A Runner's Ramblings

Title: In Search of Deeper Learning: The Quest to Remake the American High School

Author: Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine

Completed: July 2023 (Full list of books)

Overview: While listening to an older Getting Smart podcast, I heard about this book exploring an interested topic, “How can we help students learn more deeply?” This book covers that in a thorough and academic way. There’s a lot of great information in here (possibly the most highlights I’ve ever taken on a book), but it is not a fast read. Pulling part of this for a teacher training course or discussion with teachers as part of continuing education could work well. During several parts of this book, I wished I had a book study group to discuss it with or other teachers to plan ways to implement some of the aspects.

The recurring theme was that students learn best when allowed to play the “whole game at the junior level.” Giving students the opportunity to do the real work of professionals, but with more supports and feedback. They compared it to sports (among other analogies), where we don’t expect the little league team to play against the professionals, but they are still playing the same game. As students get better at certain skills, we can expect/demand more from them and they get closer to producing professional results.

Highlights:

• (What our current system looks like, leaving much room for improvement) In a tenth-grade English class, students slumped their way through a scene from Othello, reading out loud only when threatened with detention and spending much of the period filling out a worksheet that told them to summarize what they had read. In an eleventh-grade biology course, students spent thirty minutes passively listening as their teacher read out the directions for a highly structured experiment, the outcome of which everybody already knew.
• Data also consistently demonstrate that the longer students are in school, the less engaged they feel: 75 percent of fifth graders feel engaged by school, but only 32 percent of eleventh graders feel similarly.
• we were also coming to recognize that our most successful teachers, electives, and extracurricular spaces, wildly varied as they were in methods, goals, and populations, all held one trait in common: they integrated different virtues of learning.
• our own distinct vision of deep learning—not simply in school, but in life—emerges at the intersection of three virtues: mastery, identity, and creativity. In the spaces that teachers, students, and our own observations identified as the most compelling, students had opportunities to develop knowledge and skill (mastery), they came to see their core selves as vitally connected to what they were learning and doing (identity), and they had opportunities to enact their learning by producing something rather than simply receiving knowledge (creativity). Often these spaces or classrooms were governed by a logic of apprenticeship; students had opportunities to make things (newspapers, collections of poetry, documentary films, theater productions, debate performances) under the supervision of faculty and / or older students who would model the creative steps involved, provide examples of high-quality work, and offer precise feedback.
• Deeper learning is an umbrella term that has emerged over the past decade to encompass a range of desirable attributes of schooling, attributes rooted in the premise that schooling needs to move beyond rote learning and shallow testing.
• Paulo Freire, in 1970, decried the tendency of “banking” models of pedagogy, where children are treated as empty vessels in which teachers “deposit” knowledge, and argued for “problem-posing” as an alternative.
• In contrast, engaged students make a psychological investment in learning.” They continue: “Meaningful learning cannot be delivered to high school students like pizza to be consumed or videos to be observed. Lasting learning develops largely through the labor of the student, who must be enticed to participate in a continuous cycle of studying, producing, correcting mistakes, and starting over again. Students cannot be expected to achieve unless they concentrate, work, and invest themselves in the mastery of school tasks. This is the sense in which student engagement is critical to educational success; to enhance achievement, one must first learn how to engage students.”
• about four out of five classrooms we visited featured tasks that were in the bottom half of Bloom’s taxonomy, asking students to recall, comprehend, or apply, rather than to analyze, synthesize, or create. Another way of putting this: if we stapled ourselves to a student for a day, we likely would encounter one class, or occasionally two, that presented genuine opportunities for critical thinking or analysis.
• they felt obligated to move through material quickly but not necessarily deeply. In science in particular, labs were often rushed efforts to demonstrate what the textbook said rather than opportunities for real investigation.
