 We're live. Okay, great. Welcome everyone. I'm Karen Fassinpower, part of the DL MOOC team. It is February 17, 2014, and we are happy to have you here with us. We are now in week five of DL MOOC, and it's hard for me to believe we are almost halfway through the course now. It's been really great to see that you all are really embracing the idea of flexibility in this course and working through it at your own pace. And looking at our various pages, whether it's blog comments or the G-plus community or Twitter, in the last couple of days, I've really seen people are in all different places working and thinking and putting into practice different topics, everything from looking at student work to internships to student voice and choice. And we are happy that you are doing this and encourage you to find conversations with people that are around the topics of interest to you. Since we are about halfway through the course, we want to get your feedback on how DL MOOC is going for you. And we would really appreciate it if you could take just a couple minutes to fill out a very short survey for us. And if you go to our main page, DL MOOC.net, the main DL MOOC website, you'll see a big link, and like I said, it won't take more than a couple minutes. So just a couple questions to get feedback from you before we get too much further in the course. This week, we are talking about deeper learning with a wide range of students. And we have a really great panel for you. Just a reminder, if you're watching this on the YouTube page and you're watching live, you can click to go to G-plus and you can enter questions for our panelists. And you can also tweet out your questions or thoughts with the hashtag DL MOOC and we'll be monitoring that. If you're watching the archive, please also share your comments and questions through social media, and we will be there checking that throughout this week and ongoing. And at this point, I'd like to turn it over to Ben Daly, who's going to be facilitating our panel this evening. Hi, everybody. My name is Ben Daly, and our regular Monday facilitator, Rob Reardon, is not available today. So I'm going to be trying to fill in his large shoes. I think he's on an airplane right now, and I told him he should just facilitate from the plane, but he didn't think his seamates would like that idea. So I'm going to do my best. As a reminder, the Hewlett Foundation has defined deeper learning as students having content mastery, being able to critically think, problem solve, collaboration, effective communication, self-directed learning, and possessing academic mindsets. And the topic for today is about deeper learning for a wide range of students. The first one to mention before we launch in is that I think for many people there is an assumption that for students who are strong, of course deeper learning is for them, but for other students, maybe not. And so that's kind of why, even though the topic is deeper learning for a wide range of students, we're probably going to be focusing more on students who are not as academically strong or traditionally academically strong in this conversation, would be my guess. So I just wanted to acknowledge that piece of it up front. So my name is Ben Daly. I am the Chief Academic Officer at High Tech High. And I'm going to let others introduce themselves, starting with Claire. Claire, are you ready? I'm going to get back to you, Thabiti. So, oh, go ahead, Claire. Hello. Hello. Go ahead, Claire. So, sorry, can you hear me? Yes, we can. So my name is Claire Sylvan, and I am the Founding Executive Director of International Network for Public Schools, which is a network of schools that serve recently arrived immigrant youth who've been in the country less than four years at the time of their admission to one of our schools at this point in the United States. And all of our students are relatively new learners of English and speakers of other languages. Great, and let's hear from Joe next. Hi, I'm Joe Loft. I'm Senior Director of Programs at International Network for Public Schools. I work with Claire. I'm a former teacher and a principal in one of our schools, and I'm looking forward to having this conversation about how, as Ben had said, deeper learning really. It's imperative that it's something that we see for all students, not just the lucky few, and I'm happy to have the opportunity to share some of the things we've been doing with English language learners. Great, and Rosemary. Hello, my name is Rosemary Milchewski, and I am a Mathematics teacher at Flosha International High School. I actually graduated from the International High School at La Guardia Community College, which is the first international that Claire mentioned, and I currently work at this school that Joe actually founded. Thank you for having me. Great, and Zabiti. My name's Zabiti Brown. I'm the principal at Cobb and Academy Chartered Public School. It's a small charter school in Boston, Mass. We are grown to be K-12. Part of the Expansion Learning Network of Schools, and we are deeply committed to the idea of experiential learning, but also have a large number of our students who come in to read for grade levels behind, and Joe also really committed to being able to see while doing it in a way that allows them to be hands-on. So excited to be here. Great, thank you, Zabiti, and Ron. Hi, Ben. I'm the team. I'm Ron Burger, Chief Academic Officer for Expeditionary Learning. I'm a big fan of the other panelists on this MOOC, and I'm lucky that I've got to work with the BT for many years. My perspective on this is partly from working with a network of 160 schools, but it's just as much from having spent 25 years as a project-based learning teacher myself. Great, so Claire, I have a question for you. You said just a little bit about the students who go to your school. Can you talk about how you think about deeper learning when you're thinking about your students? Certainly, and I thought I might want to just start by saying that we don't think of English language learners as students who are necessarily academically challenged. They may be what they may not be. In fact, as many people may recall, Einstein did some significant work in physics and did not do that in English. So being someone whose first language is not English, which is the case for our students, means that simply you think, read, write, and have grown up speaking a language that is not English. Some of our students come to us, and they are all high school students, and have never been to school before. They may come from a war-torn country. They may come from a country where they're a girl in a school where girls were not allowed to go to school. They may be students who come from a country where there's fairly limited schooling, and so they've been to school for nine years, but only for two hours a day, or they could be coming to us from fairly high levels of academic experience, but not know one word of English yet. So you have a range of students, and what we think about is what assets each one of those students brings, and how we can construct