In Search of Deeper Learning: The Quest to Remake The American High School by Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine
It is difficult to find a truly impressive book about education. In Search of Deeper Learning just went to the top of my “truly impressive” list. This book is the culmination of a decade long search for “good” high schools. The investigation was thorough and the conclusions are founded on strong data. What the authors found were a few outstanding teachers and even fewer outstanding high schools. More important, they found a common thread that links together the teaching techniques of seemingly divergent teaching styles and school philosophies. There is a way to identify great teaching and train teachers to be great. The secret is as individual as each teacher and as universal as caring, passion, and understanding. This book is an essential read for anyone who wishes to learn the traits of great teaching.
The foundation of great teaching is based on two essential concepts. The first is student engagement. Students become engaged in the learning process when they see the relevance of the learning.Teachers must make a connection between the lives of the students and the learning that is taking place. Students often will not intuitively see relevance. It is the job of the teacher to show the connections that will engage the students. There are many ways to engage students. Examples were given of math teachers who used games and puzzles, just like video games, to help students achieve understanding of difficult math problems. English teachers carefully selected books and passages that had meaning for their students. The details vary from teacher to teacher, and subject to subject. However engagement is achieved, engagement through relevancy is essential.
The second essential is rigor. Students must feel they are challenged. They must realize that the path to success is preceded by failure, sometimes much failure. Learning new skills as outlined in Bloom’s Taxonomy is not easy. Rigor is not gained through memorization or by following recipes for success laid out by the teacher. It is gained through research and discovery. It is gained through analysis, contemplation, and discussion. Knowledge hard won is long remembered.
The role of the teacher cannot be solely a purveyor of content knowledge. The teacher must be a facilitator of discovery. Students must become adept at using the same skills are used by the experts in the discipline. These are the skills of research, experimentation, synthesis, creativity, and whatever else is specific to each discipline. As master craftsmen teach the apprentices and journeymen, the accomplished teacher introduces the students to the skills of the discipline and guides the students in the use of these skills with the goal of moving students from memorization and mimicking to creativity. Teachers must move from being the “sage on the stage” to the “guide on the side.” I like to tell students that I have done my job when they don’t need me anymore. This is when they know how to use the tools of historians to analyze reliable information that will enable them to create their own understanding of the meaning of historical events.
This leads to another essential attribute of great teachers. They must be experts in their field. They must have a depth of knowledge and understanding that makes them true academics. Teachers must be heavily engaged and be passionate about their fields of study. They must
show by example what this looks like and feels like. Teachers must have a passion to share and teach what they know. It is the combination of loving their course of study and having the desire to draw others into this sphere of engagement.
There are not many teachers in the United States who meet these qualifications. The reason is that most teachers have been taught in the old system of “drill and kill” memorizations, just like their parents and grandparents. The study found that most of the teachers who were able to break out of the old system had atypical learning experiences of their own that allowed them to see the benefits of teaching in new ways. A system of mentoring appears to be the best organized way for apprentice teachers to learn this different way of teaching.
Many schools have programs that are doing quite well. They are just not “academic” programs. Student centered education is happening in many art departments and physical education departments. Extra curricular programs are also a place to find student centered learning. The authors spend much time discussing how theater programs can be one of the best areas to witness student engagement. These are places where students can be in charge of their own learning. They are places where students create their own products that can be shared with and evaluated by others. It is the academic programs that are lagging behind because they are missing these essentials of choice, creation and sharing.
There is so much more in this book that must be read with all the examples and data to be fully appreciated. For the remainder of this writing I will become more personal as I evaluate my teaching while reflecting on what new ideas I have gleaned from reading this book.
The book discusses how socializing is a focal point for most teens. It suggests using learning teams to enhance engagement. I begin each year with classes divided into teams. Several days are spent with team building exercises designed to show how teams should work. Students will continue to work in teams with team members helping and learning from each other. This also allows students to evaluate each other’s work and to learn the criteria for good work. Teaming is an essential element of a healthy classroom. Next year I am going to focus more on using teams to collect and evaluate content. I often find myself providing too much guidance when it comes to finding good material. Students need more practice searching out material themselves.
The course content I teach is fairly easy to relate to students’ lives. It must be explicit. It must be discussed to bring out the relevance, but most students see and appreciate the relevance of what they are learning. I need to find more and better ways to have discussions in larger classes. It was easy with American Studies because we could divide the class in half. I need to experiment with ways to have more small group discussions while the rest of the class is working independently. I am looking forward to the opportunities the new STEM Center will have for dividing the class. It might be more amenable to an in house blended situation. I have some ideas. We will see how they work out.
The last observation in the book that rang true was that this highly successful way of teaching is much easier when the whole school or most of the school is on the same page. This begins with the administration. It would be good for the administrators to read this book. It discussed blended learning, flipped classrooms, block scheduling, and other variations on time allocation. These may or may not be helpful. It goes back to each teacher, and the relevance and rigor embedded in the curriculum. These factors are much more important than any external changes. Once you read the book you will see that everything comes back to each teacher and the methods each teacher uses to build relationships with and among students, and the way each teacher guides students through the curriculum with the focus on building the skills of each discipline.