 All right. Welcome everybody. Despite all of our best efforts, we did have some technical difficulties there and it looks like we have actually so many people trying to get into the chat room that that's causing us a little trouble that we're going to try to resolve shortly. So if you could put the slides up please. Okay. Welcome and you can go to the next slide, Ryan. First of all, I want to thank our, my name is Ben Daly and I'm the Chief Academic Officer for High Tech High. I want to thank our partners at the Hewlett Foundation and at the Rakes Foundation who, without this, this would not be possible. I want to thank, I want to acknowledge our partners on this project. We have the MIT Media Lab, Peer to Peer University, the Teaching Channel, and then we also have 10 school organizations that are working in various ways on this project. And those organizations are EdVisions, Expeditionary Learning, New Tech Network, Asia Society, ConnectEd, Big Picture, High Tech High, InVision Schools, International's Network, and New Visions for Public Schools. Okay. Hello everyone. My name is Rob Gordon. I'll introduce myself in a moment. But we do have a fabulous panel here to give us kind of an overview and have a conversation. What it is, why we might want to look into it and how it works and how it works. But let's go right to our panel. And here's some introduction. I'm going to be moderating Rob Gordon. I'm the President of High Tech High Education, which is a presentation that attempts to model and foster deep learning. Hi, I'm Ed Bresenio. I'm CEO of Mindset Works, which was founded by Carol Dweck and other educators to help schools foster student agency, which is an inner drive to learn and grow, to take charge of their own learning. And that's a core component of deeper learning. Hi, everybody. I'm John Needham, Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I've been doing a study of high schools in the U.S. that are striving towards deeper learning. We've been to about 30 schools, including a number of the ones on Ben's initial list. And I'm really looking forward to talking about some of what we've seen there. Larry Rosenstock, CEO of High Tech High, which is a group of nonprofit independent public schools in Southern California. Hi, I'm Maya Irvin. I'm a 10th grade student at High Tech High. And after getting the chance to go to a deeper learning conference beginning or end of last year, I decided with a friend that I'd love to be able to eventually publish a book about deeper learning from a student's perspective. My name is Mark Chun, a program officer at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. One of our main priorities is focusing on how we get deeper learning out for all students across the country. So, Mark, I mean Hewlett has been very interested in deeper learning and has really tried to get some momentum going around, a discussion going about it. My question to you is, I mean, we've had progressive education, constructive education, inquiry-based learning, project-based learning, 21st century skills. And now we have deeper learning. So, why should we, what's a lot? I mean, all these things are coming along. What is special or distinctive about deeper learning and what makes it something that we should really be attending to? Sure. Well, I think when the foundation was getting started and trying to figure out what are the competencies that students need to succeed in college career and civic life, we came up with a set of the skills and knowledge and abilities that students would need in order to do that. And one of the things that we wanted to have was a big tent so all those different groups could form underneath that, recognizing that there are a lot of these ideas that have gone back throughout the last, like, 100 years. So that's something that we wanted to focus on. Also, in terms of deeper learning, we did want to get away from a lot of the distinctions that folks were making between skills and knowledge. So when we talked about 21st century skills or even the SCAN skills, it really highlighted that we want to recognize that we need to have the knowledge of skills and dispositions all together in order for students to have success. My name is Ryan Gallagher. I'm a teacher at High Tech High. So I'll just jump in while Rob's getting his fix. So that's great. I think we've made this switch towards deeper learning. I'd love to hear from the panel maybe starting with Ed about how your work kind of connects with this. How do you feel that I know your work specifically with Mindsense Network who is talking about academic mindsets and how that aligns with this kind of new idea of deeper learning versus 21st century skills versus SCANs? Sure. So to me, you know, deeper learning is about a deep understanding of kind of deep understanding and mastery. So both the knowledge, the skills that Mark was talking about and dispositions that are needed for 21st century success. And that means creating, applying knowledge, creating new things, innovating, building on knowledge, as well as being a lifelong learner. And in order to get those outcomes, you need some deeper learning competencies that the Hewlett Foundation has identified and we can talk about those. But some of those are about student agency, particularly academic mindsets and learning strategies and academic mindsets and learning strategies and habits is how I think about it. And that means that students take charge over their own learning and that's important for deeper learning because learning happens in the learner's brain. So how engaged and active the learner is in the learning experience has a lot of impact over how much is learned and how much the learner can transfer and apply that knowledge to other things. That's great. Now, Joel, you've had the experience and a lucky experience of kind of going into some of these different schools. What makes a deeper learning school or what makes a deeper learning student for you? So I think of deeper learning at the intersection of essentially kind of three parts. One part has to do with identity. Is the task that the student is working on something that matters to them that's meaningful that's connected to their core self? And then a second part has to do with mastery. Have they built up some skills? Do they understand the knowledge in the domain that connects to notions of expertise and those sorts of things? And then the third part is about discovery. Like, are they not just receiving knowledge but creating knowledge, making new things, that sort of stuff. And it's really difficult to get all three of those parts in the same equation. But when it happens, it's incredibly powerful for people. I'm sure we'll have a chance to talk about schools as we go