BIF Student Experience Lab Receives Two Year Grant From Hewlett to Continue Deeper Learning Work
Exciting news! We are proud to announce that The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has generously given the BIF Student Experience Lab a two-year grant to continue to research and develop innovative education models. This work will contribute to The Hewlett Foundation’s commitment to ensuring that all students throughout the country are educated through deeper learning experiences that prepare them for success in career, civic, and everyday life.
In order to do this, the Student Experience Lab will use a human centered, ethnographic approach to researching the enabling conditions and barriers that impact public school educators’ ability to implement innovative deeper learning practices. The research will culminate in a public, web-based, multimedia report that presents patterns, insights, and opportunities for enabling more public school educators to offer deeper learning experiences to their students.
We will use these insights to design and launch a Deeper Learning Design Academy for a cohort of public school educators to develop and test strategies that can lead to deeper learning outcomes. We will release a series of videos, documenting and sharing the Deeper Learning Design Academy members’ journeys as they change their classrooms and schools to enable greater deeper learning outcomes, so that other public school educators can learn from and adopt their strategies.
We began working with The Hewlett Foundation in 2014 on the design of a new model to inspire, empower, and connect educators interested in generating creative and affordable ways to deepen their students learning. Using a human-centered design process, we created School Hackers, a reality style video series and crowdsourced compendium of DIY approaches to deeper learning. Through a partnership with Edutopia, we distributed a series of videos showing clever and resourceful low- to no-cost ways that educators are repurposing existing resources in order to bring deeper learning into their schools. Since the videos were posted in August 2015, over 200,000 educators have watched them and hundreds have chimed in to share their ideas.
“If we want all students in all schools to be prepared to face the tough challenges throughout their lives, we are faced with questions about how to get instructional practices that lead to deeper learning to scale across the entire educational system,” noted Marc Chun, program officer at the Hewlett Foundation. “I’m thrilled with the creative and disciplined approach BIF has taken to provide educators with some ‘do it yourself’ answers to these questions, and am eagerly looking forward to what we will learn from the important work Sam Seidel and his team will take on over the next couple of years.”
We are honored to work with the Hewlett Foundation for another two years on exploring new approaches to the diffusion of deeper learning. We look forward to helping educators transform our education system by bringing education practices that lead to deeper learning to all students in all schools. We’ll be sharing insights as the project progresses, both on our blog and on Twitter (@BIFsxl) and invite you to follow along for updates. This announcement originally appeared on our blog.