opportunities for them to work together on interesting projects where they use both English and their native languages to navigate complex concepts. You don't have to know how to read and write to think deeply. And so even if our students don't know how to read and write, we want to provide opportunities for them to engage in very complex thinking and complex projects, but also provide them with on-ramps that allows them to develop the literacy that they need in the world that they now part of. Great, and Rosemary, you're somebody who's in the classroom in an international school. Can you talk about what, if any of us came to visit your classroom or other classrooms in your schools, what they would see? Yeah, sure. So pretty much you're going to see a big mess. Kids are like talking English, they're talking their native language, their group, their group in heterogeneous groups. You know, the groups are actually something that is, it can be very complicated because you don't want to just do it randomly. You want to be able to support students both academically and also linguistically. So there is, you have to look at like how, what are the different levels of literacy and the language to be able to support each other. They are arguing, they're talking to each other. You know, and I'm just walking around trying to be kind of like a facilitator and trying to push myself outside of the, of like their group. Something that I feel like has helped our schools in terms of incorporating, having our students think deeper was the five principles or the core principles that the international believe in. And I feel like they're very highly aligned with all those components that the Hewlett Foundation believed composed deeper learning. And among those is, you know, have given the students an opportunity to, you know, learn and apply their learning outside the classroom to collaborate, to incorporate language and content and many other things. Go ahead. Yeah, and just to add one thing to what Claire had said introducing this before, I think the key thing about deeper learning for the students that we work with is not can they do it? It's just how can we create opportunities for them to do it? How can we structure the classroom that way? How can we not only instill a growth mindset in the students but how do we also give teachers the tools that they need and support them in a way that they think that students can be successful regardless of where they've come from and regardless of what their educational background has been? I think we'll talk more as we go on a little bit about the way that we group students but we very deliberately do not track students and we group students in a very heterogeneous fashion but I think we'll say a little bit more about that later. And so that question has already come in about the grouping strategies. Does anyone want to take on that question of strategies for grouping? We've heard a little bit already from Rosemary. I'll jump in just a little bit and I'm going to start by saying that for English language learners most people think about grouping them by their English proficiency which they generally determine by a test. We purposely do not do that. Our point of view on that is that the only way you would really ever have a homogenous group anyway is if you have a group of one. So given that all our classes are not one-on-one tutoring but are groups of students at various levels we think about their linguistic needs. Who knows how to read in English? Who knows how to write in English? Who knows how to speak in English? And what other languages do students speak? And given the academic content who may be more or less familiar with that content? And if you look at all of that in line with what the task is that's how we would decide grouping. And so the grouping would differ based on the task that you're asking kids to do. If you have a student who speaks absolutely no English and there's another student in the class who speaks that student's language we would definitely put those kids in the same group. But that isn't a given that we're always going to put kids who speak the same language in the same group. It's based on what their needs are in the project in the moment. Great. Sabiti you said that you have students coming in three or four grade levels behind or more and yet you're also very committed I think it sounds like to deeper learning. Can you just talk more about how you're thinking about that? Sure it's a conundrum. You know it's something that we're trying to solve a problem on a regular basis. I think at its root where we say everyone in and interested and excited about the work. And so the number one in we've got is to try to make our curriculum, our classrooms, our hallways, our community meetings as interesting, engaging, dynamic as possible. Can we create opportunities for students to learn when they're not even knowing that they're learning? And so there's that sort of excitement that we can build within kids. And then we say to them you know even though you're in a primary experience let's say it's your classroom and you are sitting next to a student that you're working with who may or may not be on grade level with you, you know math, science, think critical thinking. We're also going to give you experiences where you're going to be on your own by yourself working with a tutor or working with a teacher and office hours. The idea being that we can hit everyone in the classroom but then we also have to make space and time for the development of individuals in smaller settings. It's part of such a long school day 9 a.m. or 5 p.m. in classes half a day on Saturdays. And is that something to be that you're is that just funding out of your regular public dollars or is that something to use a fundraise for to make happen? Yeah, so you know we're chartering in the state of Massachusetts that means that we do have complete control over our budget and finances to a limit, right? So the state says per pupil here's what you get. Right now it's about 14,000 per child in Boston. And then we fundraise, we fundraise probably a third of what we spend for a year through grants and other facilities. And the idea is we want our students to just be in school for longer amounts of time. And I think that that goes a long way too in terms of the structure. So we just have to bring in more money to allow for more experiences for students both during the year and during the summertime. Great. Ron Berger, I'm wondering what you're thinking about right now. Well, I'm, I know the BT in a school really well. And I think one thing I'd like to elaborate about one of the things I respect about Codman and High Tech High and International as well is sort of breaking this illusion that one has to work on basic skills first before you get to the complex and interesting work. Which would mean that for some kids they're working on basic skills their entire career without ever getting to the interesting complex work. And it's kind of like saying the BT is advanced so he gets to work on soccer skills and play games all during