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Ph.D., Harvard University, (2006)
Jal Mehta is professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. A sociologist by training, his work focuses on how to remake the industrial-era school system into a modern learning organization that creates passion and purpose for both students and adults. He is the author, most recently, with Sarah Fine, of In Search of Deeper Learning: Inside the Effort to Remake the American High School, which won the Grawemeyer Award for excellent public writing on education. Mehta is also a leading scholar on the need to professionalize education, explored most thoroughly in his 2013 book The Allure of Order. Mehta is the co-director of the Deeper Learning Dozen, a community of practice of districts and states across the United States and Canada that are seeking to remake themselves for the future. His works with teachers, schools, districts, states, and provinces in the United States and around the world, seeking to cull wisdom from leading practitioners and share it with the field. He is also the proud recipient of the Morningstar Teaching Award and is the co-host of Free Range Humans, a podcast about "making schools fit for human consumption." Mehta is on sabbatical for the 2023-24 academic year.
The Deeper Learning Dozen seeks to transform systems to support deep, powerful, and equitable learning for all students and adults. We sponsor a community of practice of 12 districts across North America (8 in the U.S., 4 in Canada), research and learn from those districts, and share our learning broadly. This proposal supports our next 3 years, during which we will: 1) deepen our work with our districts; 2) spread our work through workshops, engage with like-minded networks, and partner with complementary organizations; and, 3) share our learning more broadly through blogs, podcasts, articles, and a field-building book to capture our learnings about humane, relational, and equitable school transformation.
Education Now examines how we can transform K–12 public school systems into more human-centered communities that support both educators and students
Twelve districts in the United States and Canada are remaking their schools to bring deeper learning for all, and their stories could change the entire field.