• A 2015 Gallup poll of nearly a million U.S. students paints a similar picture. The Gallup poll finds that engagement decreases the longer that students are in school: while 75 percent of fifth graders report being engaged by school, the number drops to 41 percent by ninth grade, and 32 percent by eleventh grade. Since students have to be at school to take the poll, even the 32 percent underestimates the level of disengagement, because the most disengaged students have dropped out of school and are not in the data.
• Students gave a range of familiar reasons for this boredom, including that the “material wasn’t that interesting” (82 percent) and “lack of relevance” (42 percent). Teachers’ pedagogical choices were another reason for their disengagement. Pedagogies that we know to be most common in high schools, like “teacher lecture,” were rated as engaging by only 26 percent of the students. Conversely, modes that are less frequently used, like “discussion and debate,” were seen as engaging by 61 percent of the students.
• Here the problem was confusing “hands-on” for “minds-on” and it involved doing in ways that did not help students see the underlying conceptual structures of their fields or disciplines.
• Professional fields, like law, medicine, engineering, and many others, recognize that the work they are doing is complex and thus have developed professional value systems and structures appropriate to knowledge workers: they are selective in whom they recruit, develop a knowledge base that undergirds their work, provide lengthy training in that knowledge, and then require those who enter the field to demonstrate this knowledge and skill. By comparison, education in the United States took a different path by placing power in the administrative class and under-developing the needed professional mechanisms: teaching is an unselective field, featuring short training and low entry requirements, which are frequently waived altogether when there is a teacher shortage. The result of this non-system is wide variation across classrooms, just as we observed. Teaching in the United States also does not have a career ladder that includes opportunities for advancement and for the establishment of highly paid master teachers, which some other countries have. The consequence is that it is hard to draw a talented, capable, and diverse workforce into teaching, which, in turn, only exacerbates the desire for administrative control, perpetuating the downward spiral.
• when these ideas have been transported into public schools, particularly large high schools serving a more diverse array of students, they have tended to be radically watered down: home economics classes, life-adjustment education, and vocational education, all of which have drawn on the practical but eschewed the academic. Schools have taken the part of it that was easier to do—offering more practical courses to less academically inclined students—but not the harder part: using the practical as a springboard to academic
• the 1960s National Science Foundation curriculum, Man: A Course of Study (MACOS), which invited students to study another culture as part of an anthropological examination of what it means to be human, died at the hands of a fundamentalist backlash.67 MACOS is just one example among many of the ways in which efforts to have students confront difficult questions have been rebuffed by the more conservative elements of our electorate. Thus creating deeper learning is not only about improving pedagogy but also about building demand for a different approach to learning.
• one eleventh-grade science teacher ruefully reported, “Forty-seven minutes is just enough time to get the kids really interested and engaged in whatever you want them to be learning, and then the bell rings and you have to start pretty much from scratch the next day.”
• To close the gap between espoused values and enacted practices, schools need a specific and granular vision of deep learning and a carefully crafted organizational design that enables them to realize it.
• Achieving deeper learning is challenging because it requires significant unlearning. For traditional teachers, moving toward giving their students deeper experiences in their domains entailed substantial loss: of some breadth in pursuit of depth, and of control, as teachers realized that being a teacher didn’t always mean talking in front of the class.
• Some teachers were able to bring deeper learning to their core classes by taking a very different stance toward learning than most traditional teachers.
• their “20 percent” projects. Inspired by Google’s practice of encouraging employees to spend a fifth of their time pursuing ideas of their choosing, these projects share a single core requirement: use the last ninety minutes of each day to design and create something that will benefit the Dewey High community.
• “It was a revelation for me: these kids were out of school for the day and they could do whatever they wanted, but making stuff was equivalent to, if not better than, play,”
• they also arrived at the idea of “teacher as designer”; teachers, they believed, would best be able to actualize their potential if they were empowered to craft curricula that reflected their unique knowledge, skills, and passions.
• Separating younger students from older ones, drawing artificial boundaries between subject areas, and allowing adults to predetermine the pace and substance of knowledge acquisition: in Dewey’s view, these practices all but guaranteed that the learning process would be devoid of meaning and depth.