forward. But when I do professional development for adults, I often ask people, can you just describe a powerful learning experience that you've had in your life? And sometimes those, I would say at least half of those learning experiences have come either outside of school or through, like, Model UN or some kind of extracurricular. But they generally have those elements. There was sort of a moment in life where something hit them that was really powerful. Then they got invested in it. They spent a lot of time on it. They built up some skills. And along the way, they discovered some things that they didn't know when they started. And so I think the challenge for classroom educators is kind of how would we create those experiences. On a regular basis. Okay. It's striking to see too. Oh, Larry, go ahead. Yeah. So, Joel, on that note of asking people that question, which I think is a great idea for everybody who's listening into this right now, EO Wilson, the well-known entomologist at the same university as Joel, I interviewed him and I asked him what was the moment in a great scientist's life like his. He's 82 years old. That he got the interest in science. And he said for himself and the great scientist he knows, it was in childhood that he had the, quote, Eurekaizing moment where the whole world opened up to him. And I asked him how are schools presently organized in terms of giving rise to these Eurekaizing moments. And he said, you know, for the most part, they're not. And that therefore we need to look to the world outside of the school and make the walls as permeable as possible to the inside and the outside. A great example of what I would consider to be a great example of a deeper learning project by a group of 50 students was something that Maya worked on last year as a ninth grader. Maya, can you just tell us a little bit about the wheel? I'd love to. So last year I was able to take part in a project that was both humanities and physics based. So on the humanities side, we looked at the rise and fall of civilization. So the Mayans, the Romans, the Greeks and the Easter Islanders. And keeping in mind that the date of our exhibition was actually supposed to take place on the date of the 2012 Mayan apocalypse. So that's sort of where they got the idea of this project. And so on the humanities side, we looked at the rise and fall and what led to the different rises and falls. That makes sense of the civilizations. And then on the physics side, we learned all about gears. So why do teeth matter and the spokes on a gear and what that means and rotations per minute and different things like that. And then so based on a theory that we created for how civilizations rise and fall, we had to create a mechanism. And so the mechanism could involve as many gears as you needed it in order to sort of get your theory across. And then each one of our little mechanisms was connected to one larger gear. And so basically, if you were to see it today, you see a big gear with a whole bunch of little sort of families of gears connected to it. And so when the big gear turns, all of our smaller ones are turning at the same time. So it's a lot to look at, but as soon as you hear a student talk about it or as soon as you know what's behind it, it's definitely something really cool. And it taught us not only were we learning about the Easter Islanders and the Greeks as in physics. My individual mechanism didn't work on Exhibition Day when the whole school was there watching. So it taught me that it was okay that I didn't finish it because my teacher said, I saw you one day, I stayed after school until about midnight trying to finish it with my teacher and two other friends. So he said that I saw that he saw me working as hard as I could. So it didn't matter that it didn't work on Exhibition Day. It mattered that I had put in the work and that I truly tried my hardest and I had to work over all the obstacles that were thrown at me. Okay, I've got one more quick question for you, Maya. And Ed, I'd like to follow up on behalf of Rob and ask you the same one. I think a good inquiry is, Maya, what surprised you about all that? Was there some surprise that just you were something unexpected about the process or the outcome? That I could do it because I was in a group with three boys. One of them was all in it. He was like, tell me what to do and I will do it for you because he didn't really know how to do it but he knew that I knew how to take charge and so he asked me what to do and he did it and the other two boys, they didn't do anything. They weren't really sure what to do and they were the type of boys. There's a basic formula for a group but I am very aware of that basic formula and teachers don't try to create a group that way but that's what ends up happening. So I was in a group with three other boys and those two boys didn't really do anything. They were sort of the exception to that formula because it equals, usually it only equals one person who doesn't do anything. I had two boys who didn't do anything. So I didn't think I could do it to be honest. I thought that we weren't going to have a gear. Nothing was going to work. I wasn't going to be able to turn in all of the papers while trying to figure out how to use Adobe Illustrator and our big industrial laser cutter and so I didn't think I could do it. So the fact that I was able to persevere and help my group and communicate with my teacher in an effective way with both teachers to communicate with my parents really surprised me because I didn't think that I could do it all I've always been pretty sure of myself but that just proved to me that I can do a lot more. And you are very sure of yourself which we know and love about you. Okay, I'd like to ask in sequence Ed and then Joel and then Mark could you give examples on the upside of things that you have seen inside schools that really surprised you in a really positive way about deeper learning and what was it about that that was so striking? Sure, so for me a wonderful deeper learning experience that I had was actually at High Tech High and it was a project slice in front of before the deeper learning conference last year and the project that we worked on for a day was to explore the issues in the Mexico-U.S. border and so we went to Mexico and there was a half of us who crossed the border and interviewed people there half of us stayed in the U.S. and interviewed people there and there was a whole process to this before the experience we kind of asked questions and explored different artifacts to figure out what we were interested in learning about we went through a learning experience and at the end of the day we created some art that demonstrated something that we had learned that day and the