daily schedules for planning and collaboration. It is absolutely essential that administrators (at the school, district, and state levels) clear the path for this to happen by providing support to teachers.

3 CONTEXTUALIZETie Subjects to Each Other and Keep It Real

• Reaching beyond classroom walls as part of providing students with integrated learning challenges is a game-changer for envisioning, creating, and supporting Deeper Learning experiences.

• Teachers must constantly shift roles: in addition to taking on curriculum design, advising, and coaching they become networkers who scout opportunities for their students. In doing so, they model many of the skills the students themselves ultimately acquire through the valuable institutional partnerships.

• Tapping local resources- including museums, corporations, academic institutions, nonprofit organizations, and other groups- to form substantive collaborations that engage students meaningfully brings Deeper Learning to life. These experiences make education much more relevant, exiting, and engaging, while motivating kids and helping them explore potential career paths.

4 REACHNetworking Beyond School Walls

• Meaningful alliances provide mentors and social networks that otherwise might not be available to students and can be key to their lifelong success.

• As another means of pulling students into the work of learning, these connections often support improved academic performance among students, including increases in graduation rates.

• Strong partnerships between schools, businesses, and community organizations build a shared sense of responsibility for the success of both the students and the communities to which they belong.

• Creating such partnerships takes vision, time, energy, and leadership from everyone involved, at both the personal and institutional levels.

4 REACHNetworking Beyond School Walls

• Finding the spark – a subject, idea, or project that makes a student light up – is the key to customizing learning experiences for individual students.

• In order to tailor learning to meet individual student’ educational needs and aspirations, teachers should seek out and develop a balanced knowledge of each student’s unique tendencies, circumstances, and interests through both formal (performance, observations) and informal (insight from parents or other teachers) means.

• Effective ways to align learning with a student’s interests and strengths include external partnerships and mentors, tailoring course work (e.g., independent, specialized projects), and dual enrollment in available postsecondary offerings.

5 INSPIRECustomize Learning to Motivate Each Student

• Technology offers many advantages in educational settings – including expanding research opportunities, improving communication at all levels, and helping students take more responsibility for their own learning – that can help teachers build students’ Deeper Learning skills. Computers can be powerful tools for building communities, supporting project-based learning, and reaching out beyond the classroom walls.

• Technology provides new and efficient avenues for students to practice research, reflection, and revision – key strategies for achieving Deeper Learning outcomes. Through tools like online education portfolios, everyone- students, teachers, and parent – can better track and understand students’ development over time.

6 WIREMake Technology the Servant, Not the Master

• Technology-based learning management systems can offer students more ownership over their learning experiences and provide teachers advisors, and administrators with consistent, reliable methods to gauge student progress and determine how best to help.

• Deeper Learning’s relationship to technology is defined by enthusiasm mixed with knowledgeable caution, ever mindful of the pitfalls (including distraction, misuse, and overused) and respectful of the critical role of educators in the classroom.

6 WIREMake Technology the Servant, Not the Master

Additional Highlights

Deeper Learning…Extended

• Deeper Learning is the process of preparing and empowering students to master essential academic content, think critically and solve complex problems, work collaboratively, communicate effectively, have an academic mindset, and be self-directed in their education.

• Sir Ken Robinson describes as a “a delivery system” to a more dynamic teacher role of mentoring, stimulating, provoking, and engaging students to acquire skills that in turn will help them most efficiently to gain knowledge and go on to become lifetime learners.

Defining Deeper Learning

• The power of a learning community to transform students’ lives when a culture exists that presses students consistently to do their best – by the setting of high expectations, and the support and encouragement needed to meet them – through a collective responsibility for learning.

• “If you want to teach well to very high standards, you have that relationship that allows you to both challenge them, and adapt what you’re doing for them so that it works”

Linda Darling-Hammond, Stanford University

Connect: Create A Community of Learners

• Deeper Learning objectives depends on four key perceptions by students:– “I belong to this academic community”

– “I can succeed at this”

– “My ability and competence grows my effort”

– “This work has value for me”

Key Perceptions

• Research in recent years has also documented the importance of students feeling connected to adults at their school in terms of their future achievements.