• Everything from lockers and bells to academic departments and final exams was on the table for reconsideration—and the vast majority of these features did not survive. Instead, the school is set up to support endeavors that are collaborative, interdisciplinary, flexibly structured, and sustained over long periods of time.
• For teachers, working at Dewey High means that instead of teaching alone and occasionally meeting in subject-specific departments, they enter into yearlong partnerships (sometimes trios) that bring together the disciplines: biology with media arts, humanities with Spanish, math with physics and carpentry, and so on. With ongoing support provided by colleagues, these teams design and teach semester-long projects that sit at the intersection of their interests and areas of expertise.
• the key idea was to produce artifacts with real social utility. Mr. Sexton sees this vision as their contribution to building a democracy, “We’re trying to create a context where people are collaborating together to create products of lasting value, which often morph into products of use to the community,” he said. “That’s what civil society is about.”
• “What gives humans meaning in life is a strong sense of identity around a purpose or passion, creativity and mastery in relation to a valued pursuit, and connectedness with the world and others.”
• this “part to whole” paradigm of learning mirrors the world of the workshop, where apprentices, assigned to increasingly difficult projects, turn to their mentors when they run up against challenges that require skills they have not yet developed. It also maps onto the world of the startup and other contemporary job environments, where people acquire new skills as the need arises. This approach has significant advantages, because it puts students in the mode of seeking to produce real things from the start.
• I think that schools now are in thrall of Taylor and efficiency—the more kids are on task for more time, the better; 100 percent is the goal. That’s not the way adults work. If you walk around and look at the adults here, they’re engaged in being adults and in adult conversations while getting their work done. Kids need that too.
• This is also one of the key reasons why Inspire may have failed to gain traction; as a whole, the school lacked rich examples to which teachers and students could anchor their aspirations. Reflecting on this reality, Mr. Friedman likens the attempt to implement project-based learning without having witnessed its end products to the act of panning for gold without knowing what the metal looks like.
• in contrast to Inspire, Dewey High zealously provides. All newcomers, be they recent college graduates or ten-year classroom veterans, participate in the “New Teacher Odyssey,” a two-week intensive summer institute where they practice designing projects under the guidance of the school’s most skillful practitioners. When combined with the apprenticeship-style support created by co-teaching with veterans and weekly opportunities for collegial feedback throughout the year, new teachers are given the professional tools they need not only to build technical skills but also to internalize the school’s core values.
• Many schools are open to the vast array of goals that could be part of a good education, and the many providers who promise to deliver them. The result, however, is that most schools end up trying to do a little bit of everything—a tactic that often results in a whole lot of nothing. Finding themselves overwhelmed by the competing priorities and new initiatives that administrators foist on them, teachers lose focus or simply start selectively ignoring what they are asked to do.
• the schools in the network generally shake their head when it comes to contracting with external providers. Although teachers and students regularly venture into the world beyond the school’s walls, partnering with community members and local organizations, Dewey High’s leaders rarely bring in outside organizations to provide professional development or to run programs. Dewey High also downplays the pursuit of sky-high achievement on standardized tests. When it comes to offering Advanced Placement classes, the school simply says no; the AP program’s emphasis on content coverage within the traditional academic disciplines runs directly counter to the vision of deep interdisciplinary projects. “We broadcast [our lack of AP classes] from the mountaintops,” says the school’s director. This public stance is critical because it means that families who choose to join the school are forewarned that AP will not be part of their adolescent’s high school experience.
• what about math, where certain concepts serve as critical gateways to others? Dewey High has no good answer to this question, which may help to explain why the schools in its network, as well as virtually all of the other project-based schools that we observed, chronically struggle when it comes to integrating math into their model.
