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From Classrooms to Campfires: Fostering Educator Growth with Symmetrical Learning Adventures
A camp for teachers provides immersive professional learning opportunities that mirror the community, agency, and joy of deeper learning for students.
Possible Futures: Toward a New Grammar of Schooling
We are at a hinge moment in the history of our schools. A 120-year-old industrial structure is radically ill-equipped for the challenges posed by the COVID pandemic, much less what has been called the triple pandemic of COVID, racism and economic inequality, and fundamental threats to our democracy.
United We Learn: Hearing Kentucky's Voices on the Future of Education
In the spring of 2021, Jason E. Glass, Ed.D., Kentucky’s commissioner of education and chief learner, staged a series of stakeholder engagement efforts that led to the formation of the Kentucky Coalition for Advancing Education (KCAE).
How Deeper Learning Can Transform Schools
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.
Why We Have Too Much of the Wrong Kind of Urgency and Too Little of the Right Kind in Education
The urgency around learning loss is keeping education spinning in place when the urgency we need is to reimagine schools and address deeply rooted challenges.
Less Schooling, More Learning
Anyone who works, or lives with kids, will have strong opinions on the ways they’re taught. Jal Mehta presents his unexpected findings after leading a nationwide project researching the best ways children learn.
The Teachers Have Something to Say
To develop an in-depth, nuanced understanding of what teaching was like during the COVID-impacted 2020-21 academic school year, we interviewed 57 U.S. PK-12 teachers from across the country in public, charter, and private schools, at different grade levels, and in different subject areas.
Healing, Community, and Humanity: How Students and Teachers Want to Reinvent Schools Post-COVID
Understanding the experiences of students and teachers during pandemic schooling is vital to educational recovery and building back better.
Amplify, Hospice, and Create: How Schools Should Spend the Money from the American Rescue Plan Act
With American Rescue Plan Act funds, schools and districts can create three years of awesome and incredible experiences for their students, at a scale that we may never see again.
Crisis creates opportunity. Will we seize it?
The Learning Professional recently interviewed Mehta about how the COVID-19 pandemic is changing teaching and learning and how to seize opportunities for improving schools moving forward
Make Schools More Human
The pandemic showed us that education was broken. It also showed us how to fix it.
How Districts Can Empower Teachers to Lead Change
This post is by John Watkins, co-director of The Deeper Learning Dozen, and principal at Inquiry & Learning for Change. John is a coach, consultant, researcher, and evaluator with several decades’ experience in systemic reform in educational organizations.
Rethinking the American High School
When Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine embarked on a six-year study of 30 of the most effective public high schools in the United States, what they found among students was largely “bored, disengaged compliance.”
Why Equity Has Been a Conservative Force in American Education—And How That Could Change
Over the past 15 years, at least since the passage of No Child Left Behind, equity has been more of a conservative than a liberating force in American education.
The Paradox of Leading for Deeper Learning
In the past few months, I have been talking with a number of district leaders who are trying to move their districts toward deeper learning for all.
Schools Already Have Good Learning, Just Not Where You Think
In a piece we recently published in Ed. Magazine, Sarah Fine and I argued that the “periphery” of schools was often more vital than the core.
A Pernicious Myth: Basics Before Deeper Learning
If there is one prevalent assumption that stands in the way of deeper learning, it is that you have to do “the basics” before you can engage in deeper learning.