Studies of American schools reveal glimpses of classes and programs that cultivate deeper learning.  But schools that are holistically aligned to foster school-wide deeper learning are few.  Through smart strategic planning, you can move your school in that direction through a process of sustainable transformation.  

Participants: Boards, leadership teams

Purpose: To accomplish your mission with greater efficacy.

Outcomes:

• Careful examination of your school culture relative to your mission

• Clear articulation and alignment of mission, culture, plan, and program

• Long-term, actionable improvement plans supported by human and fiscal resources

• Leadership teams empowered to lead collaborative, sustainable change

Provocations

• The Strategic Triangle: How A Board Supports Deeper Learning

• The KISS of Success: Why Your Strategic Plan Should Be Really Simple

• A Mission In Action: What Kind of School Does What You Say You Do?

• Purposeful Schooling: The One Thing All Great Schools Have in Common


Workshops

• Healthy Tensions: Using the Strategic Triangle to Formulate Strategic Initiatives

• Mission Alignment Assessment: Are You Who You Say You Are?


Projects

• Crafting Your Strategic Plan: With your mission as a guide, we’ll use the Strategic Triangle to identify mission-focused initiatives, establish costs, identify goals, and map out goals and costs across a multi-year strategic plan and strategic financial plan

Coaching

• Annual Goals Monitoring: Periodic work sessions with the school head and/or senior team to assess, report on, and troubleshoot progress relative to annual goals

• Strategic Plan Check-Up: Periodic work sessions with the board to monitor progress relative to strategic plan and support head and senior team in implementation

• Telling the Story: Periodic work sessions with head, senior team, and/or marketing team on storytelling and marketing related to strategic plan progress

If we want to support deep learning in our school, we need to make sure the right structures are in place.  This will require a deep-dive into how you “do school.”  It can be a little scary, and very exhilarating…because then we might want to get into some design work!

Participants: Division heads, department heads, teacher-leaders

Purpose: Facilitate design decisions that enable school-wide deeper learning practices.

Outcomes:

• A shared understanding of “deeper learning;” recognizing and celebrating where and how it is happening at your school

• Uncovering obstacles to deeper learning in your school

• Describing your “grammar of schooling,” and assessing those elements in light of your deeper learning goals

• Redesigning key “grammar of schooling” elements such as schedule, curriculum, assessment practices, academic disciplines/departments, report cards, or others in order to deepen student learning

• Finding ways to partner with teachers and students school design initiatives

Provocations

• Deeper Learning: What is it, and why is it so hard to achieve?

• Assessing for Depth: How do we know if students are learning deeply?

• Teaching for Depth: What role do teachers play in deep student learning?

• Knowing and Doing: The role of projects in deeper learning

• Deeper Learning Across Disciplines: Complex problems require flexible thinking.

Workshops

• A Deeper Learning Checkup: What do you say about deeper learning?  What do you do?  Let’s map out next steps.

• Getting Started on our Portrait of a Graduate: What does “mission accomplished” look like at your school?  Let’s start sketching it out, and point a way forward to finish the masterpiece.

• The Learner’s Journey: Does our curriculum guide students into deeper learning?  Let’s explore how such a journey might look at your school and map out next steps.

• It’s About Time: How does your academic schedule support deeper learning?  How could it?  Let’s look at some options and point a way forward.

• Assessing for Depth: How do we know if students are learning deeply?  How can we?  Let’s examine your practices, highlight some great ones, and point a way forward.

• Teaching for Depth: What is your school-wide understanding of great teaching?  What next steps can you take to define and refine our teaching expectations?

• Knowing and Doing: Taking your first/next steps into project-based learning

• Deeper Thinking Across Disciplines: High and low-impact ways to practice interdisciplinary learning

Projects

• A Way Forward: Describe your deep learning aspirations, and then craft a Strategic Learning Plan that moves the whole school in that direction.

• Collaboratively Painting the Portrait: We’ll fully articulate what “mission accomplished” looks like in the lives of your students, and establish ways of demonstrating their progress toward that.

• Charting The Learner’s Journey: Let’s set up the teams and times needed to audit your school-wide curriculum against your deeper learning goals.  Let’s establish a process and timeline for examining and refining your courses, units, goals, and assessments, along with a platform for documenting and sharing your work.  Then, let’s get started.

