 Good afternoon or good morning, depending on where you are. I want to welcome you to this one-hour webinar jointly hosted by the Learning Policy Institute and the Center for the Transformation of Schools at the UCLA Graduate School of Education. We'd like to let the audience know that this webinar is open to the public and is being recorded. A video recording will be emailed to you in a few days and available at the link that was just shared in the chat box. We'd also like to announce that we'll be holding our next webinar, How Performance Assessments Support Deeper Learning and Equity, on March 20th at 1 p.m. Pacific Time. You can register and find more information about that webinar by visiting the Learning Policy Institute's website or using the links that are pasted in the chat box. Today we'll begin with a discussion on deeper learning and then we'll hear from our page on Aguera, who is the Distinguished Professor of Education at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and the Faculty Director for the Center for the Transformation of Schools at UCLA about the research he has done on how we should think about scaling opportunities for deeper learning. We'll then have a discussion with Kent McGuire, who is the Program Director of Education at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Carlos Moreno, who is the Co-Executive Director of Big Picture Learning. And finally, we'll have a few minutes to respond to questions from the audience. We encourage you to submit your questions throughout the presentation in the chat box and we will come around and answer those towards the end. And just to kind of kick off the conversation, we want to just frame the question of what do we mean by equity and deeper learning. We think about deeper learning as both a flexible understanding of content so it can actually be applied, critical and creative thinking, communication and collaboration skills right now, especially the ongoing ability to learn to learn. And of course, those habits and mindsets, like a growth mindset that support resilience, perseverance and the ability to continue to improve. Throughout the economy, the demand for skills is changing. There's a much greater demand for complex communication and higher order thinking skills, much lower demand for routine skills of any kind. And we've seen a big change in the way industry and business are looking for the outcomes of schooling. In 1970, the top three skills were reading, writing and arithmetic, essentially. And by the turn of the century, the top skills that were being sought were teamwork, problem solving, interpersonal skills and oral communications. So you can see how the nature of the economy and expectations of the workforce are really changing. The other thing that has really evolved is a dramatic and exponential increase in the amount of knowledge in the world. And I often note that as a Stanford professor, I don't like to quote people from Cal Berkeley, which is across the bay and our big rival. But there are professors there who are doing very fascinating research on the growth of knowledge in the world. And they found that between 1999 and 2003, there was more new knowledge created in the world than in the entire history of the world preceding. Things like technology knowledge are doubling every 11 months at this point. So it's impossible just to take a set of facts and divide them up between the 12 years of schooling and ask kids to memorize those facts and spit them back on a test and expect them to be prepared for a world in which they will be working with knowledge that hasn't been discovered yet using technologies that haven't been invented yet solving big problems that we have not managed to solve. So the nature of learning has to prepare young people for that kind of a world. And one representation of that is the hiring process at Google, right up the street from us in Silicon Valley here, where they used to use transcripts and grades and test scores to decide on hiring practices. They collected reams and reams of those data. And then they did a lot of studies to figure out how the different indicators for hiring related to performance on the job. And they found out that the traditional measures, grades and test scores, had no relationship to how people did on the job. Instead, what really made a difference was whether candidates and employees had what they now call learning ability. The ability to run into a big complex problem. Figure out how to go out and get resources and information to apply to a solution. Work with others to develop a strategy, test it out and see if it works and revise it and improve it on their own. And essentially learn at all times how to get from the problem statement to a solution. That's really what deeper learning is in its most fundamental representation. And we see a recognition of this all around the globe. This quote is from the Singapore Education Minister of a few years ago. Who was part of the overhaul of curriculum and assessment there to focus much more on critical thinking and problems, solving skills. And he noted that the goal is less dependence on remote learning, repetitive tests, and a one size fits all type of instruction. More on engaged learning, discovery through experiences, differentiated teaching, the learning of lifelong skills, the building of character through innovative and effective teaching approaches and strategies. And I think that's what educators here and elsewhere around the world are trying to do as they create schools that develop deeper learning. We know from quite a lot of research that schools that are successful in this mission typically engage in project-based instruction where they're integrating real world problems into the curriculum that are both motivating for students and require that kind of complex interdisciplinary thinking. They use authentic performance-based assessments where kids are actually demonstrating how they can apply their learning and knowledge to solving real world problems. They create a culture in which students are responsible and have a lot of agency for their learning and revise their work