In Search of Deeper Learning

 

In Search of Deeper Learning: The quest to remake the American high school by Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine is one of my new favourite books on education. The following are some quotes from the book:

“Most classrooms were spaces to sit passively and listen.  Most academic work instructed students to recall, or minimally apply, what they had been told.”

“It may seem counterintuitive, but in many high schools there is more deep learning happening in “peripheral” activities than in “core” disciplinary classes.”

“As we spent more time in schools, we were struck by the contrast between the student passivity, boredom, and apathy that was too often found in teacher-controlled core classes and the energy, vitality, teacher passion, and student leadership we saw in the elective and extracurricular spaces.”

  • students as active producers rather than passive recipients
  • learning by doing rather than by transmission
  • clear purposes and external audiences rather than simply working to please the teacher
  • multi-age groupings rather than age-graded classrooms
  • integration of students with different skill levels rather than tracking, and
  • learning through apprenticeship rather than didactic instruction

Table 7.1  A Different Stance:  Traditional versus “Deeper” Teachers

Traditional teachers “Deeper” teachers
Educational goal Cover the material Do the work of the field; inspire students to become members of the field.
Pedagogical priorities Breadth Depth
View of knowledge Certain Uncertain
View of students Extrinsically motivated Creative, curious, and capable
Role of student Receiver of knowledge Creator of knowledge
Role of teacher Dispenser of knowledge Facilitator of learning
View of failure Something to be avoided Critical for learning
Ethos Compliance Rigor and joy

 

“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.”

“These powerful learning environments were also cognitively challenging.  “This is the class that makes my brain hurt” was a refrain we heard more than once.  To enable these experiences, the teachers had carefully built communities that were challenging yet vulnerable, where students sought to give their best but were willing to be wrong.”

“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.”

“It is also important to name what we are not arguing.  As should be apparent, deep learning is not synonymous with student-centred learning, project-based learning, blended learning, or competency-based learning.  These are modalities of learning that can be either deep or shallow in practice.  We think of mastery, identity, and creativity as rather stringent criteria against which particular learning experiences can be evaluated.”

“Our study also suggests that achieving these challenging integrations will require as much unlearning as learning.  For traditional comprehensive high schools, it will be impossible to realise powerful learning environments without giving something up.  For example, the rush of teaching and testing for enormous amounts of content in various subjects, with all that entails, would need be to be rethought if the goal were to give students a deeper learning experience in those subjects.  Such a goal would also require teachers to rethink whare are, for some, fundamental aspects of their identities, moving from deliverers of content and repositories of knowledge to skilful facilities of deep explorations into particular domains.”

“It takes time to accrue skill.  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.”

“Our research suggests that helping teachers reflect on and understand the reasons for these stances (particularly the shift away from teaching as transmission and toward students as junior-level participants in their fields) is critical if teachers are going to stand for deeper learning and teaching.”

  1. A specific and granular vision of good instruction, which was the north star to which everything was oriented;
  2. Thick mechanisms for adult learning, which enabled all adults in the building to learn together how to achieve this vision;
  3. Symmetry, that is, the ways in which adults worked with an learned from one another paralleled the ways in which they hoped students would learn;
  4. Visibility, which means that student work (and by implication), teachers’ teaching) was public and shared, which both de-privatised teaching and created some collective accountability around the enactment of the instructional vision;
  5. A collective identity that connected to the instructional vision and anchored student and faculty commitment to this way of working; and
  6. An organisational design that aligned all structures in support of the instructional vision.

“Making schools places where our children learn to think, where they create, where they pursue things that matter to them, where they create, where they pursue things that matter to them, where they seize the skills that will help them master their lives, should be an easy sell.  But we recognise that it is not.  It can be seen as threatening for students not to learn in the ways their parents were taught.”

 

 

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