• Suppose you had standards for content and skills and understandings. You wanted everybody to be reading at a sixth-grade level or something like that, and you set that as your goal. Come the end of the year, not everybody’s reading at a sixth-grade level. What do you do, then? What do you say to the kid who’s not reading at a sixth-grade level? You say, “You haven’t measured up.” That’s crazy, because development is not curricular. Development is individual and personal. Different kids develop at different rates and develop different skills at different times. The important thing is that those skills develop in relation to kids’ passions and their willingness to try something new.
• When we interviewed Mr. Hughes in 2011, he had nothing but scorn for the idea of using quantitative data to guide the work of schools. As far as he was concerned, Mr. Hughes told us, “data” was a four-letter word—a tool used for control and micromanagement by the state.
• Do we want high schools to be places where students look to the future by venturing into the unknown, or do we want them to be places where students master the timeless building blocks of disciplinary knowledge? Should we care more about cultivating passions and dispositions, or about building cultural literacy and a shared foundation of skills? Should the field empower teachers to be “adventurous” in their work, or, given that adventure entails the nontrivial possibility of failure, should it instead provide clear frameworks for what and how to teach as a hedge against inconsistency?
• well-known charter networks like KIPP, Achievement First, and Uncommon Schools, these schools differ in their particulars but share a common set of precepts: strict discipline, which involves penalties for small infractions such as dress-code violations; high academic expectations, organized around state standardized tests and college preparatory exams; and strong norms of classroom control, including, famously, the requirement that students actively track speakers with their eyes in an effort to avoid distractions.
• Critics also point to recent studies indicating that many of the students who graduate from no-excuses schools start college but do not graduate, which suggests that high levels of control and prescriptiveness do not necessarily serve students well in their postsecondary and adult lives.
• like many similar schools, No Excuses High has significant trouble retaining its students. The school does not publish and would not provide us with figures about its retention rates, but one senior estimated that she had started with fifty students in her fifth-grade class and that only about half of them were still at the school in twelfth grade.
• In classrooms that were not as strong, we identified a tendency toward breadth over depth, certainty over exploration, and control over passion.
• they have used electives to offer the new courses in engineering, African American literature, and Latin American history; they have used extracurriculars to encourage journalism, literary writing, and debate; they have used the period after seniors’ college applications are in to let Mr. Tobbs develop student-driven presentations; and they have devoted two hours per week to developing projects. What they have not done is make many changes to their core disciplinary classes:
• “Even if we loosen those surface level structures, we are not going to let them fail. In college, they very well could fail. So I think it’s important to let them semi-fail in a place that’s not going to let them completely fail before they completely fail in a less supportive environment.”
• IBDP still represents a small niche in the landscape of American high school curricular reform: only 2 percent of U.S. public schools offer the program, compared to the almost 78 percent that offer AP classes.
• the assessment tasks that lie at the core of the IBDP specify a granular vision of deeper learning outcomes—that is, they paint a detailed picture of the kinds of knowledge, skills, and dispositions that are worth developing and the kinds of subject-specific activities that can support their development, as well as provide rich models of what proficiency looks and sounds like. In so doing, the IB is solving a problem that we witnessed time and time again in non-IB schools—much talk about “deeper learning” and “twenty-first-century skills,” but no clear picture of what such concepts mean in terms of actual classroom instruction or student outcomes.
• one of the critical limitations of the IBDP is that it does not in and of itself force a disruption of teacher-centered instructional practices. Essentially, while the IBDP specifies in granular detail what content and skills are worth learning and how learners should demonstrate mastery, it does not specify with similar richness the kinds of teaching practices will best support progress toward these outcomes.17 This omission, paired with the fact that—unlike project-based learning—IB’s vision represents a subtle rather than a radical shift away from conventional thinking about the goals of high school education, means that without robust school-level supports it is all too easy for teachers to continue seeing themselves as content experts whose role is to “profess” fixed bodies of knowledge to their students. The history and reputation of the IB as a program aimed at preparing students to thrive in elite universities, where skillful lecturing is celebrated, exacerbates the problem. As one seasoned IB teacher wryly notes, some teachers who are new to the program see it as a mandate to become more teacher-centered:
• the school’s leadership encourages teachers to celebrate students’ growth over time regardless of their actual achievement
• students pick up on their teachers’ commitment to supporting them. As one student says, “I can ask my history teacher for help and he’ll never look at me funny—it’s extra work for my teachers, but if I ask them for it, they’re excited that I want to know, which I love.”