constantly to meet standards to develop a growth mindset. They personalize instruction and they attend to the social-emotional components of that learning. I'm trying to change, there we go. But in the United States, deeper learning is that inequitably distributed. Joel Mater wrote a blog a couple of years ago in which he pointed out that deeper learning had a race problem. That is to say, it's much easier to find this kind of instruction in advanced courses, in wealthy suburbs where kids have lots of opportunities for inquiry and investigation and learning, particularly in the no-child-luck-behind era. Many schools serving concentrations of students in poverty, often students of color, were really into a test prep modality for multiple choice tests, rather than teaching kids the skills that they will need for the future. There are many challenges in getting equity and deeper learning to conjoin. Those, of course, include the growing poverty that young people and their families experience in the United States, segregation, which often is associated with different curriculum opportunities, as well as different school settings, tracking that goes along with that, the kinds of tests that we use, and the way in which we help educators learn to acquire these new pedagogies. But this is a really important challenge for us, and I'm going to close this part of the presentation with this quote from the Excellence in Equity Commission a few years ago, which pointed out the huge costs of inequality for us in this country. And the report noted that if Hispanic and African-American student performance grew to be comparable to white performance that remained there over the next 80 years, the impact would add some $50 trillion in present value terms to our economy, just about enough to deal with the new debt that we've acquired, more than three times the size of our current PDP. This represents the income that we forego by not ensuring equity for all of our students. So we're delighted to have Pedro Niguera, who's been working on this problem for many, many years throughout his career, both in Cambridge and in New York, before we were lucky enough to get him here in California. He's been involved as a classroom teacher and a board member, but also as a thinker and a researcher, a writer, a philosopher, and among his more than 200 research articles, many of them deal with these questions of equity and deeper learning. He's recently published a report for a learning policy institute called Taking Deeper Learning to Scale. So I'm turning over the webinar now to Pedro to present his finding. Thank you, Linda. And it's great to be with you today and to join in this conversation on this important issue. And Linda's done, I think, a great job already setting up what deeper learning is and why it's important. Now, I'll come back to that in a moment. The paper she referenced that I did for the Learning Policy Institute really asked, why is it that so many districts in school struggle with this issue, even affluent districts, particularly in serving low-income kids of color? And one of the things we show is that in such districts, this is driving the disparities in achievement in many ways because kids simply aren't in classrooms with it being challenged, nor exposed to the kind of curriculum that would prepare them for college and for work. So I want to use my time to reinforce some of those points and talk about what it would take to begin to get equity to a scale. And so let me start by, again, reminding you of the challenge. And Linda's done that already. But I would say that in many districts, this need to pursue both academic and excellence is a challenge because we see these as being at odds with each other. And we see these as conflicting goals. And given that we have growing inequality in our society, very often the equity impulse is what gets compromised or sacrificed altogether. We've had a lot of difficulty addressing the needs of under-performing schools throughout the country. And one of the things we haven't addressed is what's actually happening in the classrooms. And I would say unless we address that, we're not going to see much progress at all. We have policies that really get districts moving towards and schools towards compliance with policy. But we haven't approached the need for capacity building in schools. Simply put, unless we make sure that the skills of teachers match the needs of kids, we're not going to see much change in the achievement gap or much improvement in schools that have historically been under-performing. Finally, the public is increasingly frustrated. I think particularly this is the case in many long communities of color where school failure is the norm and where the need to use education to break the cycle of poverty is so great. So those are the challenges we face. As a reminder, equity is about addressing the needs of all kids. And the reason why this is complex is because as we know, the academic needs of the students are impacted and completely related to their psychological, their emotional, and their social needs. We know that recognizing for the differences kids bring with respect to how they learn and what they bring with respect to needs is a key part of the equity work. In many schools, we have to mitigate the effects of poverty, mitigate the effects of trauma. And all too often, this work is made all the more difficult because schools lack the resources to do it. And then finally, equities always have to be focused on outcomes. But here, I think it's important to recognize that the academic outcomes and the developmental outcomes for students have to be seen as being together and related. And too often, we have schools focusing on achievement as measured by test scores but overlooking other basic needs that kids have. And this is one of the reasons why we've seen so little progress. So as Linda pointed out already, access to high standards is an equity issue because too often we've used assessments to rationalize sorting kids. We've dumbed down the curriculum for kids we think are not college material. And we've confused academic performance with intellectual