Final Projects: Deeper Learning for All

The Ed School students presenting their final projects for Associate Professor Jal Mehta’s course, Deeper Learning for All - Designing a 21st-Century School System, anticipated tough questions from the panel of experts, including Professors Ronald Ferguson and Andres Alonso. What they didn’t expect, though, was that their toughest feedback would come from 10 Cambridge Rindge and Latin School (CRLS) students who were sitting in.

One of the teenagers, listening to the pitch for Deeper Learning Collaborative – a consultant group that brings instructional leaders together to spread deeper learning through their school via coaching and teacher collaboration –  pointed out that many systems have teachers with little interest in getting better. Another high schooler talked about the need to get buy-in from a school because “at a point it is not up to your project to make a change but the responsibility of the school.” Another high school student questioned how to bring the collaborative to the actual schools that need it. “It’s hard to get into the place that would really need it because they might not be looking,” she said.

“I was blown away,” said Whitney Wiegand, a student in the Education Policy Management Program, who presented the Deeper Learning Collaborative. “It put us in an odd position to be arguing that deeper learning is not happening for enough of our nation’s students and then to hear from high schoolers who were able to synthesize information and provide feedback that was so applicable and so well-articulated.”

Yet that was also part of the intent of the Deeper Learning Design Symposium – the culmination of nearly 14 weeks of work resulting in 17 different presentations to a panel of experts ranging from faculty to practitioners to high school students.

“Ideas don’t get better without feedback,” Mehta advised the Deeper Learning Collaborative.

Over the past semester, students in this class have examined what it means to rethink education and design a new 21st century system aimed at supporting deeper and more engaging instruction for all students.

“We need to build a different kind of school system, and so this assignment was created to help students begin to think about how they might transform some corner of the world toward deeper learning,” Mehta said.

The course grew out of Mehta’s own work doing an ethnographic study of high schools. In his research visiting nearly 30 American high schools, he recognized that students weren’t often being given rigorous, challenging, and meaningful work – often referred to by educators as “deeper learning.” That same view is likely what attracted more than 75 students to apply for the course though enrollment was capped at 34.

“I’ve spent the last several years teaching high school in North Carolina, and I was always excited by my students’ progress but also skeptical of whether the work we did together was really preparing them to do high level work in college and in their careers,” said EPM student Ellen Viser, also part of the Deeper Learning Collaborative. “This course offered a deep dive into what really authentic, meaningful work can look like in the classroom.”

Perhaps the biggest jump of all came when students were given the opportunity to dream big and work with their peers to create a new vision for schools. The students used a design thinking process based on IDEO and the Stanford Design School to create their projects. Part of completing the projects involved interviewing a number of potential “users” of their design, spending time considering alternate definitions of the problem, and brainstorming potential solutions. The results were thrilling.

“We have students developing schools in India, working with Boston Public Schools and the Boston Teacher Union to develop deeper learning professional development in Boston, working with the state of Connecticut to revamp teacher prep, and so forth,” Mehta said. “Think of it like an Othello board -- we need to gradually increase the number of people who have experienced really rigorous, meaningful, and engaging education, and then they can do the same for other people, and, over time, the numbers can grow exponentially.”

The final stage of the project was developing a prototype and testing the results at the symposium this week.

“I think we were caught off-guard by some of the questions we were asked,” Wiegand said. “We have spent all semester poring over this idea, and to some extent we felt like we had come to the end of the design process. After the questions from the experts we collectively realized that we are only at the beginning of the design process, and have a long way to go if we really want to implement our plan.”

Following the Deeper Learning Collaborative presentation the Ed School students seemed just as eager to continue working on it as well.

“More than anything it helped a lot in helping us further ideate and as we said in our presentation ‘reimagine and relearn’ ways by which we can bring deeper learning into schools,” said Mark Yee, a student in the International Education Program, also a part of Deeper Learning Collaborative. “It pointed us to areas of growth that our group can still work on and I think we're all excited to continue building on what we have so far.”