To Redesign Schools, You Need Community

Professor Jal Mehta’s work has taken him into many schools where principals, superintendents, and other leaders are looking for ways to remake industrial-era, compliance-driven systems into modern, human-centered learning organizations for both students and adults. Harvard’s Deeper Learning Alliance is helping them make that a reality. 

This new initiative is part of Harvard’s Deeper Learning Institute, which was originally co-founded in 2018 by Mehta as a way to support districts engaged in equitable, deeper learning. The institute’s work includes research, convenings, a podcast, and a deeper learning education camp. The Deeper Learning Alliance is the newest initiative and focuses more tightly on supporting school leaders who want to experiment and transform education together. The first cohort will begin meeting in September and will include leaders from public, charter, independent, and international schools.

“We do a lot of deeper learning work in the field with schools, districts, and sometimes even states and provinces. As we talked with school leaders, they reported that they wanted a community of cutting-edge practitioners who were redesigning schools in ways that created purpose, joy, connection, and sustainability for both students and adults,” Mehta explains. “They didn’t want another program, or another set of materials, or even another process. They wanted the chance to work with others to think through how they might redesign their work. This community is our response to that need.”

Deniann Grant, director of global network strategy at the Deeper Learning Institute and an Ed.L.D. candidate, echoes this sentiment. “The Deeper Learning Alliance developed in response to what we were hearing from the field,” Grant says. “Time and again, our work has shown us the importance of community and collective action. We do our best work together, and we know there are common problems and collective strengths we can use to solve them. Why not bring brilliant, dedicated people together?”

Each school or district enrolls with up to two participants who attend nine monthly live virtual sessions throughout the course of the school year. Every session includes small-group peer consultancy, and members gain early access to Harvard’s deeper learning frameworks, a curated resource library, and practical tools they can apply directly in their own context. Participants are guided through the deeper learning ideation process to help them problem-solve and collaborate with others on a real challenge facing their school or district.

Additionally, members receive early-bird registration to the 2027 Deeper Learning Conference in San Diego, California; a certificate of completion documenting their continuing education hours; and exclusive material from Mehta’s forthcoming books, A Chance to Solve Their Own Problems: Inside the New Methods Seeking to Remake Public Schools and Leading with Symmetry: How to Transform Systems, Empower Educators, and Reimagine Schools.

“Transforming a school is too important — and too hard — to do alone,” says Alisa Berger, executive director of the Deeper Learning Institute, who has more than 25 years of experience as an educator, principal, and school leadership coach. “When I served as a principal, I intentionally sought out other school leaders who shared a common vision of what school can be and a deep belief in what students are capable of. Over time, we realized that we needed outside support to help us navigate everything on our plates and expert guidance to surface what we didn’t yet know. The Deeper Learning Alliance is what I wish I’d had as a principal: a monthly cohort of like-minded leaders supported by experts and grounded in real problems of practice.”

Real challenges shared by applicants include moving deeper learning from pockets of early adoption into schoolwide practice, shifting Portrait of a Graduate work from a vision document to a lived reality, establishing more holistic measures of student growth and success, building more intentional onboarding and professional development for teachers, and designing new ways to strengthen communication and trust with families.

In classrooms of deeper learning, characterized by purpose-driven, relational, and engaging learning that occurs at the intersection of identity, mastery, and creativity, Mehta says students gain much more than content knowledge. “They also develop durable, lifelong competencies that shape how they learn and engage with the world,” he says.

Rather than simply memorizing and regurgitating course material, deeper learning empowers students to feel more in control of their education, Mehta says, by cultivating a sense of sustained curiosity and a love of learning, identifying and pursuing educational goals that relate to their values and interests, building confidence in their ideas in order to create positive change in their communities, and strengthening their ability to question, analyze, and construct meaning from a wide range of texts.

“Too often, you hear that the test for school reform is whether you’re in it for the kids or the adults. We think this is a false dichotomy and terribly misguided,” Mehta says. “Similarly, too many schools are enthralled with innovation when they should be thinking about transformation. The Deeper Learning Alliance is a place for school leaders who want to design for real human beings, to work with students to find structures that unleash passion and purpose.”