• It’s About Time: We'll assess the effectiveness of your academic schedule relative to your deeper learning goals.  We’ll define and design ways to bring your schedule into closer alignment with your goals, and make a plan for communicating and rolling out the plan.

• Designing For Interdisciplinary Depth: We’ll co-design an interdisciplinary unit or program, ready for implementation.

• Signature Program Design: Let’s design a signature deep learning program that is all your own, tied to your school’s mission and brand.

Coaching

• Walking the Way Forward: monitoring, assessing, and trouble-shooting school-wide action toward your Strategic Learning Plan.

• Studying the Portrait: supporting you as you assess and demonstrate students’ progress toward the Portrait of a Graduate

• Refining the Learner’s Journey: ongoing meetings with faculty teams to assist with deeper-learning based refinement and documentation of courses, units, goals, and assessments.

• Making Time for Making Time: ongoing support and trouble-shooting for your deeper-learning-based academic schedule.

• Implementing the Signature Program: ongoing consultation to support the success and growth of your school’s deeper learning identity.

Teachers are at the cutting edge of your mission, constantly refining their practice to find what works. Let’s tap into this reservoir of creative energy and empower teachers to lead the change that results in deeper learning.

Participants: School Leadership Teams, Division Heads, Teacher Leaders


Purpose: Achieve sustainable school improvement by building a faculty culture of reflection, collaboration, and professional growth.


Outcomes:

• Faculty-wide internalization of deeper-learning goals

• Faculty empowered with agency and ownership of their growth

• Transparent, consistent, effective faculty evaluation and support systems

• Faculty culture of collaboration, reflection, innovation, and continuous improvement

• Long-term, sustainable progress toward strategic program goals

Provocations

• Tapping Teacher Wisdom: What if teachers’ dreams for the school came true?

• The Power of Plus One: How slow, deliberate implementation wins the race

• Growth Starts with Seeds: How small faculty teams can be seedbeds for great ideas

• From Silo to Consortio: The school-changing power of teacher collaboration

• What Does Good Teaching Look Like?: Laying the foundation for teacher growth

Workshops

• First, Where Are We Going?: We’ll engage your school mission, deeper learning goals, and teacher wisdom to establish attainable professional growth goals.

• Mapping out the Journey: Let’s sketch out a multi-year professional growth journey toward lasting, transformative deeper-learning practices, from seed idea, to celebration.

• Plus One, Plus Two: We’ll put together a plan identify and spread the deeper learning practices already working at your school.

• Celebrating Deeper Learning: Let’s organize an in-house professional development conference to share the deeper learning practices your teachers have developed.

• Defining Great Teaching: We’ll co-create the description of great learning at your school — the foundation for teacher support, evaluation, and growth

Projects

• The Professional Development Journey: We’ll co-create a detailed, actionable plan for a multi-year professional development journey towards deeper learning practices — one that all teachers can join, for lasting, school-wide change.

• A System for Support and Growth: Let’s co-design a predictable, transparent, and effective system to support teachers in their professional growth.

Coaching

• Walking the Professional Development Journey: Ongoing support and advice as you implement each stage of your deeper learning professional growth plan. 

Teaching is a cultural activity, and the practices that cultivate deeper learning can feel foreign at first. Let’s tap into teachers’ highest aspirations and empower them to teach the way they’ve always wanted to.

Participants: Teachers across all content areas

Purpose: Helping teachers connect with deeper-learning goals, and equipping them to implement deeper-learning practices

Outcomes:

• Students and teachers working toward clearly defined deeper-learning goals

• Assessment practices that support student learning, growth, and improvement

• Student learning experiences that guide them beyond knowledge and toward deep understanding, transfer, application, and creation

• Deeper student investment in the learning process

Provocations

• Start at the Heart: Tap into your deepest aspirations for students’ learning and growth

• The Beauty of Backward Design: Why starting with the “why” makes sense

• Assessment for Improvement: Centering assessment on growth rather than grades

• Simpler Rubrics, Deeper Learning: Constructing rubrics that focus on what’s important while streamlining your feedback and keeping you sane!

• Writing for Deeper Learning: Writing is thinking!  Deploy low-stakes and high-stakes writing activities for deeper learning in your content area.

• We Have a Problem: discover “problematization,” an upside-down approach that creates a focus and urgency and sets the stage for deeper, inquiry-based learning.