• expectations for coverage, which meant that classes needed to move quickly across a variety of topics. Laboratory experiments were usually squeezed into one class period. The Crusades got a week; the Cold War got two days. Consequently, deeper historical or scientific investigations were scrapped in favor of moving across more content, and the quantity of material covered was so great that students had significant trouble remembering it.
• As a science teacher who had a Ph.D. from MIT told us, the problem with science in school is that you are mostly demonstrating to yourself what is already known; real science, she said, is all about the unknown.
• as the competition for elite credentials intensifies, students, quite rationally, begin to pursue the credentials rather than the underlying knowledge and skill. As he writes, “When they see education through the lens of [its exchange value], students at all levels quickly come to the conclusion that what matters most is not the knowledge they learn in school but the credentials they acquire there. Grades, credits, and degrees—these become the objects to be pursued.…
• Reba Page’s book Lower Track Classrooms can help us to understand these classes. Page’s research suggests that lower track classes generally assume three patterns: the “skeleton” pattern, in which a superficial version of upper-track material is covered at a slower pace; a “relevance” pattern, in which fun, timely, or real-world content is used to try to interest the students; and a “skills” pattern, in which students are drilled in basic skills.
• she didn’t see her teachers as people “implementing the will of the district,” but rather as people whose passion for books could be contagious: “You know, if you’re passionate about Of Mice and Men, and that brings you joy, that will translate to your teaching, and then the students will feel passionate. But, if I’m making you teach Of Mice and Men just because.… Some people are [made] really uncomfortable by that book. They don’t know what to do when they get to the character of Crooks. They don’t know how to handle the relationship between Lennie and George. They hate the book. Is that good for kids?” At the same time, she said, she was trying to move away from teachers picking books only because they liked them; she wanted teachers to articulate why a particular book would be useful in developing a particular skill that they had commonly agreed was important.
• in many high schools there is more deep learning happening in “peripheral” activities than in “core” disciplinary classes.
• A 1915 article quoted a high school principal arguing that the extracurricular activities “pulsate with life and purpose” while the formal curriculum “owes its existence to a coercive regime, loosely connected and highly artificial.”17 Coleman’s
• High school theater is an example of what learning scientist David Perkins calls the “whole game at the junior level.”39 Perkins’s point is that in variants of games like little league baseball, players do not spend a year learning to catch and another to pitch and another to bat. Rather, they play the whole game from the start, just at the level at which they can play it. The idea is that playing the whole game at the junior level helps the players see how baseball as a whole works, as well why they would want to put practice time into learning the specific skills.
• This was different from what we observed in many academic classes. In science, for example, students, even when they were doing labs, were mostly going through a series of steps to demonstrate a principle that had already been discovered by previous scientists. In a sense, this is the opposite of real science—actual scientists explore what is not known as opposed to trying to verify what is already known.
• The following elements make theater a powerful learning environment: Purpose and performance Choice Community Interdependent roles Use of heads, hands, and heart An arc of learning Apprenticeship Offering the whole game at a junior level There are good reasons to think that these same elements are critical in other extracurricular contexts.
• how can the work of these teachers inform a broader effort toward deeper learning? We identified these teachers by focusing on three primary criteria: cognitive challenge, engagement, and participation. With respect to cognitive challenge, we sought out classrooms where the task that students were confronted with was in the top half of Bloom’s taxonomy—with students asked to analyze, synthesize, or create—or were in levels three or four of Webb’s depth of knowledge scale, which similarly focuses on complex thinking as opposed to recall or application.1 With respect to engagement, we were interested in the ethos of the classroom: was it a place where there was energy in the room, where students spoke with both knowledge and enthusiasm about the work they were doing? Did their body language and vocal or written contributions suggest that they were “in task” as well as “on task,” rather than counting the minutes until the bell rang? Our third criterion was participation. We picked classes where at least three-quarters of the students were actively engaged with the task; running a great class for a few students isn’t enough.