the week. But Ben is not so good so he's going to practice skills for 12 years and never get to play a game. And you think why do you think those kids start losing their part for soccer when we've never let them play a game for 12 years because they're always doing remedial work. So this idea of it's not one or the other. You're doing basic skills work and you're giving kids complex tests at the same time, not at the same moment but over the same day, the same week. So everyone has sort of rich, complex, deeper learning opportunities as well as kids getting support for their skills when they need extra support. It's not a choice if you have to do one or the other. Does anybody want to jump in on that point? Yeah, I would like to add to that. So I feel like that's something that you might agree with when you first start teaching but I totally, totally disagree after, I've been teaching for five years but I feel like every year is a learning experience and every time you have different kids you've got to change your strategies and try to meet their needs. So I feel like the kids do not necessarily need to sit down and just work on basic skills all the time. You can definitely implement them throughout the projects and the group activities. Something that we in our school really value a lot is just trying to follow the depth of knowledge that chart and having students go from level one to other way to level four. So on level one, we want everyone to be able to show us that they can accomplish that through different activities but then progressively start to move them forward towards the highest level in challenging each of the students. I think of specifically like last year, let's say on this project that we were working on exponential functions where I mean the whole the whole driving question, essential question we have is like how can we improve our financial life using exponential functions? Now when I first asked the students a question about like how do you improve your financial life? They mentioned a lot of the things that they believed and that they have been listening to since they were little. Like you improve your financial life by having an education, taking advantage. So that having that question and asking the students that question kind of make them a little more interested on what we were going to be learning throughout the unit. So students had many opportunities to start with their basic skills. Like I might start with just asking students, giving them two scenarios what will happen if you take you know if I double if I give you a penny and I start doubling me every day and scenarios like that where they can describe the patterns in words, using words or using a table or using a graph. So having students go from level one to level four allow us to be able to really work with the students who still struggle with level one while the other ones are hitting already level four. And giving them opportunities throughout the unit, many opportunities throughout the unit to access those levels. So what do you think? So I want to jump in with a kind of a related question from the audience and this is from Joan Sobel. And she asks, when students are developing literacy in a new language are you always supporting that development in a PBL context or are there other contexts as well? I think you try everything you can. And I think if the culture of the school and the way that you believe students learn deeply is through project-based learning, then I think most of their day and most of their learning experience should be engaged in deep project work. But I also think that you have to find lots of other ways to support students as well. How to supplement that learning. I've had the pleasure of seeing Rosemary teach many times. And I know that she tries lots of different tricks in the course of a classroom because she knows her students really well. She knows how to pair students together or how to group students so that they can support each other and maximize their learning with each other. There's one teacher in the room but there are maybe 25 or 30 students and they're in a lot of time, they're their best resources. They have direct access to each other much more quickly in a much more responsive way than just one teacher in the room. But I also think having teachers collaborate and share groups of students is another critical piece because teachers in different subject areas at different points of the day see different angles on one student. And it's really critical that teachers have time to share those, those observations but also the strategies that they're trying, who they're pairing students with, just different techniques that they're using. The teacher collaboration piece of that I think is absolutely critical. Rosemary works on a team of teachers in her school with four other teachers. They share the exact same group of students. They travel from class to class all day long and they know those students very, very deeply and are able to support each other and create structures in the classroom so the students can support each other as well. And something else that I feel like as a team we have and I mean many of all the schools I guess in the international are trying to incorporate is you know the language in the content integration is one way in which we can actually really support those students into develop the literacy both like in their native language and in English. And so having like common language outcomes like language standards that we all incorporate within their classrooms can really support them in developing that the literacy. So some examples of the language outcomes that we might have within all the disciplines is like having students be able to compare and contrast or like use cause and effect. So we try to really focus on those skills per unit and support the kids so that they can see a reinforcement in all their different subject areas. Thanks Rosemary. I would like to go back to the question itself about doing it in a PBL, a project context or are there other contexts? The one context I think that is not particularly useful is trying to teach language by itself as isolated words. This is a pencil. Please repeat after me pencil and thinking that you're going to be developing that first and then you're going to get around to developing students ability to do projects. It's in the projects. If you think about how kids learn language mothers don't put babies generally sit in a row and say to them now please repeat after me mama. They might say mama is the kids moving around and doing things and they'll talk to the kid in the course of life. And that language is learned by using it to describe things that you're experiencing and you need language for a reason. And so if kids are engaged in a project they have a real reason to learn language. So trying to separate these two out as people do very often and say now I'm going to teach you language and once you've got that down some future date if you haven't dropped out of high school yet because you're bored silly then maybe we'll teach you