Advancing Deeper Learning Under ESSA: Seven Priorities
This brief recommends seven ways for supporters of deeper learning to take advantage of the changing education policy landscape, as authority shifts from the federal government to states and local districts. The authors outline priorities to help the nation’s high schools move from a largely inequitable system to one that prepares all students for college… Read More ›
Effective Schools for Deeper Learning: An Exploratory Study
This report proposes one strategy by which to strengthen the nascent research base on deeper learning’s implications for high school improvement. Specifically, it describes an exploratory study designed to test the idea that a particular kind of whole-school assessment, involving site visits by teams of trained observers, can provide useful data about students’ opportunities for… Read More ›
Deeper Teaching
In this paper, Magdalene Lampert provides a close, detailed description of “deeper teaching,” referring to the kinds of instructional strategies and moment-by-moment teaching decisions that enable students to learn deeply. She concludes by describing the kinds of early-career guidance and support that teachers will need in order to understand what deeper teaching entails and put… Read More ›
The Implications of Deeper Learning for Adolescent Immigrants and English Language Learners
This report argues that students who are immigrants and/or “English language learners” (ELLs) often exhibit strengths that monolingual, non-immigrant children may not have, and that policymakers should view as important assets for individual learners and their communities. Further, the strengths that ELLs and immigrants bring with them to school tend to be well aligned with… Read More ›
The Influence of Teaching Beyond Standardized Test Scores: Engagement, Mindsets, and Agency
This report was sponsored by the Raikes Foundation. It is a follow-up to “Teaching Adolescents to Become Learners – the Role of Noncognitive Factors in Shaping School Performance: A Critical Literature Review,” a CCSR report written in 2012. This report is in response to a “need for more research on the role of school and… Read More ›
Equal Opportunity for Deeper Learning
This report calls for fundamental changes in curriculum, assessment, and policy to ensure equity among students regardless of socioeconomic status. The quality of instruction for low-income students and students of color is increasingly becoming a concern in the United States. Access to a more rigorous curriculum for underserved students can bridge gaps by equipping students… Read More ›
How School Districts can Support Deeper Learning: The Need for Performance Alignment
This report addresses why district central office leaders should make performance alignment a key part of their efforts to help all students learn deeply. And what, more specifically, does performance alignment entail and how might district leaders move in that direction? School district leaders nationwide aspire to help their schools become vibrant places for learning—where… Read More ›
Deeper Learning for Students with Disabilities
This report focuses on deeper learning for students with disabilities. The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs now requires states to fully disclose the precise steps they will take to ensure better outcomes for students with disabilities. This new requirement can aid educators in implementing effective practices for providing deeper learning opportunities… Read More ›
Let’s Get Real: Deeper Learning and the Power of the Workplace
In this report, Nancy Hoffman argues that in a period when very few teens have access to jobs, high school experience must incorporate gradual exposure to the workplace. Educators today assert that “college and career readiness” should be the goal for every high school student, but “career readiness” is too often an empty tagline. What… Read More ›
Civic Education and Deeper Learning
This report, authored by Peter Levine and Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, proposes that the turn toward deeper learning in education reform should go hand in hand with a renewed emphasis on high-quality civics education. Not only does deeper learning have great potential to promote civic outcomes and strengthen our democracy but, at the same time, civic education… Read More ›
The Role of Digital Technologies in Deeper Learning
To compete in today’s global, knowledge-based, innovation-centered economy, young people must go beyond a high school diploma and acquire not just academic knowledge, but cognitive, intrapersonal, and interpersonal capacities. That is, they must engage in deeper learning. As schools shift away from traditional education models in favor or providing deeper learning environments, they are required… Read More ›
Equity in Competency Education: Realizing the Potential, Overcoming the Obstacles
This second paper of Students at the Center’s Competency Education Research Series examines equity concerns in competency education through the lens of family income, exploring the effects and implications, as well as proposing potential mitigations. Equity is both a central goal and a fundamental value of competency education. Competency-based approaches are designed to promote equity… Read More ›