end result of that is something that is not as predictable as when we are kind of saying lecturing one to thirty students but the learning was a lot deeper so one of the students that was with me who was a teacher who was a principal actually we were working on our art and she said and she kind of we were talking about what we had learned that day and she had an aha moment that because she didn't speak Spanish she had the level of her thinking about what had happened that day had been a lot lower than for the Spanish speakers in the room and that gave her an aha moment for the situation that English language learners are and the challenges on developing academic language to developing kind of the understanding of the standards that we want them to learn so that was a wonderful experience where I didn't know exactly what to expect out of the day but great deeper learning came out of it Great, thank you and you know Ed you might know that one of our students once said I'm not here illegally they just moved the border to the other side of me Charles? Sure, I mean I find that in deeper learning settings the person who's organizing the learning tends to kind of be able to tilt things on its head or see things not in the way that you would have originally seen it and the comment that Larry just made about moving the border that that's the kind of thing that one would think of in that case so for example we went to a math science magnet school in Illinois which and we were at a class which is a humanities class and this guy who is a fairly traditional teacher he you know would read a little bit from the text and then the students would discuss it a little bit and so forth but what he was teaching was from David Hume and David Hume teaches a lot about notions of causation and David Hume's ideas are basically like just because the sun has come up for the last billion days doesn't mean that you know for sure the sun's going to come up tomorrow and so the assignment for that class was take one of the labs that you did in your science class and write about it from David Hume's perspective like are those things that you think you figured out like are you sure that you really figured them out after you've learned about Hume and this guy you know he was like teaching humanities at MIT or something like you know he was this is a math science magnet school he was sort of the outcast and he sort of found a way to kind of destabilize the whole enterprise by taking what he was teaching and then asking them to apply it to their math science work so really deep learning can happen in lots of different ways but often that's one quality of it that's a great point in many different ways and Mark can you give us an example sure I'm going to give two quick examples and for one with regards to deeper learning and I don't think we've mentioned this yet but at the foundation we've identified our six competencies that we have found that students need understanding or mastering content critical thinking and problem solving communication both written and oral collaboration skills learning how to learn and then the academic mindsets and a great example I think it was pivoting off of what Maya just said I visited schools and I would ask them well where do you see the students developing these skills and they'd say well collaboration obviously it's happening right here they're working on a group project and Maya you have to let me know if this happens with you oftentimes folks will take the project if there's more students you cut it into four pieces each person goes off and maybe does their part you couple it back together at least a minute and that's not really the way that we're thinking about the teamwork and collaboration skills that students will need in the future so sometimes there are examples where folks think they're focusing on helping students develop these skills and they often aren't that's one challenge the other extreme Ron Berger one of our colleagues who works with expeditionary learning he reminds us and I found this as well that you go to any school across the country and there are pockets of teachers and students who are doing this type of learning what I've been to many of the schools within the steeper learning network have been ticked off the different organizations it's amazing how this is happening across the board so it's happening for all students in all classrooms and so it's not just a little group of students getting that but everyone's getting it and I find that that is the tremendous power of this work so one of the things that I would like to throw into the mix here is this a given example of this is this question of social learning for some reason I went to law school and I've often asked people who've gone to law school if you could do one of the following three things and your life depended on getting through law school would you attend the classes would you read the cases or would you be in a study group and almost everybody I ask that question to is be in a study group so would someone like to talk about this whole notion and Maya you've seen this a lot in a lot of the projects here but anyone on this question of the peer to peer exchange my nephew once said of course someone in the study group had better read the cases but he's a wise guy would someone like to pick up on that theme I think that depends on the student I know that I think it depends on the student and the people who you know who you would be in the study group with personally I know that teachers teachers who have been hard to kai for a while have gotten very very good at sort of learning more about seeding charts and where to sit people and can you work outside I don't know I'm sort of students know now that a teacher says that you can work outside and the student can it's not because you're picking your favorites it's because this student has proven to the teacher that they can work outside and that they can you know sort of communicate with their peers so I think that just depends on the type of student and if speaking with other students helps then that's what the student's going to choose to do but I'm not sure that that's always the case with every student so you know when we have these conversations we're talking a lot about what students are doing in terms of deeper learning in schools what about for you you're an interesting organization that you work for right now what about the role of deeper learning for the adults in the organization that you're working in that's a great question I think that's something that we found characterizes a lot of the schools of the deeper learning now recognizing that the types of how you engage students we need to apply the same practices for how we engage the adults