something that's interesting to you. So I think that's really important. And we do mix just to be clear we mix grades nine and ten always in our school and that mix of grades can contain kids from 14 through 18 quite often because kids may come in who are over age but under credited. And so we have a very mixed age grouping within our structure. I just wanted to add one thing to what Joe said when he talked about grouping teachers to work with the same group of kids elementary school people do that normally they see the same kids all day. But high school people think of themselves as subject areas. I teach math I teach social studies and by grouping them across subjects what you allow them to do is talk about the kids that they teach. Great I think Karen want to jump in. Yeah I really appreciate your point Claire especially about language instruction. I taught in East Africa and my first experience in teaching in a government school was going through these very rote conversations of good morning teacher how are you we are fine and I very quickly realized that the kids had no idea what any of this meant. I thought we need to scrap this go to something else. I want to share a comment from the community from Celeste Kirsch who says perhaps working on basic skills in the context of PBL gives motivation and drive to want to improve these skills which I thought was a good comment. And then we also have a question from Mary Morgan Ryan relating to what Ron and others were saying about the about the mastery of basic skills and she's asking what does that mean for elementary grade levels you know particularly where often basic skills is more of the focus. Do you want to speak to that Ron? I'm sure sure I actually don't differentiate greatly between elementary school and secondary to be honest even though I was an elementary teacher for 28 years but I agree that it's a crazy thing to try to separate basic skills from engaging complex work project work or other complex work because it's the exciting work that gets kids wanting to work hard on their basic skills. The basic skills are in service of something where they can contribute. I would also want to say that it's important for us to think beyond English language learners there's a really wide range of kids for whom the classroom the traditional classroom and textbook kind of learning is not a situation in which they always thrive or show their deepest intelligences and that those same kids who may struggle due to learning style differences or learning challenges or behavioral challenges or focus issues are often kids who are really talented in the real world that they that in real life they thrive in many ways and so the more that we can make the academic work we do connect to real world things the more those kids have a place where they can shine so when you have groups in elementary school where kids do work that's actually connected to something where they're going out in the environment to take water samples where they're going out to the community to interview people where they're organizing something all of a sudden these kids that have skills that would not have been noticed before are the stars because there it real life kind of projects and connecting learning to real life opens that window for kids who have a whole range of skills that aren't being noticed in many classrooms Ron I have a follow up question for you you wrote a book about having kids do beautiful work and important work you taught in I think a sixth grade classroom for many or maybe all those years and could you just talk about like what did it actually look like in your classroom or in other classrooms that you go into where it's working well in terms of that you know pick the topic maybe it's around learning grammar rules or I mean I hear all of us saying both it doesn't need to be either or it doesn't need to be first basic skills and then deeper learning but I just love to hear more about from your perspective like what does it actually look like in a classroom when it's happening well well I would say it's not a whole lot different from what Claire and Joe and Rosemary were just describing in terms of I taught every grade between kindergarten and sixth at some point and at its best the classroom was a really active place where kids were working hard where there's beautiful work on the walls and then things would pause where kids would post their work and we would discuss and critique it so if you're looking at teaching basic rules of grammar you don't have to have kids sit for 45 minutes and listen to a teacher explain grammar you could have tasks that include grammar as part of them that kids are working on collaboratively or individually and then looking at that work together to critique and understand the rules and where they're working and where they're not working so that it's an active peer-driven sense of working toward quality not just to sitting passively and listening to someone tell you things great Sabedi what are you thinking about right now I'm thinking about my kindergarten right now this is our first year ever having kindergarten at Cogman I am a high school former high school teacher and high school principal for many years and we've been looking a lot of the great work that's been done around the country where folks have tried to figure out how do you get four or five six-year-olds to be very excited about digging into language development digging into reading and writing so right now in our one of our kindergarten classrooms we have a curriculum it's about nutrition and it is it kicked off with me going to the classroom and basically pretending like I was going to read a book to the students and in the middle of the book I break out my Coca-Cola and I break out my chips and I start eating this terrible junk food and the kids are looking at me they have a junk food free policy at Cogman and the kids are looking like what are you doing why are you eating that food and they're really upset and it becomes the kickoff so that down the line they're asking themselves this question like why was this person in our classroom doing this what can I do to convince him that he's eating terrible food right and so they're looking at Kale and they're looking at carrots and they've got them on the wall they've got the C and the K and they're talking about the different different letters making the same sound they're working towards cookbooks so they've created dishes in their classrooms and they're creating a cookbook all together so it's really deeply literacy with their work and literally in the hallways they're still stopping me and saying you really should stop eating those chips you know I keep saying to them I'm excited to see your cookbook so that I can eat more healthy thank you for stopping me once again to tell me how terrible I am at eating bad foods so it's that kind of thing where they are interested enough in the idea of helping me to be healthier that they're going to then do the harder work of the revisions on their writing and the revisions on the cookbook and learning more about