ability. There's an assumption that kids who have low skills are not capable of higher order thinking skills. And then finally, the most important, we haven't given teachers good guidance on how to do teaching in head of students' classes with kids who are learning English, with kids who have other needs. And so hence, we see scripted curriculum in these schools and we see kids not being challenged, not being stimulated, not being inspired. So what we've been calling for, what I call for in this paper, is a need to focus on access to deeper learning. And that's the opportunity to utilize those higher order thinking skills, analysis, evaluation, application, creativity, to undertake and learn through complex tasks and challenging texts, to acquire the skills needed for college and for careers. This includes the ability to do independent research, to engage in critical analytical thinking, and to produce high quality work that shows evidence of mastery. Now, anybody familiar with Bloom's Taxonomy will know this is not a new idea. These ideas have been around in education for a long time, but what we haven't been very good at in education is making sure that access to these kinds of learning and opportunities are available to all kids. I often remind people that the most common question that you hear from any three-year-old is why. And that why is a higher order question. Kids want to know why they have to take a bath, why they have to eat broccoli, why the sky is blue. Anyone who engages in a conversation with three-year-old knows that these are complex questions and that our children are ready because they're naturally curious. That curiosity doesn't go away as they get older, but it has to be nurtured. And so the alternative to nurturing that kind of thinking is what we would call the trajectory of marginalization. When we see kids who start out disengaging subjects, they don't like reading, they don't like math. And before long, they don't like school. And if that is not addressed, they become structurally disenfranchised. Meaning we have large numbers of people in our society who are not well educated, who are not in the labor market or stuck in low-wage jobs or in our society stuck in our prisons because almost always we are more likely to incarcerate those we fail to educate. And so the consequences of not doing this work, I think are quite clear. The question is how do we make sure that access to effective teaching and access to deeper learning opportunities are available in more schools? So I'll use the rest of my time to talk about how to do that work. And a lot of it starts again in the classroom with teachers focused on evidence of learning, making expectations clear, modeling and exposing kids to high-quality work, utilizing diagnostic tools to check for understanding, learning about students' interests in order to make their lessons relevant to their lives, expecting students to advise and resubmit their work. This is how kids learn grit, and this is how kids also learn that we're not gonna expect anything but their best effort. It is soliciting their feedback and bringing teachers together on a regular basis to analyze student work. So we are clear that teaching and learning are connected. Now, I'll give you a few examples of schools that are doing it, but I would say that all of them are places that are focused on engagement. Engagement is a pathway to achievement, but engagement is multi-dimensional. It is behavioral, that's the part we can see. Are students in class? Are they prepared? Are they working hard? But it is also cognitive. Do they understand what's expected of them? Are they able to process the information? And then finally, it is also emotional and effective. Do they care? Are they applying themselves? Are they spending effort? When engagement comes together, what we see is that better results are produced from kids and from schools generally. So here's one example in this picture of a middle school in East LA, Holland Beck Middle School, to me illustrates what a classroom looks like when kids are engaged in deeper learning. As you can see, this is an eighth grade algebra class, 90 minutes long. Algebra, as we know, is the gateway to college. And although these kids come from a fourth community, although many of them are English learners, they're up out of their seats doing math. This is developmentally appropriate math because as we know, middle schools need to move. They also need to talk. And as you can see, they're talking about the math. When I talked to that teacher, who is now the facilitator, she explained that when kids learn in this way, she can differentiate support. And in many schools, that kind of instructional guidance is not being provided to kids. I saw the same thing in Oakland where I see students engage in debate. Debate is a great way to promote critical thinking. Clear communication, both oral and written, good research skills, because you debate, you have to know what you're talking about. You have to collaborate with your team and you have to be creative in how you rebut argument. If more of our citizens knew how to engage in debate, we might be in a very different place with respect to our democracy. And then finally, here's a school in Massachusetts, the largest school in the state, Brockton High School, one of two urban high schools that received the highest level of rating by the state. Brockton High has been focused on literacy across the curriculum. Every teacher is a teacher of literacy. And because of that, the scores that not only in literacy have gone up, but they've also gone up in math because literacy in high school is literacy, math is literacy based. What I should point out here is over one-third of the senior class for the last six years have received the highest possible score. They've recently seen a downturn because of a change in direction from the state leadership. But as I've heard from the former principal, two graduates, they're back onto math. I mean, they're back onto literacy again. The key element of their strategy was it was focused on student needs. They didn't sit around blaming middle schools and