6. The digital tools students will require for future success are too often unavailable to traditionally disadvantaged groups.
Many of the schools that are successfully tackling these problems and ensuring relevance for students are what the Hewlett Foundation (2017) calls deeper learning schools. In chapter 7, we examine their effectiveness and highlight the practices of a few exemplar deeper learning schools.
Four Big Shifts and Ten Building Blocks
These deeper learning schools and other innovative educational organizations are serious about addressing this book’s six arguments head-on. They recognize that if we want different learning and life outcomes for students, we have to design for them. Accordingly, deeper learning schools make most (and usually all) of the following four big shifts in their approaches to schooling.
1. Higher-level thinking: The shift from an overwhelming emphasis on lower-level-thinking tasks, such as factual recall and procedural regurgitation, to tasks of greater cognitive complexity, such as creativity, critical thinking, problem solving, and effective communication and collaboration. In other words, this shift asks students to live more often on the upper levels of Benjamin S. Bloom’s (1956) taxonomy (or Norman L. Webb’s [2002] Depth of Knowledge model) than the lower ones. The shift away from lower-level thinking helps foster graduates’ citizenship skills, economic and college success, and life readiness.
2. Student agency: The shift from classrooms that teachers overwhelmingly control to learning environments that enable greater student agency over what, how, when, where, who with, and why they learn. Student agency allows for greater personalization, individualization, and differentiation of the learning process. As a result, student disengagement diminishes because students have greater autonomy and ownership over more of their learning.
3. Authentic work: The shift from isolated academic work to environments that provide students opportunities to engage with and contribute to local, national, and international interdisciplinary learning communities. This shift supports students’ motivation by helping them see direct connections between their learning and the world around them, and identify the content’s relevance to their future lives. It more directly connects students’ learning activities to the societal innovations that surround them, enabling schools’ instruction and curricula to be more contemporary.
4. Technology infusion: The shift from local classrooms that are largely based on pens and pencils, notebook paper, ring binders, and printed textbooks to globally connected learning spaces that are deeply and richly technology driven. The new affordances of mobile computing devices and online environments allow the first three shifts mentioned here to move into high gear. Robust technology integration efforts also combat equity concerns, allow students to master current information landscapes, and increase relevance to rapid, technology-driven societal innovations.
Deeper learning schools tend to use a common set of building blocks to form the foundation of their work. These building blocks vary in form, depth, and intensity depending on the classroom or school model, but together they foster the four big shifts that define innovative schools. Not all these building blocks are present in every deeper learning school, but most deeper learning school models incorporate at least a few. In no particular order, they are:
• Project- and inquiry-based learning environments that emphasize greater student agency and the active application of cognitively complex thinking, communication, and collaboration skills
• Authentic, real-world work students derive from community projects, internships, digital simulations, and other learning experiences
• Competency-based education and standards-based grading that shift the focus of assessment from seat time to learning mastery
• One-to-one computing initiatives (and concurrent Internet bandwidth upgrades) that give students access both to digital learning devices and to the world’s information, individuals, and organizations
• Digital and online information resources, often including open-access resources
• Online communities of interest that supplement and augment more traditional learning communities
• Adaptive software and data systems (and accompanying organizational models) that facilitate greater individualization of learning content and pace
• Alternative credentialing mechanisms that enable individuals to quickly reskill for and adapt to rapidly evolving workforce needs and economic demands
• Flexible scheduling that moves students away from fifty-minute chunks of time—and a prescribed number of hours and days in a prescribed location—and toward opportunities to learn longer, deeper, and in more places about important life skills and concepts
• Redesigned learning spaces that accommodate flexible, student-centered grouping and learning tasks rather than classroom spaces that the needs of instructors or janitors dictate
Although these building blocks are presented here as separate items, they usually work in coordination to create qualitatively different learning experiences for students. The combinations a deeper learning school chooses—and the depth of their implementation—form that school’s unique character.
Our Message
The intent of this book is not to denigrate the efforts of the numerous sincere and dedicated educators who are trying the best they can to serve students well within traditional school systems. We’re both passionate advocates for schools, educators, and students; we both have long histories in the public education system; and we’ve both been vocal proponents of powerful learning, student and teacher rights, and adequate school supports and funding. But we also recognize that schools need to change (and if we’ve done our job right, by now you do too). We can’t keep doing the same things that we have always done, nor can we continue to move at the frustratingly slow pace that we’ve seen so far.
The intent of this book is to recognize that despite our very best efforts, much of what we’re doing in schools isn’t working because it isn’t relevant to the needs and demands of the world around us. For the most part, the problem lies not so much with our people but with the outdated systems that many of us are struggling to abandon. When societies shifted from an agricultural model to an industrial model, we responded by changing how we educated our young people. Now that our societies are shifting from an industrial model to a global information and innovation model, we need to change our approach to education yet again.
In some respects, the concerns in this book are no different from the concerns of the authors of A Nation at Risk and its many heirs. We also raise questions about the education that students experience in most of our schools. But our worries lie in completely different directions than poor performance on standardized tests, and our prescriptions bear little resemblance to the technocratic “solutions” that policymakers tend to prefer. We agree that schools need to change, but that change should have to do with a school’s relevance, not just with its achievement scores. Complex problems don’t get fixed with simplistic approaches.
The challenges that lie before us are too great—and the opportunities ahead are too powerful—for us to sit back and pretend that the status quo is adequate. We love schools. But we must change them in order to save them. However, the paths that we advocate for in this book so far have been unrealized on a large scale. And despite our eye on the future, we recognize that concerns regarding
