Over the course of several days, fifty teachers established what makes deeper learning for students possible. Three themes emerged: connections, purpose, and intellectual depth.

What existing practices and tactics, related to these themes, can we tap into to create a shared infrastructure on which to design and facilitate deeper learning experiences for students? A partial list includes:

Connections

• Using the d.school’s Stoke Deck to help students connect in light ways
• Employing EL Education Protocols to help students share ideas in structured ways
• Establishing norms to grope toward serving all learners’ needs 
• Interrupting status differences and combat institutional biases using the National Equity Project’s Liberatory Design Kit
• Helping students surface one another’s strengths and tendencies using activities such as Compass Points and Strengths Finder

Purpose

• Unpacking learning outcomes and creating shorter, digestible purpose statements
• Finding a suitable audience for student work
• Using community and professional partnerships so students can do work that impacts the world outside of school

Intellectual Depth

• Using Bloom’s Taxonomy verb chart to move from fact memorization to sophisticated work with material
• Employing understanding by design to create lessons and units that establish goals for depth and backwards plan from there

As school and instructional leaders, we’re supporting teachers by:

• Finding professional audiences for their work, such as at the New School of Thought Institute (NSTI 2020)
• Creating time and space to examine student work for evidence of deeper learning
• Launching inquiry-focused professional learning communities that allow teachers to dig deep into topics in teaching and learning over the course of a semester
• Sending teachers to exemplary schools in the Deeper Learning network
• Capturing exemplars of lessons and projects
• Surfacing roadblocks and dilemmas, so we can help shape the path

The goal is for this entire group to be energized to provide students with the rich learning and engagement that only happens at sufficient depth.

A fear: the lack of specificity of the effort. Despite many attempts, deeper learning remains difficult to define in a straightforward way: is it simply “non-shallow,” is it a set of competencies, or do you just know it when you see it?

The pre-requisite to this effort, therefore, is trust in one another, so that the ambiguity can be rich soil, not for the cultivation of excuses, but for several dozen various blooms.