said they focused on what do students need to be prepared. They differentiate professional development for teachers. They had a shared leadership strategy so that when the principal left, they continued to experience progress and they looked at the data. They looked at the evidence to ask, is it working? And so what we see is that when you look at Brockton, they're asking a different set of questions. The teachers are asking, what are we teaching? How do we know students are actually learning it? What do students know to be prepared? And given that we're not lucky to get any additional resources, what do we need to focus on? What do we control? What don't we control? And I would say questions like these allow them to make greater progress. The Boston Globe, which once described Brockton High as successful, now talks about it as a model for urban homes amongst high schools. And so if you could do that in Brockton, a school of 4,100 kids, I would say that you could do that in many other places. I saw this at the computer science high school in Philadelphia, where in 10th grade, kids were doing computer science and being prepared for jobs like Linda's drive at companies like Google. I saw it similarly at the Bronx Academy for leadership and technology in New York City that school that serving students with interrupted formal education in the Bronx where students are not only learning on how to work with technology, but they're also learning and developing strong command of English and of their native language Spanish. And despite the fact that many did not attend school regular in the native country, they have a 95% graduation rate. And so when we look at the examples of schools with this kind of work is happening, what we see is that the skills of the teachers are aligned with the needs of the students. This differentiated professor development for teachers in content, in pedagogy and in building strong relationships. There's the professor development for teachers that's matched to meet the student needs. There's access to mentors for teachers in content and in pedagogy. And there's time for observation and feedback from veteran teachers and knowledgeable administrators. When all this comes together and when teachers have time to collaborate, what we know is that schools can in fact move forward and deeper learning can be made more accessible. So I'm sorry if I rushed through, but I don't have a lot of time for this, but I hope that that's enough to spark some discussion and I'm looking forward to your question. Thank you. Thank you so much, Pedro. What a wonderful beginning to the conversation. And I'm gonna come back to you with some of those questions about scaling up. In fact, I made start with one right now which is if you could just give us sort of a framework for how you think about the process of getting from a few classrooms to a whole school, from a few schools to a broader district, what are a couple of the things that you think are really important there? I think that one of the most important things is the collaboration time. I work with a school here in LA, Social Justice Humanitas High School, where this people learning is happening. And so much of it, the teacher will tell you is made possible by the fact they have time to plan together, to design lessons and lessons plans together and to give each other feedback on their work. And there's no shortcut for that. I would also add that this is one of the few schools I know of where students evaluate their teachers and provide them with feedback on what's working, what's not. I look at another district like Abingdon, Pennsylvania, outside of the Philly, and they're doing the same work at a larger scale. And because of it, what we see is disparities relate to race and socioeconomic status have been shrinking for several years in a row. That's great. Thank you so much. We'll come back for more questions to Pedro. Let me remind you that you can put questions in the chat box. I want to introduce our panelists. Kent McGuire, as I noted, is the program director for education at the William and Florid Hewlett Foundation. He is a veteran of the National Education Movement for Public Education. He was previously the president and the CEO of the Southern Education Foundation, an organization committed to advancing public education in the American South with a focus on equity and excellence. He is a recovering dean of a college of education at Temple University, where he was a tenure professor. He was assistant secretary for educational research in the US Department of Education. And I could go on except that would probably make him sound old, and he is not that. And we're also joined by Carlos Moreno, who is the co-executive director of Big Picture Learning and the visionary for all US school and district-wide Big Picture programs. Big Picture is now in, I think, 20-some countries around the world. It's a strategy that is based in project-based learning. Students engage in internships deeply in a regular way, linking their learning to real-world problems. And he is a proud native New Yorker and a passionate educational leader in that work. And I wanna start, actually, by asking you, Carlos, as you think about how Big Picture has taken this very educative and unique approach to schooling, typically in many communities working with students living in communities of high poverty and students who, in some cases, have not experienced a lot of success in school before, both how you've managed to create success in the individual schools and how you've managed to scale that practice. Well, thank you, Linda, for the handoff and appreciate it being with you all. And also, before I begin, I just wanted to take a second and just say that thoughts are with our number of colleagues and folks down in Broward County Schools and the Parkland, Florida community during this time. I know a lot of us have felt it everywhere. For Big Picture, I think for us, it's our entry point has always been to really discuss with the local districts and schools around back to Pedro's initial big question of why when we talk about blue taxonomy and the purpose of the