• A Chicago scientist studied anti-bullying programs and found a 11% gain on achievement test.

• Student mentoring and guidance of one of the most effective ways to model a more robust perception of the learning process.

• Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory (SLT). SLT stated that children learn by observing and imitating influential models, particularly those most similar to them.

Social Emotional Learning (SEL)

• With educators playing the role of coach, reminder, and guide, this heightened sense of trust in students to have some ownership over both expectations and actions is at the core of effective learning communities. It evens out the arcane balance of power that adolescents are notoriously resistant to, and underscores that school real is about them – and about learning.

• State Superintendent, Michael Martirano stated on 11/2/15 we need to shift from “a sage on the stage to a guide on the side”.

Teachers changing roles

• The interplay of student and teacher autonomy is key to building safe, trusting communities and also to creating the kind of open culture necessary for meaningful learning to take place.– High Tech High utilizes a Google principle of 20% of

students time dedicated to the students choice as long as it benefits the school.

– Power-sharing systems such as student governments to empower students. Power-sharing systems like the Avalon example require both teachers and students to be creative.

Democracy, Autonomy, and Flexibility

• Two reasons that collaboration has become such a 21st century skill:– Employers have recognized how pooling talents can lead to more

innovation and better products.

– Collaboration has become easier, and more prevalent, as new information technologies have emerged.

• …from inspiring students to care about each others’ success, to motivating would-be idlers, to establishing procedures for constructive feedback, to knowing when and how best to intervene when group dynamics turn sour.

Collaboration

• Designing relevant and engaging experiences for students is a tall order, as teacher work to align projects and assignments with evolving state academic standards and also use and develop appropriate methods to ensure student work is fairly assessed.

EMPOWER: Activate Students to Lead Their Own Learning

• Research suggests, however, that when implemented correctly, project-based learning is superior in many ways to conventional teaching.

• Several studies have demonstrated that effectively chosen and managed student projects can make contend more memorable, improving student’s problem-solving and collaborative skills, as well as their motivation.

• Advanced Placement pass rates increased by as much as 30% during the 2011-12 school year when students engaged in project-based curriculum rather than more traditional instruction.

• Parachute packing example…

The Power – And Rigor – OF Projects

• Teachers at all eight schools recognized the power of public-speaking events to motivate students to do quality work, and they often require some kind of public presentation in addition to having students simply hand in their assignments.

• Besides formal presentations, students also frequently engage in public debates, which obliges them to engage in research material, consider multiple perspectives, demonstrate their mastery in the subject and hand, and , of course, improve their communication skills.

• One teacher reported, “We need to develop their habits to be about articulating where you found the evidence and to back up every argument with evidence.

Communication: Oral

• For students to become deeper learners, they need to get used to the idea that learning is never a finite process, and that it certainly shouldn’t end as soon as they hand in a quiz or an essay. In all the schools we visited, student get frequent opportunities to revise their work many times, in response to feedback from teachers and peers.

Communication: Written

• Teachers at our eight schools sys they constantly coach students in this skill, talking about the value of reflection all the time, and regularly assigning them to make entries in journals or on blogs.

Self-Reflection

• It’s common-for educators, parents, policymakers, and even students-to assume that schools are meant to prepare kids for real life, despite how very little like real life they usually are.

• In contrasts, teachers and principals at Deeper Learning schools are constantly looking for ways to break down the barriers.

• Teachers interviewed endeavored as much as possible to connect students’ studies to events in the real world.

• Controversy isn’t avoided; it’s often a key part of the curricula. This not only makes classwork more stimulating, but gives students practice in critical thinking, problem solving, and effective communication, while contributing to their transformation into more informed and thoughtful citizens.

What if School Were Real Life?

• Traditional, top-down procedures grant teachers little or no time to collaborate as teams, something that is essential for developing interrelated learning plans.

• Jay McTighe’s Understanding by Design: learning begins when teachers clearly identify the reasons behind the instruction, and more precisely, what student will need to be able to know and do upon completion of a unit, project, or course.

Collaboration & PLC’s