Evolving Deeper Learning Standards

Most collections of learning standards refer to a negotiated set of concepts, skills, and facts that make up a discipline or that describe a theory of how people develop a particular broad skill like literacy. How they get used is to answer questions around what we believe learners should know and be able to do. Typically, this negotiation occurs at convenings of educators, policy makers, and subject area experts. But what if life was already doing most of the negotiating for us?

Schools like the ones I work with are committed to Deeper Learning. The notion that it isn’t just knowing things, but being able to do things with what you know and that there are a number of highly important skills and attributes that help people thrive. Given that, schools ought to focus on the development of those skills. Typically, that focusing involves empowering students to encounter new knowledge and develop key skills through authentic projects and problem solving.

Not long ago, I was involved in a project to collect strong examples of projects and problems from across a number of Deeper Learning organizations. Looking at projects from schools across the several networks and from around the country, I was struck by how frequently certain topics were the focus of the project inquiry. Global food security, energy crisis, global warming, immigration, and the proliferation of technology all showed up repeatedly as the basis for authentic student projects intended to also help them “learn the standards.” Not surprisingly, of course, as these are the issues of our day and what more obvious way to make learning relevant than to make it about the real questions we as a species are grappling with.

But in an over-stressed and maxed out educational context, I wonder if a small bit of elegance might emerge from those patterns? Teachers across the country who are committed to Deeper Learning are naturally clustering around a common set of of world and local issues. Maybe there could be a loose set of “Deeper Learning Issues” that were curated and evolved over time to represent a reference point of important world issues we ought to expose children to in their learning both to make it real and to help them be ready for real life? So the issues of the world would be the foundational standards.

Paired with that, what if we used that list to prioritize what students needed in different content areas? The amount of knowledge in fields like biology or chemistry is increasing on such a rapid basis that no one is truly “caught up.” Even experts rely on a conceptual foundation and then spend the majority of their time in a particular subset of ideas. So if I were creating a high school course in that discipline, wouldn’t I do well to try to make sure that my students learned what they needed to know to understand hotly debated current issues like whether to vaccinate your children or not and assume that if they were able to do that, they would also be developing a sufficiently strong conceptual understanding and basic grounding in the discipline that they could go on to additional learning if they so chose?

Tell me, what would a set of Deeper Learning Issues include?