school is really discussing with those folks that are moving or attempting to move forward this work is what's the purpose behind this work to ensure that it's truly deeply grounded in advancing pedagogy, advancing quality practices and better outcomes for the students that have been most marginalized. I think for us, when we talk about our secret sauce, we kind of codified it a bit into four ingredients. And so one, our entry point is always around the commitment to pay attention to the whole child, not just what they're able to do academically, but also what are their passions, their interests, their strengths, their community, really knowing who their families are. We then move on to beginning to focus on student strengths at the onset and not necessarily the challenges. Too often times when schools, especially those that have been most marginalized or students that haven't experienced success previously, the initial conversation is to talk about what they're not able to do. And we believe in really this true asset-based focus. And then through that work, begin to address some of their challenges in some of the places where they need to continue to grow and develop. As a firm believer, as you mentioned, Linda, experiential learning, we're big on allowing students to learn outside of the school wall, willing to be able to take what they're learning in the classroom and see it applicable in the real world and engage with real world mentors and folks that are engaged in that work so that before leaving the K-12 system, they have a much clearer and better sense of what might be next or what they may be interested or passionate about. And then of course, when you put all those pieces together, you have to think creatively and differently around how you allow young people to demonstrate what they've learned and what they know. So in addition to your more traditional formative and summative assessment, a space where young people can engage in student-led conferences, exhibitions, performance assessments, and so on. So, but a lot of that work is really begins with that why, that purpose when engaging with the school district. And when you are carrying these practices, which are relatively rare in most school districts, to new sites where you're starting a new school or helping a school transform what it does, helping a district make room for this practice, what do you find is most important in that process of scaling up what you do in individual schools? Cool. Yeah, so I think to reinforce a few of Pedro's points, I think the time and commitment to teacher preparedness and development and an opportunity for them to sharpen and community build as a school. I think as you continue to build these schools where you want to have young people collaborating in really thoughtful and meaningful ways, that also needs to be modeled by the staff engagement. So a space and opportunity for that to happen. Also, really ensuring that we're not trying to force a round peg into a square hole and figuring out what are the other pieces in terms of your norms within a school or a district that you may need to really think creatively or do away with, right? So too often times these conversations hit a roadblock when we start talking about a master schedule or a bell schedule, right? And then we say, okay, if we did not have that, what would we be able to do? What could teaching and learning look like in this space? And often once we're able to get past that initial roadblock and then also create the space for teachers to collaborate and learn, whether it's from Big Picture or a number of the other deeper learning community of practice organizations, really we see schools be able to flourish and continue to catch hold. That's really great, thank you. Kent, let me ask you what your view having worked in both preparation programs and at a university level and with systems and districts is about how we can both get educators to be successful in this work and how we can get systems to become successful in enabling this work. Kent, if you are speaking, you might be on mute. That button, I'm just trying to figure out how to get it up. Oh, there we go, got you now, there we go. I wasn't in control of that, Linda. Well, thanks, and let me just quickly say first how indebted we are at Hewlett to your work and the work of the Institute, which I think your articulation of what we've been after when we use the term deeper learning was kind of really spot on. And I think Pedro set up the challenge, you know, really, really well. I, my sense is that we could make a lot of headway in how to think or rethink how to prepare well and support educators if we could solve for that through the vision of learning and the structure and organization and practices of the kind of schools that Pedro is looking at in some of his cases and certainly in the example that big picture represents. I don't actually think we have a problem finding or creating these kinds of schools. I think the network, certainly one we've supported and the communities of practice to which Pedro, I mean, Carlos refers, are all running up against what I would call sustainability issues because starting them up is one thing. But if all we're really doing is tinkering around the edges of the system rather than trying to transform it, that's where we hit a wall and that's where I think these sort of equity issues kind of continue to surface. So to me, we really do have to get at this question of assessment. We've worked on how the assessment of learning, we're starting to work on the assessment for learning. We've definitely gotten all the way to assessment to learn. So we've got a progression to follow there. If we can't rethink the time and space both what's a school day and a school year and where people learn if we can't think in creative ways about what students work on, if we can't rethink what kids get credit for and how they get it, then these will be these kind of system limiting issues that keep us from getting where I think we need to get. So I just hope we can talk not just about the kind of core technology of what a deeper learning school is, but ultimately