within the buildings so teachers and administrators still need to continue to learn as well and it's just what you raised earlier aspect of the social learning opportunities for them to get together and plan and figure out how they can work with their students so I think that's been a key part of what we learned this is not something where teachers need to be separated to their own silos and do their own work we need to find ways to engage them have a chance to improve their practice and work together right okay and what about for those of you who know Sam Seidel's wonderful work on hip hop and flipping out of something out of nothing what about this whole question of the remix and the role of the remix in life today and that sort of whole notion of building tinkering and remixing and sharing in a way that we're doing today is that something Ed that you would want to try to tackle a little bit this question of sharing and collective creation of new knowledge sure so that I think is kind of like the world works at its best the real world when people are creating things that are of value for other people often you have people coming together and being energized and applying their different skills in a collaborative way to create something that's of value for the world and so what they're trying to do is mimic that environment in schools so that students learn that way learn to operate in the world and also create things that are of real value for the world okay very very good thank you so much and I also see a question here from Mark which is a good one about this question of equity is this for everyone and can this be for everyone Rob the equity question is this a great moment for you to return yeah well in my view the great project of high tech high and the great project for education everywhere is to reach all students and to discover that all students are capable of deeper learning and the question then becomes how do we find ways to offer access and challenge to all learners and ways that by which all learners can shine so for me that leads us to a couple of things one is to students getting their hands on things and designing and building things as in project based learning but doing projects and doing design and building itself is not enough there needs to be some sense of a problem or a real question that we're pursuing students need to perceive that they are engaged in authentic work for an authentic audience so when those conditions are in place we can have any of all students can have access and can realize that they have a voice in the design, in the definition and in the exposition of the problem I know I'm wondering a little bit let me take a shot at this question of equity I think that what you want to have is a sense of imagination, intuition and inspiration and imagination and intuition and inspiration based on socioeconomic status they don't mispredict based on race they don't mispredict based on gender they don't mispredict based on language ability those are sort of natural elements and talents that are all within us but they're not drawn upon in schools I just have something I just took off my shelf just because some of you have seen it before it's just a lot of fun so here's a case where okay so Ryan okay so this is a book that some kids did among many books about the San Diego Bay and these kids were asked to write a very interesting book and with photographs about the flora and fauna of San Diego Bay and it's really professionally done the most interesting page to me is this one in the mammal section the kids noticed that there were homeless people living by the side of the bay and they have a very respectful treatment of homeless people in the mammal section of the book most of us as adults would have seen the homeless people of course but it takes the freshness of the eyes of youth to notice the homeless people and respectfully include them in the book and that to me is part of the equitable part of the remix recreation and productive inquiry is that we all have something we all have something that we want to bring to the party here hey Joel I'm going to go back to you now I want to ask you since you're in the academy what is some of the more compelling is there any thing around compelling research that you are sort of tickled by these days that is examining some of these questions about how we not only learn but how we really learn that is a really good question I mean I've been particularly interested over the past few years on the research that expertise accumulates over time but I think that this I'm not trying to dodge your question Larry but it's a topic where leading educators are ahead of the sort of research and writing about the topic which is why I've spent a lot of time in schools trying to learn from practice I did want to say one quick thing doubling back to your last question though about equity which is one of the most tragic things about our school visits a school for a day and I encourage everybody to do this to get out of your own school and take a look at another school you'll notice two things one unless it's a school which is explicitly set up to do this kind of work you'll just notice very wide variability from classroom to classroom so you know I remember once going to a school and I went to the history class and usually my first question is to a student I just turn to the student I say you know what's happening in this class and the student said well you know go ask that girl she's the one who understands what's happening in this class and you know I went over to her and she started to talk and I asked a question and she tried to read something out of her notes and it was just miserable for both of us and then I was shadowing a student I followed the student across the hallway to the next class it was a chemistry class and the whole demeanor of everything changed they said you know professor you need to put on your goggles if you're gonna be in this room and they just like went to the materials and they started working like that's the way that room was so I just I frequently find that that the kids are ahead of the adults that what the kids want to do what they can think about usually if you visit a school for a day you get half an hour just to sit down with the kids in the cafeteria or whatever and talk to them about the school inevitably no matter what school you're in they are perceptive, witty ironic, thoughtful, incisive etc and then you follow them into their some of their classes and those qualities are not being permitted to come out so I think the big challenge for equity is to sort of to figure out ways to unleash that. I would love to hear Maya's perspective on this around the question of is this for everyone or is it simply