the vegetables so that's the I think that's as strong as we can get when we're at our best terrific one thing that I'm wondering about is I feel like well so one question I have is what can a teacher do in their classroom tomorrow and I feel like sometimes some of the feedback that we hear is like yeah that's really great at high tech high or international school especially in learning you kind of have a whole school that's set up in a deeper learning direction so I wonder what advice people have for someone who's teaching in any kind of environment and ways that what can they do in terms of thinking about teaching a wide range of students and addressing deeper learning issues anybody want to take a stab at that I'm not going to take a stab at it one of the first things that just comes to mind for me it's a simple thing that I'm seeing in more and more schools as I go visit here in the Boston area just thinking about Carol Dweck and growth mindset and changing perception for students so they're not thinking about themselves as as an empty receptacles that are either broken so all the knowledge is getting poured into them and then poured out or simply unable to learn if they're thinking about themselves as as students who are exercising that muscle of their brain then it changes the dynamic I think pretty dramatically I totally agree go ahead I'm sorry go ahead Rosemary I totally agree and I feel like something that I really value and especially when it comes to having a wide range of students is it's just kind of building a classroom community that actually allows the students to you know express themselves and express their thinking so I feel like two things that we should definitely do is just make sure that our students feel that they feel that they're like their input their ideas are valuable and having them collaborate just collaborate and letting them express themselves and their ideas I think are two things that will allow them to I mean to meet their needs and it's to start and I would also throw out as a practical step for teachers to take I think every school has some teachers who are just phenomenal at reaching certain types of students and I think one of the most valuable things you can do is to seek those people out to talk to them find your collaborators see other people teach notice what they're doing ask them questions about it some schools have I think a lot of the schools that the people on the panel here there are structures that are in place to make that happen on a regular basis and then build it into the culture but even a school where that's not a structural component I think there's small ways that you can start doing that to kind of push on the culture of the larger school Thanks, Joe And Thabiti gave a great plug there for growth mindsets so I would be remiss if I didn't point out that if you want to learn more about growth mindsets stay tuned to next week of Deeper Learning MOOC where we will have that very topic coming up so thank you Thabiti I will add an extra stipend to your paycheck for joining us today for that plug thank you Ben can I add an elementary example for that of a starting place so an elementary teacher who was teaching Spanish to fourth and fifth graders found herself in a situation where she had an incredibly wide range of learners many kids whose first language at home was Spanish and other kids who had just started to learn Spanish they knew almost nothing and they were all together so how do you meet the needs of all those learners and what she did was create a project where they could contribute and she partnered with a school in Guatemala where most of the students didn't know Spanish even though they were in a Spanish-speaking country because they spoke Indian languages that were native to where they were and so they needed books in Spanish so the fourth and fifth graders created children's books in Spanish to send to Guatemala and because the kids were at all different levels of their Spanish the complexities of the books they created were on a wide range from sort of easy books for first graders to pretty complex chapter books for the kids who were more fluent they each contributed something of value and they worked really hard on their Spanish vocabulary and grammar in order to create the books but they didn't all have to enter at the same level but they all created something of beauty and quality so I think that's where I would start is can you get kids to create something where they feel proud that they can contribute something of value and that they want to study hard in order to make that contribution great thank you Ron so Rosemary you're in this kind of interesting place where you went to the international school now you're back as a teacher it would be great to hear some of your experiences with them actually what Ron just said reminded me of my very first day of school in the United States when I came from Colombia I walked into my history teacher and they were having presentations so immediately they told me okay you're going to be in this group but they were having presentations on that day and I had no idea what they were talking about I couldn't understand a single word of what they were saying but I remember this group but you know they told me okay you're going to be with us and then they wrote in a little paper what I was going to say but again I had no idea what that was and all I did was just greet it and they applauded me the whole classroom was so happy and applauded me and that moment made me feel so comfortable and I was like oh my gosh schools here are so cool so since that moment I was like okay I think I can do this now obviously like the few months after you know I was crying just like anybody else like I can't do this I need to go back so just the language just struggling with the language is something that it doesn't matter where I was it was going to happen but I knew that I was actually in the right place just because I knew other people who had the same kind of struggles but didn't learn English as fast and I think being in a very diverse school where I had to actually communicate with my classmates in English really really really helped and being able to collaborate with them and I'm curious for you had now going back and teaching at is it the same school that you were that you went to no it's not it's nice the one that actually Joe founded but I did my student teaching there and I knew that first of all like when I graduated from high school I was just so thankful to everyone there and I really built very good relationships with my guidance counselors and the teachers and they provided me with so much support so much support that I actually told them all the time if it wasn't because of you I wouldn't be here I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing right now so I was very thankful and I like math so I'll say you know what let me just be a math teacher and I knew I wanted to still be winning the internationals because I visited some other class so the schools that were not international and I was a little bored