Pulling the Lever — How Teachers are Deepening Student Learning

Let’s be honest, there are plenty of education buzzwords flying around: deeper learning might just be one you’ve heard. Regardless of whether you use the term “deeper learning” or not, skills like critical thinking, being a good communicator and being able to work effectively on a team are all concepts that you consider important for students to have.

If you’re an educator, you know that group projects, and student exhibitions can be amazing ways to engage students not just recipients of knowledge, but as active participants in their learning. That being said, the intention of this article is to get beyond the buzz; to explore what deeper learning is, it’s importance, and to provide some insight as to how teachers are preparing their students for a world outside of school.

Deeper Learning, as defined by the Hewlett Foundation, is a set of six competencies that focus on academic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal skills that we believe students need to have to prepare them as life-long learnings, and good citizens.

These competencies are:

• Mastery of academic content
• Critical thinking
• Communication
• Collaboration
• Having a perseverance mindset
• Self-directed learning

Even if a teacher hasn’t heard the term deeper learning, they are at the least familiar with these skills, or rather competencies.

If you were curious as to what deeper learning looked like in practice, you might find all these competencies at play at one of the official deeper learning schools, such as High Tech High in San Diego California, or the Big Picture Learning school Network. Many deeper learning advocates have pointed to these schools as exemplary models for what happens when educators collectively drive to deepen student learning. It comes as little surprise that when a school is given the opportunity to establish a mission around deeper learning, space for experimentation, and financial support, you will see deeper learning happening at multiple levels.

However, there has been less of an understanding as to what is going on in our nation’s public schools, many of which are more traditional in their approach to education. More problematically, an “us vs them” mentality has developed in terms of who is doing deeper learning, and who isn’t — creating more challenges in helping schools do more deeper learning. Our time spent in public high schools had revealed that most, if not all teachers, we’re doing some deeper learning work. It might not be happening every day with all 6 competencies, but we know teachers were looking to build out these skills (often times in between test prep, and coursework they just “needed to get through”). So to shine some light on the experience of public school educators with deeper learning, we went out and spoke to educators.

We interviewed educators from public schools in urban, suburban, and rural districts. We spoke with over 20 teachers, school leaders, and administrators. Our questions focused on pulling out teachers experiences as they implemented deeper learning competencies. We had educators speak to the enabling elements in their school or practice that allowed them to deepen student learning, as well as the barriers that restricted them from doing more or implementing all competencies more consistently. The interviews provided us with a plethora of stories that we were able to bring back to our Student Experience Lab where we dissected and analyzed our findings. After identifying patterns and trends, we were able to identify a model of the six most common barriers and enabler that would hold our findings together. We called this model LEVERS, which is an acronym for the six most common barriers and enablers educators’ faced when deepening student learning.

The LEVERS indicate that realities of school leadership, student equity, teacher versatility and experience, and school or education structure, could act as both barriers or enablers. For example, a school with a high turnover of school leadership often inhibits deeper learning in a school, whereas a school leader who supports her teachers and advocates for experimentation will have a profound impact the frequency and effectiveness of deeper learning. We published our findings and high-quality videos of our educator interviews on a web report. You can find it all at levers2learn.com. We encourage you to visit the report, and watch the videos, and share them.

From our initial research, we went back to the educators we had initially interviewed to present the LEVERS to see what resonated, and what could be improved. We also brainstormed what we might do, moving forward, to help push a school to do more deeper learning, more often. We established the Deeper Learning Academy, a cohort of teacher teams from 4 different high schools that would use a design-thinking methodology to help spread deeper learning in their school. Teams met up and came up with some compelling solutions. Some of these projects addressed teachers’ personal commitment to do more deeper learning in their practice, and others would be implemented across the school. Staying true to our methodology, we encouraged teachers to start small, prototype quickly, and build upon their learnings.