get at the cultural and social and political issues that I think are constraining the kind of scale that we would like to, we'd really like to see more of. Oh, that's great. Well, we actually, that dovetails with some of the comments and questions from some of our participants. Just to pick up on what you just said, Kent Allen Young wrote, is it not even more than access to deeper learning but actually the intentional commitment to and presence of deeper learning experiences, environments and relationships? I word that access may have schools and districts only create metrics that kids have the opportunity to have deeper learning or are exposed to deeper learning versus literally having it part and parcel of their daily learning experience, which means you have to transform the school environment, the assessments, all of the things that make it part and parcel of the daily learning experience. So I'd like to throw that question and dilemma back to the panelists. Maybe we could start with you, Pedro, on whether you have thoughts about how we get this to be part and parcel of every student's daily learning experience. And then I'll invite others who have thoughts on that to join in. Well, I often say if part of it is shifting the focus away from achievement, which is where we've been on, but which is an outcome measure and onto engagement. How do we get kids engaged in learning? When we open the conversation that way with teachers and we start to explore what are the strategies that actually get kids engaged in learning material, then we can open up the conversation about deeper learning. I think in a more robust manner than we have so far. Too often in schools, I think it's true in secondary schools, we're preoccupied with covering material, not getting kids engaged and identifying the critical kind of learning skills kids have to acquire. And then thinking about the kinds of learning activities that allow them to learn those skills. We shift the conversations in those ways. I think that opening up the strategies that lead to deeper learning is not so difficult. And I've seen that occurring in several schools. That's a great example. It reminds me of actually when my family moved from Maryland to New York state and my oldest daughter was in a region's curriculum, which has the courses are evaluated by a test at the end of the year. And I went to my first back to school night and teachers would say, well, you know, this is a region's class. So we actually can't teach what we want to teach. We have to cover this curriculum. And they were kind of apologetic about how boring the class is going to be based on their view of what they had to do to prepare kids for a particular kind of test at the end of the year. So changing those assessments so that they actually draw on and encourage engagement in the way that you described, Carlos, when you mentioned that exhibitions and other forms of demonstrating learning are so important, is part of that question, I think. Carlos, do you have some thoughts on this issue of how we make deeper learning part and parcel of everyone's daily learning experience? Yeah, I have some thoughts, Linda. Let's start with this notion that sometimes folks are absolutely looking for the exact perfect conditions and time. And sometimes it's just important to get started, right? It's just important to get started because you know it's the right thing to do. And sometimes, and it's a big question oftentimes because you think about the variety of different distinguishers and these different activities. And if you're in an existing school, it's hard to change them all at once, but begin changing a practice within your school, right? So whether it's the advisory piece, and not just stay there, right? So if you're converting your home room into a true advisory piece, you start there. That's your first lever. And you know that by within the second semester of the following year, you wanna have your 11th and 12th grade students engaged in internships and you're gonna figure out how to do that piece. You're gonna figure out how you're gonna do the, have students be able to demonstrate what they're learning. He is seldom, they're the perfect conditions to get started. But the staging and the unwrapping to some of these practices to get to deeper learning may not all come at once. It may not just be, one day you're a very traditional school and the very next day, your entire school of a thousand students is engaged in deeper learning. That seldom happens, but you have to get started. You have to get started. Yeah, I would say that probably never happens. We could probably agree on that. Alan Yanua had asked that first question, notes the systems change for deeper learning is what Jefferson County Public Schools in Louisville, Kentucky is currently trying to undertake. Gilberto Cooper asked the question, is there a school district, especially one with constrained funding that might serve as a case study for how to implement deeper learning? Obviously, Jefferson County is on that path we can see here in California, districts like Pasadena, which are now requiring a graduation portfolio from all of their students as one lever into a deeper learning framework. Oakland requiring a capstone project at the end of high school as another lever. But I wonder if any of you have additional thoughts about school districts that might serve as case studies for how to implement deeper learning. I know of districts that are fine. I'm sorry, go ahead, Ken. I was going to turn the question back on Linda, Pedro. Well, we'll let Pedro take the first whack at you. So let him take the first whack at it, right? Let's turn it to Pedro. So, yeah, I would say there are districts that are working at it. I work with a district in the Central Valley in California, Bradley, which is a small rural district. This is their focus. And there are a couple out in Culver City, California's another district that's working at it. But I don't want to pretend that they figured it out. It's a challenge because we talk about student mindset, a big obstacle is teacher mindset. Teachers who are accustomed to teaching