 If you look at the American education system of data, looks like what it looked like in 1900. We were an agrarian society transforming into an industrial society. And what we needed at that time were lots of workers with basic skills and basic knowledge. The problem is we haven't adjusted or changed or upgraded that system as society has dramatically transformed it. Do you know how to collaborate? Do you know how to communicate? Do you know how to present? Do you know how to look at things in a critical way where you can take the real complex and make it simple? Those are real needed skills. And that's really where the demand is going to be in the future for jobs. If we don't have the skilled workers, corporations are going to go where they have to go to get that skilled work. My role as a superintendent is to find inspirational curriculum, meaningful assessments, and almost by necessity to become more visionary about trying to predict what the future will look like to better understand how we need to work with our students. So we probably should sit for a second, agree on what we're looking for and what we're trying to do. Virginia Beach Schools has approximately 70,000 students. We're a great and high-performing school system. But we were getting information back, even with our top graduates that said, you know, I wasn't as well-prepared as I thought I was. That told me we may be successful right now on standardized measures, but we may not be successful on the right things. Class class? For me as a leader in Virginia Beach, the essence of deeper learning is changing the manner in which we work with young people. When we go into the classroom for their short visits, we're looking for evidence that deeper learning is occurring at the time. We need our kids to be able to identify and solve problems, to think creatively, to communicate effectively in writing and in speech, to own their own work. What's changing is such a drastic move away from the proverbial sage-on-the-stage teacher who holds forth in front of a class in rows to a much more collaborative collegial classroom where the teacher is a guide and a facilitator of the student learning. I define deeper learning as the intersection between skills and understandings. Deeper learning capitalizes on what you know, the basic skills of language, of mathematics, of science, of history, to use it in an authentic way. Use it in the way that you or I, or any adult out in the working world would have to use those skills. When I came over and said, how's it going? Before they answered me, they asked each other. And that was just like, for me. I try to use more projects, more collaboration, much more of a discussion-based classroom setting. Deeper learning naturally pushes the students to learn and master communication and collaboration, problem-solving and critical thinking. I know your oil's in demand, but we are in round nine. At this point, it's best if you just give away all of your oil. It's the students who keep each other accountable. And so there might be 30 teachers in the classroom instead of just one teacher. Before coming to Impact, I wasn't really sure whether or not I had the right skills and grades to be able to go to college. Impact gave me the inspiration that I was. We focused on a couple of really important leadership skills, like collaborate productively, critical thinking, communicate powerfully, and complete projects effectively. So along with making sure that students are keeping up with the content, they're also getting these life skills that don't need to be successful in college and in the workplace. An assignment that I had for my AP government class was the paper on federalism. This paper focused on the Constitution and analyzing the Constitution to determine whether the state or the federal government should be in charge of a specific issue. All the students were given the choice to pick any issue. And I picked immigration. The states recently have been passing laws and the federal government has been deeming them unconstitutional. My family immigrated here, so it kind of pertained to me as well. And it really evoked something in me to research and see what the actual solution to that issue would be. After researching all the current affairs about immigration, I moved on to the next step of analyzing the Constitution for any mention of immigration or any law that might affect immigration. While analyzing the Constitution, the key law that I focused on was the one that said that Congress shall have the power to take any step necessary to protect the citizens. The reason I focused on this one is because immigration is not specifically mentioned in the Constitution, so you have to analyze more generalized law and apply it. So since Congress has the right to protect its citizens, I came to the conclusion that the federal government should be in charge, because not only is the Congress responsible for national security, the rights should be consistent throughout every state because we do as a nation believe in equality. I think deeper learning is when a student learns something beyond the content that we're supposed to, when they're able to apply their experiences or apply the knowledge that they receive from other classes into what they're doing. Learning something through deeper learning really means internalizing the information.