there I was like I can't help them so I'm very thankful to be working at where I am right now and my job I feel like I like when I first day of school the first thing I told my students is look I came here just like you I had the same struggles so telling them my story I feel like it gives them some hope it gives them some hope like oh my god maybe I can't do this like I came probably graduate from high school go to college and get a degree in less than 10 years so all I have to do is you know just work the car and I guess I mean aside from other things right you need a lot of other support but having telling them my story like it gives them it can relate to me and I can relate to them as well that's great yeah so in this country we have a new set of standards coming the common core standards and of course other countries there's also other kinds of sort of standards like that and I'm wondering for people on this panel how you think that maybe start with the common core standards how you think that that is or is not going to support deeper learning happening for kids I didn't want to start off on that question I actually think it does support I something that I really like about the common core is just the mathematical practices if we by us trying to incorporate the mathematical practices we're technically allowing them to you know to master the content and at the same time you know like see how it relates to real life situations so I really appreciate the mathematical practice of the common core standards others so one of the things I appreciate is this idea of close reading and looking at literacy standards across different disciplines when we first started looking at the at the common core I think at Codman a few years back we were thinking this is going to be really difficult to change some of these fundamental practices we have we have this idea of changing texts for students who are many great levels below where they started or students who are really struggling with the content and common core saying you know we want to take the same text really complex text and ask students to take more time to dig in with that individual text and I think in fact on the ground what that looks like is spending significant time thinking about how to make something that's difficult accessible by many different students and for us that's a that challenge has meant that the rigor of our of the text we're sharing with students has really gone up so I appreciate that in terms of a push I think that one of the things that I have some difficulty with I think the common core so pushing down into elementary schools and into our younger students is asking kindergarteners to do things that we were asking second graders to do a couple years back and on some levels that's not allowing for development in the same way that we had in the past for social emotional development for students so just get excited about school and so I think on the one hand it's the rigor is increasing and I think on the other hand there's a there's a drum beat that's much earlier in our society that it's not necessarily one that we want to we want to roll with we want kids to also experience what it needs to be a good friend and how do you do that while you're also trying to get them to read by the end of kindergarten it's difficult yeah I think the thing that we're excited about is the emphasis on language one of our core principles is around language and content integration and Rosemary is as skilled as any ESL training teacher that I know of integrating language development both in English and in native language into her teaching and that's a common characteristic of all the subject area teachers in our schools I think the thing that makes me a little nervous the thing that I worry more about is simply dropping those standards down from on high isn't really providing the support that teachers are going to need to be able to actually do that in the classroom and I think it's more than just it's more than just a curriculum change and it's more just than just the knowledge of the standards that's necessary or asking for a culture shift we keep talking about mindsets at various points and again it's important that the students feel that they can be successful but I do also think it requires a big shift on some teachers parts too to see the kids that we serve in our schools as fully capable and and full of lots of potential but at the same time we need to we need to give people the tools that they need to actually make that happen and give students a fair shot and especially for you know the late arriving immigrants that we work with who come at high school age the clock's ticking right they want you to finish high school quickly in four years which for some students is just not going to happen and we often have students who take a little bit of extra time so that they're graduate they meet all their requirements and they're actually college ready so the other concern that I would have is when do you expect those students to meet those standards and how quickly not if they can but just when can they do and Ron Burger do you have something to say about this sure Ben thanks I'm actually expeditionary learning is very excited about the opportunity of the standards I think the standards prioritize higher order thinking in a way that very few state standards do so it's a moment that we can take advantage of to push deeper learning I don't think all the standards are that way and I think it's how they're applied that matters so Rosemary talked about the standards for mathematical practice which are terrific and if those stay close to people's hearts and mathematical instruction it's going to make things much deeper and so I also think that there's great literacy stuff happening for young kids but as the BT pointed out we can't necessarily assume that it's only going to be a force for good because if people push away creative language and play at younger levels thinking that the standards demand that then we're in trouble one of the great opportunities for us in EL is we've been creating open source curriculum for Common Core literacy and there's no textbooks connected to it so we're able to sort of pull in high quality fiction and non-fiction literature and primary source documents put it out for free and it's actually being used by people in a way that sort of has an alternative to a textbook approach to learning so I think Common Core is is a moment in education that we can all take advantage of to say there's higher order thinking being called for and deeper learning is the way to get there so something that I'm thinking about right now which connects to an audience question is I was standing next to Bob Lenz who's the CEO of Envision Schools a few years ago and somebody said to him well our kids can't do project-based learning because our kids need more structure and and Bob said well you think that project-based learning isn't structured but actually it is structured it's just structured differently and I was so fascinated when he made that remark because it made me realize