for the fast-moving students is it simply for the students who use their hands what Maya what's your take on this from the student perspective I I definitely believe it's for everybody I think that it's a little I know it's a little strange to just say that it's only for the fast-moving student or for the Haidt-Khai student I think that every student can learn how to collaborate and how to sort of work together and I just think that Haidt-Khai has its own way and I think that their Haidt-Khai isn't the only way to do it and I think that there are a bunch of other ways so I think that it's for every student and I think that it does take it's a process you know I've been at the school since I was in fourth grade so I'm used to project-based learning and I don't really remember what public school is like so I mean now I've gone through the process I'm in tenth grade and I'm used to it but you know I don't believe that to say that is to say that you know nobody else can do it I think that it's just it's a process and I think that you know if if they work hard enough and if they're really motivated and even if they're not I think there's always a way for every student to sort of yeah to work. Thanks Maya I think Ed I think you wanted to say something about this as well yeah you know I agree with Maya I think that this is for every student every student has a capability of developing those deeper learning competencies that Mark talked about and Maya said you know if they're motivated and then she said well if they're not motivated too and that's that's what I encounter as a skepticism from educators or others most often in deeper learning is well you know what I can put these projects in front of students I can create these great learning experiences for them but some of them are just sitting back and they don't care and you know if I wear their shoes I'd be so excited because it would be so cool to be learning about all these things but they're not engaged and that is a challenge but the key is that we can develop in students that inner drive that motivation for them to make the most out of those learning experiences and some things that are important to develop that inner drive and motivation our academic mindsets which are four key beliefs I can change my intelligence and abilities through effort which is a growth mindset I can succeed I belong in this learning community and this work has value and purpose for me that along with effective self-management and learning strategies and habits unleashes that inner motivation and so we have to be deliberate about creating environments that fosters those beliefs and strategies in students that they take ownership of their learning and then yes I believe that this can be the best way for students to learn and I would also say that there is not one way to create deeper learning, different schools can design themselves in different ways to create deeper learning experiences and outcomes for students So Ed, thank you and this actually takes us back to what Joel was saying earlier about the different settings that you move into even within one school and speaks to the centrality of the teacher in creating an environment where students feel that their input is valued where collaboration is the norm for the day and where important questions are being pursued I want to shift gears a little bit and ask about the adults what about the adults in schools what needs to happen with and for adults if we are to foster and model deeper learning To me the great irony in schools today is that we're asking teachers to foster and model deeper learning and 21st century skills and they're working in a 19th century work environment but what needs to happen for the adults and how can administrators and other leaders help adults in their efforts to foster deeper learning Well I'll take a quick shot at that I think the most important thing is for the adults to no longer be working in autonomous isolation and to be working collegially in groups and I also think that they should not be in the stove pipe of their own discipline but rather they should be doing work that crosses disciplines because that's how we experience the world it's not this is the math part this is the science part so I think I think people need to be meeting there's no other way I don't think you can really do this unless the adults are collaborating and reflecting doing tunings of projects seeing whether the project not only whether it needs to be tuned whether it's worthwhile to do in the very first place so those are types of things that normally don't happen in schools and you know Rob we've been in schools where you check your mailbox you teach your class in autonomous isolation and you go home that's a tough environment to make it happen I think it's important to add really quickly that everything that Larry just mentioned that teachers need to do students are doing a high-tech high so that person I find that very interesting and I think that maybe that's what helps teachers become so good at this concept of deeper learning is that they are doing what they're asking their students to do which I think really helps so to pick up on Maya's point about modeling we tend to find that the relationship between the teachers and the administrators parallels the relationship between the students and the teachers we call that symmetry so in schools where the teachers are afraid of the administrators the students are afraid of the teachers and in the schools where the teachers really respect the students usually they also have experienced that same level of respect from their administrators one thing I learned from my own students I teach a class at the Harvard Graduate School of Education on deeper learning and if you put in the course catalog that you're going to teach a class in deeper learning it can't just be the readings like you've got to deliver and one of the things so we did we watched some videos and students did a long kind of design project which with a lot of the elements that Maya emphasized a lot of struggle along the way and uncertainty and ambiguity and not sure if they could do it and presenting before a real audience and some of that went well and some of it didn't go well and clearly the experience of going through that project especially the parts that didn't go well but being in an environment where we had stress that you know you get three hits out of ten you're in the hall of fame and baseball that's the way you want to think about it we're going to try things out and just keep working on it and what they said to me was you know we learned something from the readings but we mainly learned about deeper learning because we kind of live deeper learning and so their challenge going forward