in a particular way, changing the way they teach, changing the way they engage kids, it doesn't happen quickly or easily. And I would just say that there are places around the country. New Hampshire is really redesigning its entire curriculum and assessment system to be performance-based and project-based. And you can find many communities there that are pursuing deeper learning. And there are places like parts of New York City where this comes back over and over again. Pedro has participated in some of that work over the years as did I. So there are a lot of people who are coming back to an approach that they were developing in the 1990s. I would say that's true of Jefferson County, Kentucky. So I think we can increasingly find places that are trying to look at this as a district-wide or even a statewide phenomenon. And I think one of the questions that we got was whether the new innovative assessment pilots of the Department of Education is putting out might facilitate some of this. And I'd love to put that out there for if any of you have thoughts about that. I'm hopeful. And that goes to you. I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful. But I'm not sure how optimistic I am if that makes any sense. Only in the sense that, I think Pedro's good point about pivoting from a focus on achievement to a focus on learning is really important. And I'm not sure if the pilots will get all the way there. But I'm hopeful about that. I wanted to just to stay with that earlier question for a second, I wanted to ask Carlos if in big pictures experience there were any two or three things that they have learned in creating schools that they believe are strong levers for change at the system level? Carlos, are you on mute? We need to be sure that Carlos is unmuted so he can answer that question. Thank you. There we are. Go ahead, Carlos. I appreciate that. Thank you, Kent, for the handoff. I have found, we have found that some of the true levers in influencing some of the practices have come, ultimately folks are looking at results, right? They're looking at the results of the school. So when you're looking at the demographic of the students that we serve and the outcomes, not just on their performances on standardized tests, which oftentimes folks are looking at, but also the graduation rates, matriculation rates, the percentage of students that are going on, not just at college, but also clearly identifying post-secondary plans that are non-traditional. So going into a clear job development program, whether it's the military, whether it's an apprenticeship, a lot of that has been really kind of wrapped around in the practices around our internship programs. So learning in the real world, I'd say 80% of the time when folks are reaching out is to learn more how they can bring the outside in and then the inside out, as you like to say. So some of those practices, some of those practices, a lot of conversations that we're having at state levels, whether it's in Nevada, whether it's in New Jersey, whether it's in California, or around how do you help develop district-wide and statewide internship programs where young people can learn in the real world and directly apply what it is that they're learning in school, outside of school. So that first, it's a big one. Can I add something just to kind of affirm what Carl's just said? I was just in Washoe County, Nevada, and met with some folks from a deeper learning school there who said exactly what Carl's talked about. This is their focus and they're getting excellent results. The sad thing is that even within the district, the success of this school is not being shared or learned from in other schools. And I think that continues to be a big challenge with taking this to scale. We've got to figure out how to get schools to learn from each other. Let me just also add a response to a question we just received from Gilberto Cooper who asked how can deeper learning be recognized with standardized testing. What the Brockton case shows is that you can actually get better test scores through deeper learning as a strategy. That is when kids acquire strong literacy and problem-solving skills, they do better on standardized tests too. The challenge is quite often, if you feel driven, particularly by tests that have a lot of content coverage and memorization to achieve that, it's a big bet in the view of many teachers to say, well, we're not going to spend all our time burrowing in on that test prep in a more test-like way. So I think your point is accurate. It's also a challenging process. We got a question from one of the participants about how do you, what have you found obtained buy-in from teachers to embrace deeper learning, which I think touches on that question. Carlos, would you kick us off on that and then Pedro and Kent may want to add on? Absolutely. Oftentimes when we begin working with a new school, it's an existing school. And the first question that teachers ask, especially if the entry point wasn't, did it come from the teachers at the school or was it an administrator that kind of said, hey, come on in, we'd love for you to talk to us. How is this going to change my day-to-day work? And what is the support that you all will provide in the shift in what my role as a teacher looks like? And I think that's the right question. And again, going back to reinforcing what Pedro said earlier, is the space and opportunity to support teachers, develop teachers, and provide that, even that opportunity to see it in action. Too many times, focus, you know, focus on literature and an example in a video, but it's important that folks are able to see it and touch it and engage with a variety of different folks and the stakeholders in that community. What has the impact been to teachers, to parents, to students, to administrators, and partners? I'll also say that I think with a lot of the deeper learning, or different deeper learning models, if you will, one of the things that I think we all have in common is that we absolutely want teachers that are masters in their content, but that don't love their content more than they love working with kids. So if