Deeper Learning: 10 Ways You Can Die

My colleague Bob Kegan once wrote a memo for our program on education leadership titled "10 ways you can die." The idea was that there was no way to guarantee success — improving education systems is damn hard — but there were surefire ways to fail, and knowing what those ways were would at least give you a fighting chance to succeed. On Bob's list were things like, "if you don't know the history of the system you are doomed to repeat it; if you can't manage yourself you can't manage change of others" — and many other nuggets which have guided us since the memo's creation.

Today I thought I'd try to offer a similar list about deeper learning. Some are for teachers and some for system level leaders. I'll avoid obvious points, like you need to know what you want to teach, and try to focus on some that are a little less visible.

You will die:

1. If you haven't experienced deep or powerful learning yourself. This seems obvious but is frequently ignored. I remember once showing a video in a class at HGSE of a constructivist math class in which students were having a fairly animated discussion about the relationship between area and perimeter. One of the students in my class said, "Oh — that's what they were trying to show us in my school last year when we were moving towards Common Core math." One of the things I've learned in my own journey in trying to teach people about deeper learning is that the most powerful things you can do is give adults models and experiences that mirror what you are hoping they will do for students. We also call this "symmetry" in our work — that if, as a system level leader, you want teachers to teach students in a particular way, you have to give teachers opportunities to have those same kinds of learning experiences....

Read more at Education Week.