is like if most school is gray and they've now experienced orange a lot of them want to become school principals and so on they can't just say to their teachers you know let's do orange like you know some of their teachers and their schooling may have experienced orange but they're going to have to create experiences for those people which are sort of similar to the kinds of experiences they went through and so forth it's sort of like pay it forward if Maya were to grow up and run a school I'd have a lot of confidence in it because she's spent so long being immersed in this kind of environment I think I'd have a lot of confidence in Maya as well she's ready to run as one of these schools right now in America so I want to there's an interesting question that's come through from our chat line here how do we identify the real questions that bring meaning to students learning and I don't want to take anybody by surprise but let's think about that for a second and I have a thought about it and that thought is to go to the students and ask them what their questions are that's what just came to mind we've had we've seen really profoundly deep project based learning where the teachers went in without a notion of what the curriculum might be what the generative questions might be and simply said to kids 6th graders, kindergarteners and 12th graders we've seen it on all those levels teacher goes in and says help yourself and about the world and we can gather those all together up on the white board and categorize and bring them all together into one kind of overarching question that kind of links all the questions and then proceed from there those are questions that have real meaning to students and that have real currency in the world beyond school and the 6th grade class that we were talking about they all realized that their questions were all linked to the end of the world and they studied the Mayan calendar they studied earthquakes, they studied tsunamis they studied supernovas they studied asteroids and they presented all these different things but they all related to questions that they themselves have brought to the table others on that issue identifying real questions that bring meaning to the learning I just want to say that is the whole reason that I was interested in writing a book from a students perspective because when my friend and I went to the deeper learning conference there were a lot of questions being posed that we turned to each other and we went wait a second I'm pretty sure that I could give you at least if not the answer, at least part of the answer and we started to feel a little we didn't know if we were naive or if we really could give you the answer so I think that's the biggest reason why we thought it was important to have a book from a students perspective and I want to answer some of these questions because I think that my mom is an educator we've always been an educator for about 16 years she's now the dean at one of the high-tech high schools and so I've seen her work in a public school and I've seen her work in high-tech high and so I've heard her have conversations about her curriculum and how she's teaching and what she struggles with and so I think that sometimes as educators you forget to go to the student and ask a question that's again like students have to learn how to sort of maneuver their way through deeper learning that's what educators have to do as well and so I think that sometimes it's forgotten that the students are the ones who are most affected by deeper learning Maya that's very helpful thank you and I think there's a lesson there too not only about curriculum and what questions to pose and pursue but also about assessment and that if we're talking about deeper learning then assessment takes on a different cast and assessment is not only about how are the students doing but how is this experience and how is this course and this design working for the students so that not only are we looking at student work but students are looking at the design work that we as adults have put together around this learning experience is it working or not any other comments about assessment 2.0 or 3.0 how would we know that deeper learning is going on how would we get at that I think as the saying goes the proof of the pudding is in the tasting and I think that looking at student work is a very powerful way to understand what's really going on see what they've done themselves I think it gives new meaning to parent participation it gives new meaning to accountability in schools it gives new meaning to use of public dollars for schools to actually see what students are doing themselves we've certainly found that to be the case here where a lot of people in the early going were questioning what we were doing and then when they saw the books that they published and the patents that they got and things like that they said well it's different than the way I went to school but this is really interesting that would be my take yeah mine continues to be I think that the assessment is dialogical and it's mutual that it goes both ways I want to raise one other question another we're drawing near to the end of our time here but I know and I would love Mark to chime in on this and Larry and anybody else who's interested I just want to bring up the notion of standards in the United States the emergence of common core in other countries I know that standards are a piece of the picture and I know that many educators feel constrained by standards and beholden to them in such a way that they can't do the kinds of things that they really want to do so what about deeper learning and standards and in this country deeper learning and the common core standards that are coming through Larry let me ask you to lead off on that okay I'll go first I remember when the term was first used and being in a meeting with several people about it and there were a few of us who said instead of the word standards why don't we have the word expectations and the person who are the word standards says what's wrong with standards and we said well we're all wordsmithers here and if you add a few letters to standards you get standardization and standardization in some regards is the death knell of innovation in anywhere and in education as well so now we have a new set of standards that are fewer, higher, better and I'm very fond of some of the people who've created them personally but I'm not sure that that's really going to move the needle as much as a lot of people hope, pardon my cynicism about that, I think that there's a lot of ways that you can be accountable and the greatest risk for standards is that they devolve into content standards rather than process standards in my opinion So Mark, I