you love your content more than you love working with students, right, then there is a rub there. And that's something that I'm really honest with folks when we're working with folks, that there is a space and a place for that, but where we're talking about is holistically supporting and working with young people, and if it's just about your content and your content and delivering the content and not the holistic support of young people, then that may not be the right shift. That's a great point. One of the things I would just add on this question of getting buy-in from teachers is that it's very hard to engage in a practice or a pedagogy that you've never seen or experienced yourself. And we're doing a study right now of teacher preparation programs that prepare teachers for deeper learning and equity orientation. And one of the things they do is engage every practice they want teachers to engage in, they use in the preparation program itself, project-based learning, the use of rubrics and exhibitions and et cetera, the collaborative group work, because many people haven't experienced this in their own K-12 education before they become teachers, much less in their school. So figuring out, as I think the big picture strategy does, how you embed people in experiences that allow them to have a different set of visions and ways of behaving is, I think, something we have to worry about as well. I add to that, because I think that's an excellent point, Linda. I think teachers who haven't experienced this will struggle and even not understand why it's so important. But I would also say that in many districts, what I see is that the way we deliver professional development to teachers is totally ineffective. We have dozens of teachers in an auditorium, we tell them this is the new strategy, go do it. It's just not effective. And so I think we have to be a lot more thoughtful in what professional development looks like and how teachers receive the guidance. We ask teachers to differentiate instructions for students. We don't differentiate professional development for teachers. And not all teachers are the same, and they all don't need the same thing. That was one of our questions, which is how would you differentiate professional development for teachers? You want to say a word more about that, what that might look like? I've used the Brockton example again. What they did was they did professional development in content, in subject areas, because they knew that science teachers would know best about how to teach literacy in science. And then, and again, it's been ongoing. It's not one or two or three times a year. They've used all of their department meetings to do this work. So the best professional development is constant. It draws on the skills of our most experienced and effective teachers, and it is not incriminating. That is, we don't use it at the same to blame people, but really to help them and provide real, clear guidance. And that's what we're seeing in schools that are, I think, making the biggest gains in teaching. That's great. You know, it seems to me... Go ahead, Ken. I have a tough question for you. I want to ask as the last question, but you can make this comment first. Well, you know, I think the extension of Pedro's point is that, you know, you can think about professional development as something you sort of do, or you can think about the schools as organizations where the adults are learning all the time, just like the students. And I think those kind of schools are where you're likely to see the rapid growth. Yeah. So here's the last tough question. Albert Field sent this way back in the beginning of the panel. Is it to the advantage of a small group like white students to keep others out of deep learning to reduce competition for jobs in the New World Order? Do you base the current wealth gap between the top 1% and the rest of the country? Wouldn't restricting deeper learning from Black and Brown students fit the pattern of the haves and have nots? We have another comment from Valerie Brahma who runs a pair of schools in L.A. Focus on deeper learning and intentionally diverse. Do we have thoughts about the intersection between school integration, segregation, and increasing access to deeper learning? You mentioned early on, Kent, the big social forces. Give us some wisdom on this point. Well, I think the first reaction is that I do think there's a sentiment out there that views education right now in zero-sum terms. And I think, you know, two-hour collective detriment. I think the reality is that the country won't thrive unless or until we figure out that we've got to educate everybody here deeply. And so this kind of zero-sum is a real problem. It may in part explain why we see the gradual disinvestment in the system as the complexion of who goes to school, you know, changes. And, you know, these are examples of needing to deal both with not just with the teaching and learning, but with the issues of policy and public will. I guess the last thing I'll say in the interest of time is that I know we intend to spend time over the next six months really trying to listen to folks in communities so that we can learn how to express their passion for this in terms that makes sense and maybe build some capacity to bring constructive pressure, you know, to bear for change. Terrific. That is our closing statement. That hour has gone by so quickly. Thank you. Pedro, Kent, Carlos. I'd like to remind the audience we're recording this webinar. We will email you in a few days when it's available online. We invite you to join us for the next webinar, how performance assessments support deeper learning and equity on March 20th at 1 p.m. Pacific time, 4 p.m. Eastern time, and you know how to do all the math in between. You can register and find more information about that webinar using the links paces in the chat box. We'll send notifications via email if you sign up for our email list. And finally, we'd like to share the following online resources, which will also be posted on this webinar page so that you can pursue more learning about deeper learning. Thank you all for being with us.