that for us at High Tech High when when we're at our best we really are very structured but it's a different it is definitely a different kind of structure and sometimes I think we are not structured enough and actually we would serve kids more kids better if we did have a little more structure to our work and so a question that came from the audience from Monica was about structures and systems that allow for deeper learning and her question is how do you create this culture as a leader? So any general comments about structures for deeper learning and then in particular how you create a culture around structures and systems that support deeper learning? Joe do you have something to say about that one? Oh sorry Claire go ahead I'm sorry I was going to just say that for us one of the main ways we do that is to allow the structures that we establish for adults and the structures we establish for students to mirror each other and both of those structures are ones that create opportunities for collaboration of people who are different from each other they may teach different disciplines they may have different skills and to allow them to look at a problem very deeply over time for adults in our school the project is helping students grow and working with the same group of students with students it's working on a project in a group and they may have different roles that they play and so we may create that and we create opportunities for the adults to grow and become leaders so that Rosemary who I met as a student when she was about 14 or 15 and Joe who I met when he was a first-year teacher at international not a first-year teacher at in general he'd been teaching I don't know that eight years were given structures to work in that allowed them to develop and become leaders themselves so that opportunity to work in a collaborative group and to grow as a leader allows you to grow deeply and look deeply and the collaboration allows you to learn from your peers both your fellow students and or your fellow teachers thanks Claire so Thabita you're leading a school right now and Claire's given one example of kind of a way that they think about doing this and sort of having structures for adults and structures for students that mirror each other as part of what I heard Claire say what thoughts do you have about how you can set up systems and structures to support deeper learning I love Claire's example I feel like so much of what we do as school leaders is create opportunities for our teachers to be great and you know I have a great team over at Cobham and they do amazing work I'm under no illusions that the work is not done every day by the folks on the ground really working with students in the trenches and so I have to respect those folks and make sure that I'm giving them the time and the time to be able to work together at the grade level at the discipline level to design meaningful curriculum together and then figure out how to engage with their students I also have an opportunity though as a school leader to organize a school day in a way that makes sense and so I'm getting feedback from students and feedback from teachers we have significant time for students to be working on their core academic classes in the math, science, humanities, language courses but then we also carve out time for students to work on their own during the school day and we carve out time for students to have office hours with teachers during the school day and we say we are not only interested in you getting the big picture idea of a project you're working on but we're also really interested in you understanding the minutia and the small detail so we're going to create space in the day to make sure that you can speak to your classmates and then also speak to your teachers to be able to engage in that work I can also organize the week in a way that helps students engage in deeper learning by creating a fieldwork experiences for kids so every Friday at Codman we have our fieldwork day where the math, science team will be on and we'll have the opportunity to take students out to the museums to collect water samples as Ron spoke about our humanities team will go down to the Huntington Theater where they have internships there and can meet with actors and directors and talk about the plays that are being performed and relate that back to their essays that they're doing in their classrooms and that's a schedule that we've created where students must be off campus must be engaged in a lab must be collecting data on those Fridays and then again on Saturdays for two thirds of the year they're having tutoring with an individual tutor who's helping them to go a little deeper in some of the the basic skills that they may have missed prior to coming to Codman so I have a lot of authority to be able to make those changes a lot of it coming from thoughtful educators on the ground and students were saying this is what we need so those all help that's great Thabiti one thing that I'm just connecting to what you said is I hadn't really thought about how internships which we talked about a couple weeks ago in particular with some folks from Big Picture are actually a really great example of a way to have all different kinds of kids kind of connect to deeper learning so I'm glad that you kind of made that connection Ron Berger I think you had some us name to say oh Ben I was just going to say I think it's a misconception as you were saying to say that deeper learning or project-based learning is unstructured and I guess I wanted to make the distinction between tight and loose people assume that a project-based learning classroom or a deeper learning classroom is going to be loose and a traditional classroom is going to be tight and I would say it's really just a question of what you're going to be tight and loose about so in many traditional classrooms they're very tight about pacing you have to be on the right point at the right time and they're very tight about kids being quiet that neither of those things necessarily means that there's good learning going on to me I would rather have to be tight about different things I'd rather be tight about kids being focused and kids being courteous and if you go into a classroom where kids are courteous and respectful of each other and they're really focused it may be quiet it may be pretty busy but there's really good learning going on and if you have very tight standards for those a lot's going on so I think it's not a question of tight or loose it's what are you going to be tight about and what are you going to be loose about and I would argue that when you're tight about pacing that you have to be at the right page at the right day or you're tight about kids always being silent that you're actually hurting learning by that tightness great Rosemary I'm wondering if there's anything on your mind about all these topics that are swirling around well I was just thinking about like the structures that you can have that you can put in place even like even as a teacher I can also help the students in terms of like creating some