wonder if you'd like to inject a more hopeful note fewer, higher, better what's your take? Sure I do think that linking the last two bits of the conversation together that the standards or expectations is another great way to think about it that is also linked to the notion of assessment so before we assess we need to know what we're assessing for and so this conversation on standards is really about what are the core things that we want to make sure that all of our students know or are able to do in the way in which they approach their work so if we think about in those terms let's set aside the vocabulary that might be daunting us on standards but we clearly need to know what matters to us what matters for our students and assessment needs to link to that so I think when we think about assessment for deeper learning the key part is the process that first we have to pause and stop and say what does it really mean for our students to be critical thinkers what would it look like if they can collaborate and communicate well and we need to do that assessment so we can check we actually do what we hope to do and then of course what would it mean for the assessment to be part of the learning I mean one of the things I would recommend to anyone who's engaged in teaching and learning is to ask students what is the best piece of feedback or assessment that you've ever had on your work and hear what it is hear what seems to be useful assessment we asked that question the other night at one of our graduate school courses here we had a panel of students in and asked that question and it's very interesting kind of students refer to moments things that were said in dialogue not about the test course and so on one student said we were working on a project together in groups I love to take leadership my teacher pulled me aside and said you know you're doing a lot of work in this group and you're leading wonderfully but there others aren't having quite the chance that they might need to step up if you would step back a little bit and see what would happen the student said that feedback changed the way I work in groups and changed my view of myself in groups I was never the same in group work that was what was meaningful assessment and meaningful feedback to her 21st century activities 21st century observation and response and she felt that her way of dealing with groups and dealing with the world had been changed so can I just add a couple thoughts on the standards and assessment point that people said so our studies of high schools teachers consistently tell us the things that hold them back are day tests and also college expectations sets of SAT2s and APs are a very complicated topic expectations set elsewhere as to what their students should be learning which generally push them to cover a lot of things superficially which is the kind of antithesis of deeper learning so there clearly needs to be some serious rethinking of that kind of a system if we want and then the other thing that my thought on the word standards is that it seems like in the best learning experience the field sets the standards so like if you're trying to make a robot or write a field guide or perform a piece of music like contained within music engineering writing those things have standards and so if you make those things with those standards then the teacher can become the coach and the teachers are helping the students it's not the student trying to please the teacher anymore it's the teacher working with the students to try to meet the standards that are essentially set by the field and since adolescents are sort of aspiring young adults they want to be adults in certain respects when they get welcomed into the world of adult standards when they can play a piece of music a robot write a field guide that somebody might buy in a San Diego bookstore write a book about deeper learning those are really powerful and then when you start giving feedback people become really interested in your feedback because they're working towards something that they care about very interesting job I mean one of the things that we one of our thoughts about standards here at High Tech High has been we want our students to be standard setters of internalization of standards and the setting of internal standards rather than simply the response to externally imposed standards and what we're seeing of course is that as the students work goes out into the world and they're working from their internal standards those they are also working towards the standards of the field as well I wonder if we could just do a very quick final word kind of thing if we just quickly go around one more thing that you'd quickly like to say that to wrap things up and you may pass if you wish as well here so I'll take a stab one thing that I think has been helpful for me because when we talk about deeper learning we talk about a lot of things and one way that I categorize all those things are on the spectrum from inputs to outputs with outputs you know one output being success in work in the 21st century and you know other things that are related to that like a deep understanding and the ability to apply knowledge and to innovate and create new things and leading to that so those would be kind of for me deeper learning outcomes then in order to get those outcomes you need deeper learning competencies which is what the Hewlett Foundation has identified as those six critical pieces of deeper learning and then in order to get that you need kind of deeper learning strategies a long list of strategies that different schools can use in different ways like project-based learnings, engage with experts teach academic mindsets design solutions to real problems etc and so that might be as we're talking about a lot of things in this MOOC about deeper learning that might be one framework to categorize all those things okay thanks Edward anybody else? yeah Larry I'd like to say a quick thing about it what I hope is that we get to this place that we all feel when we've had a deeper learning experience which is sort of the sense of everything falling into place like having solved the riddle and a sense where our imagination led to sort of an epiphany and to a sense of awe that's what I hope that we would wish for and that's what I hope we would all find for ourselves and for our students just two quick thoughts one despite the fact that they're at the moment at least in the US schools there's not that much deeper learning out there when there is it's really powerful when you ask people about powerful learning experiences in their lives they often don't just tell you about the learning they tell you about how it changed themselves so what we're striving for is really powerful and important