• Grade-Free Feedback: provide meaningful feedback without grades, from numberless rubrics to portfolios to learning contracts…and still derive valid quarter grades!

• Students as Agents of Learning: How to foster student voice, choice, metacognition, self-reflection, and confidence as they own their learning.

• Learning by Assessing: explore ways to deepen student learning by fruitfully engaging them in carefully designed self and peer-assessment protocols.

• The Power of Revision: writing improves more from draft to draft than from assignment to assignment.  Cultivate a classroom culture of reflection, revision, and growth.

• From Coverage to Questions: Discover how designing units around generative themes can get your students thinking deeply in your class.

• Doable Interdisciplinary Learning: Complex problems call for interdisciplinary solutions.  Engage that kind of thinking within the structures of your school.

• Reading Reality: Your middle or high school literature class can enrich how students perceive and understand their world in ways they can’t stop talking about. 

Workshops

• Growth-focused assessment design studio: Let’s take a deep dive into one of your units, articulate the learning goals, and design a series of assessments that illuminates students’ growth over time.

• Meaningful, Manageable Feedback: Want to provide substantive feedback to students, but feeling overwhelmed by the work?  Let’s take a look at one of your learning activities and redesign the feedback protocols to be both more meaningful and more manageable.

• Nurturing Reflective Learners: Self and peer assessment can be a powerful means of student growth — or a waste of time.  Let’s look at a learning activity from your class and design in some rich, effective self-assessment and peer-assessment protocols.

• Writing for Deeper Learning in Your Class: You want students to think and learn deeply in your class, not just remember information.  Writing is thinking on paper — a way to deepen and demonstrate students’ understanding in every subject area.  Let’s take a unit from your class and design some writing activities that will deepen learning without crowding out content or adding to your grading burden!

• Project Design Studio: Interested in project-based learning?  Let’s design a “hands-on, minds-on” project for your class that deepens and demonstrates students’ learning.

• Marking Out a Grade-Free Zone: Grading student work can pit us against our students and undermine learning.  Let’s design a “grade-free zone” within your class to create space for growth, experimentation, and self-reflection—and a valid quarter-end grade!

• Power Up the Generator: Most course and unit titles are static.  Deeper learning starts with topics that generate questions, debate, and connections.  We’ll take a fresh look at your unit or your class, designing generative topics to set the stage for deeper learning.

• Interdisciplinary Learning Design Studio: We know that most complex problems demand interdisciplinary solutions, and we intuit the need to equip students for flexible thinking.  But it sounds complicated.  Let’s co-design a powerful interdisciplinary learning experience, crafted to succeed within the existing structures of your school.

• Literature as Lens: Let’s face it, literature is a bunch of stories about things that never happened to people who never existed.  Let’s rediscover why the study of literature is essential, and then redesign a class or unit to sharpen students’ ability to read reality.

• Amplifying Student Voices for Deeper Learning: Let’s revisit a unit from your class from the students’ perspective.  How might we redesign the unit to invite deeper student engagement and connection?  We’ll consider a range tools like problematization, student questionnaires, self-reflection protocols, portfolio models, student choice, and others.

Projects

• Unit Redesign: Using the principles of backward design, let’s work together to redesign an entire unit (or group of units) to cultivate deeper learning.  We’ll identify deeper-learning goals, design assessments to measure student progress aligned with those goals, and craft learning experiences that equip students with the knowledge and understanding they’ll need to succeed on those assessments.

• Deeper Learning Assessment Makeover: With your course objectives and deeper learning goals in mind, let’s study your assessment practices for an entire course.  We’ll uncover the ways in which your current assessments illuminate students’ progress relative to those goals.  And we’ll build from there, designing formative and summative assessments that deepen and demonstrate student learning; foster a culture of self-reflection, metacognition, revision, and experimentation; and support growth and improvement over time.

We know that students learn deeply when engaged in work of real value to real people. Suddenly, it’s not just academic — it’s authentic. To do it right, we’ll need to reach beyond the bounds of school and connect.

Participants: Leadership Team, Teachers-Leaders

Purpose: Develop capacity to connect students to real-world experiences that deepen and extend learning beyond the classroom.

Outcomes: 

• Students actively connected to their communities

• Schools equipped with sustainable partnership models

• Faculty confident in facilitating project-based, experiential learning


[This section is still under development.]