• In its earlier iteration, said Mr. Wolf, the skill-building part took most of the semester, and the project happened only in the final three weeks. But when a team conducted a review of the course, they found that students did not find the skill-building part particularly engaging or relevant, because it was divorced from the context in which it would be used:
• In line with Dewey, who urged that the teacher should be an active researcher of her own practice, and a reformist superintendent who in 1893 advocated teacher learning so that students could “drink from a running stream rather than from a stagnant pool,” Ms. Marino frequently adjusted and experimented with her own practice.

• The ways in which these teachers taught were highly varied. Consistent with the aphorism from the National Research Council report—“asking which teaching technique is best is analogous to asking which tool is best—a hammer, a screwdriver, a knife, or pliers”—the pedagogical approaches that these teachers employed differed depending on their disciplines, goals, and teaching philosophies.
• Across the variety of settings that we studied, some clear commonalities emerged among those learning environments that students and teachers described as the most powerful. In all of these environments, learning started with a purpose—something that was not preparation for life later but could grab the interest of a young person in the present. Students were treated as producers, that is, as people who could offer interpretations, solve problems, develop products of value, and otherwise create in ways consistent with the norms of the field or discipline. Subjects were treated as open-ended rather than closed; there was a belief that what students were discovering or creating had significant value, not that knowledge had been previously discovered and needed only to be transmitted. Students were invited to “play the whole game at a junior level”—that is, while there were opportunities to work in depth on particular subsections, students were immersed in whole projects, such as putting on a production, designing experiments, or engaging in mathematical problem-solving.
• In other words, the most powerful learning experiences we observed were neither at the progressive pole of self-guided learning nor at the conservative extreme of direct instruction. Rather, they assumed the model of apprenticeship or induction, in which students became motivated by a domain and worked to develop or make something within that domain, but did so under the watchful eye of expert mentors.4 Our findings are consistent with two recent syntheses of decades of work on project-based learning and problem-based or inquiry-oriented learning, both of which find that such modes can have strongly positive results if (and only if) they are organized with appropriate scaffolding and necessary direction from more knowledgeable others.
• Much as Finnish teachers have to complete a research thesis as part of their training, it would be good if prospective American high school teachers similarly had to produce research—one project focused on an educational problem, overseen by education school faculty, and one piece of disciplinary research in their fields, overseen by faculty in the disciplines. For those aiming to teach less classically academic subjects, such as modern instantiations of vocational education, we would expect that they would spend time similarly apprenticing in real-world equivalents. The core principle here is not that teachers need to become more academic, but rather that they need to immerse themselves in the real-world versions of the subjects they aspire to teach, which, depending on the domain, may or may not sit within the university.
• The most compelling teachers in our sample had a median experience level of fifteen years. In part this is unavoidable, because it takes time to accrue skill.13 But these teachers also described very long periods of trial and error, in which their transmission mode of teaching had to be gradually undone and replaced by a different mode of pedagogy. The example of Mr. Martin, the first-year math teacher who had spent a year co-teaching with one of the strongest teachers in our sample, suggests that this learning trajectory might be greatly accelerated if new teachers were apprenticed to master teachers. This relationship was successful in part because it was true co-teaching—the two teachers planned together, taught together, and debriefed together, with the ratio of teaching gradually shifting more to the newer teacher over time.
• The fourth element—visibility of student work—was another mechanism to de-privatize the classroom and to act as a check on the rigor of what was being produced. At Dewey High, this came in the form of public exhibition of projects. Seeing the work of one’s students and one’s colleagues’ students not only exerted some modest pressure for performance but also promoted collective dialogue among faculty about the nature of high-quality student work.