and then the really concrete thing in my class students said the most helpful thing with respect to learning about deeper learning was seeing it seeing it and doing it but first seeing it and then doing it so there's nothing that we can say that would be as good as spending if you had spent this hour with Maya and her three classmates even if they weren't all working full on you probably would have gotten more about deeper learning than listening to all of us talking about it so I would strongly encourage folks find other teachers, find other schools find places to look and then just start trying things out and I just got a text from Maya's mother that she is one very proud mama watching this as well as she might be I want to jump in really quickly I do think that ultimately we know that there are some schools where this is happening and some students are getting it and a lot of students are not just as mentioned I do think that the notion of deeper learning in fact this is ultimately a social justice issue it's the equity themes that have permeated this conversation that we need to find ways for everyone to have this because otherwise they're going to be left behind when we think about what the challenges are moving forward in the world and we need everybody to be engaged in this Thank you more for grounding us back in reality and Maya any last comments here I feel so lucky to be able to to communicate with educators as a student so that I can hopefully eventually by my senior year have cut down on the amount of times that I feel naive and that I know what I'm talking about and I feel very very privileged to be able to grow up in this age where so many more people are passionate about how I learn and hopefully it will help me in the future so I look forward to getting to talk to everybody on the panel and hopefully hearing more from the people who are watching because I'd love to learn more about deeper learning and how I can help when I grow up Maya thank you and thank you for being with us I want to acknowledge Camille Farrington who has been with us but whose audio has had problems and so has not been able to contribute but has been there and present and has a lot to say about deeper learning mindsets and the implications for adults and so forth a lot of wisdom to offer so maybe we'll find a way to bring Camille into the game at a later time at this point with thanks to all panelists and apologies for our late tech start which has caused our overrunning a little bit because we wanted to give you your full time I would like to turn it over to is it Ben or to Ryan who's going to kind of wrap up here it's me thanks Rob just the two aspects of deeper learning that I want to highlight about things that are already happening happening within the deeper learning MOOC to me one part of deeper learning is doing something so it's not just reading something or just hearing information it's going out and actually using it in some way and another piece is about the idea that knowledge is socially constructed which is a fancy way of saying to other people in order to really learn deeply and so a couple things I want to highlight from the doing something that have been happening you can go to the next one Maureen Devlin is a fourth grade teacher who has created a whole week long curriculum of how she's going to work with her fourth graders on deeper learning love it also we have next Simon Fogg who is in the early running for most most engaged deeper learning MOOC participant who made a map and you can go to the next one and see the map which shows where all of the current participants are and please if you're participating with us please add yourself to this map you can find it back within the Google Plus community or on the website I'm sure and next up Kevin Hodgson created using Viologs which I believe is a Columbia University tool where you can watch the video that we had recommended but you can also add in as you're watching you can put in your thoughts about it so these are all great ways of people kind of doing something with knowledge and contributing for all of our learning and I also want to talk about some ways that we are constructing knowledge together or giving a chance to talk so you can forward two more please Ryan and so one is about we really want to encourage you to join a small group and you can see there's a few on the screen right now but we have groups for high school for elementary school for Australian educators a variety of librarians I saw so jump into a group or more than one we think that would be a great way to kind of break down the madness of a thousand plus people all contributing in the larger community and next up I wanted to highlight the Boston area and I think that's a great way to meet up Dan Wise who's at Tufts University has been trying to organize this group and so if you're interested in meeting with other people in your local area we want to encourage that kind of behavior because I think there's something about online and there's also something about face to face that we want to encourage next up we also know that there are schools where teachers and administrators are getting together to talk about the work of teaching videos from watching these panel discussions and so Cambridge and Latin was one place that we saw we know La Jolla country day there's a big picture school where people are doing this I think teachers at high tech middle Chula Vista as we speak are gathered in a conference room a little woo woo to them next up oh I just wanted to highlight this comment that Peter Janna wrote he was talking about how this really breaks video made him think about teacher passion and how what's the intersection and where is the overlap and where is their tension around that so I thought that was a very thoughtful post and last but not least if you're not a Twitter user I encourage you to go check out Twitter where we have the tweet of the weeks lots of people are posting their most significant learning experience three that I liked Australia Lopez Aguilar wrote about learning to learning a lot from teaching an eight-year-old about how to play the piano when she was an 11-year-old also it's in plan again talking about creating a poetry anthology in the 10th grade and then my favorite Chelsea weight talking about a 6th grade teacher drinking horse pee in class and I'll just leave your imagination to be tantalized by that possibility I would just say next week we'll be talking about looking at student work and we have a fantastic panel that's assembled thank you everybody we're sorry about the tech issues will be sure to work everything out for next week and thanks for the for esteemed panel and for Rob it was fantastic we'll see you all next week same time