structures I'm thinking right now of some of the things that we worked on as a school and it's creating like different tutoring groups so last year we had in the spring a math tutoring math peer tutoring and this year in the fall we started one on literacy so we have different kids who we actually select this strategically based on their needs so currently we have some of the 11 and 12 great kids working as reading tutors for some of our side kids the students we interrupted for more education and that has been working very well for us and in terms of the math peer tutoring is the 10th graders who had already maybe passed the brilliant exam or who or even if they're not like super strong in terms of math but they can help someone else we have them working with some of the new nine graders as well great thank you Rosemary so we do want to try to squeeze in one more audience question from John Sebel about if we if we want to have teachers collaborating I wonder how much how much time does there need to be for teacher collaboration certainly like of course you could never have enough and so that's part of the answer and and any would be good but do people do people have a thought or maybe one way to say is how much collaboration time do people have built into their different schools in terms of scheduling or formal time for that so in my school we have every Wednesday from like 2.40 until like 4.30 we have our team meetings which is when we discuss like instructional work we on and how we can support the different students that's when we start planning on like what are some of the language functions and outcomes that we can implement and then like logistical stuff like field trips and so on every Thursday we have a guidance meeting which is our team in one of the guidance counselors when we discuss certain students and how we need to support them in terms of like their social social emotional needs we also have in Friday's no Wednesday mornings we have team leaders meeting which is when we discuss like school-wide is like when we discuss like admin staff and then bring it back to our teams and then we have like a whole bunch of committees that can help make decisions for our schools so we have like personal committee PD committee so there is a lot of different groups in the school and a lot of different times in which we can discuss how we need to move our school forward in our students great I'm sure others might answer that question but we're running out of time so I'm just gonna move us along but I think Resmer you really kind of it's actually what I would say like do we need a lot of time to meet and like really more meetings but like yeah actually we really need a lot of time to meet each other in lots of different configurations over lots of different issues so we're gonna kind of have one more go round just sort of the final word anything on your mind and of course you can pass if you want as well so Joe final word final thought for on this topic yeah I I guess there's a parallel to me between language learning involves taking risks and I think great teaching involves taking risks too and I think being an instructional leader means setting up opportunities for teachers to collaborate but also giving them the freedom to try new things and to take take risks because you're modeling that for students and without that I don't think you can have a thriving school culture terrific Claire any final words for us nope pass okay great and Ron burger well this is not new for me but I would just say again that if I'm trying to think about meeting the needs of all learners the question I would be asking is does every student in the class have an avenue to contribute something that's high quality and that they're proud of and if not then something's wrong in the structure of how how teaching and learning is happening in that class every kid should be able to contribute something great terrific Sabedi any final words yeah it's uh this is very difficult work and I think we're not we're still stuck I think in the United States in the factory model of education largely and we're trying to figure out how to break out of that and so what I appreciate the most are that many folks in this country are really working hard to try to to try to tackle that that conundrum and the thing that I'm most excited about where I am and being part of the experts in the learning network is that the idea is that we're trying to we're getting every student we need to get to every single student and so if that's a configuration that you're doing in your classroom outside hours weekends summertime whatever it is just to make sure that it works there's a lot of applause for folks who are trying to break down those walls and get to every single student terrific Rosemary you're going to get the final word for our panels today I just want to say that for all the teachers of very wide range of students please don't give up on them you might have you might feel certain times that is like you can't do it or they can't do it but they they can do it so please just don't give up on them okay thank you thank you everybody and we're going to turn this now over to Karen or Ryan for some final DL MOOC comments but really thanks everyone for carving out time to be here with us today I really appreciate it thank you all so much this was a really great discussion and I want I think the comment that this is really hard work is is a great thought to leave with and I just want to thank all of you on the panel and all of you in our audience for all the hard work you're doing to really meet the needs of of all of our students so as always we had we had more questions and comments from the audience than we could get to but I encourage you all to move these conversations to the G plus community or continue them on Twitter we have several opportunities this week for you all to share your experiences on this topic our tweet of the week is to share your biggest challenge or success with making deeper learning work with a wide range of students so please post your responses to that with the hashtags DL MOOC and DL differentiate we also have two optional put it into practice activities one focuses on the ideas of discourse and perspective in English language arts and social studies and the others looks the other looks at perception and perspective in the math context and we would love to hear it if you try out either of these activities or if you come up with your own please share those with us and one of the things I love about this MOOC is the way that all the topics for our different weeks keep intertwining and looping back and today we heard reference to academic mindsets and I know a lot of people have had interest in that and I just want to remind everybody that that is next week's topic and if you are looking for an opportunity to restart your work on the MOOC and sort of put behind what you haven't done and pick up somewhere next week would be a great opportunity to do that and again thank you everyone and we're loving the conversations and we'll see you soon bye bye bye take care