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Diving into deep learning
by Chana R. Schoenberger
In Search of Deeper Learning: The Quest to Remake the American High School,
by Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine, Harvard University Press, 2019
I
f you went to high school in the United States, you are familiar with the
typical school day. Students sit at rows of desks, listening to the teacher
lecture, perhaps coming up to the board to solve a problem, or meeting in
small groups to fill out a worksheet. Considerable amounts of class time are
spent preparing students for the high-stakes tests that dominate the college ad-
missions process. Even at the top end of the achievement spectrum, students
complain they have to stuff huge numbers of facts and theorems into their brains,
only to forget them after the tests. When asked about the best parts of high
school, students are likely to cite one or two classes, often electives, as well as their
time participating in all-consuming extracurricular activities such as theater, de-
bate, or the school newspaper.
This assessment came as a surprise to a pair of education professors, Jal Meh-
ta of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and Sarah Fine of High Tech High’s
Graduate School of Education, who had set out on a cross-country research tour
to find out how the best public high schools in the U.S. exemplify what is known
in the field as deeper learning. Deeper learning is defined as a set of competencies
that include content mastery, critical thinking, collaboration, and effective com-
munication. Mehta and Fine define it as the place where “mastery, identity, and
creativity” meet. Students who have engaged in deeper learning have strong ex-
pertise in a field, learn to identify themselves as practitioners of the discipline, and
acquire the ability to create something new, such as original scholarship or art.
As Mehta and Fine sat in hour after hour of interminable lecture classes, they
realized that these top schools, for the most part, were not providing any deeper
learning opportunities to students. And if students were engaging in deeper learn-
ing, it was happening on the outskirts of the core curriculum. Elective classes,
often available only to the oldest students who had completed a state-mandated
curriculum, allowed teachers to delve into a narrow topic within a subject, gener-