There is an understandable interest in deep-learning, after all, who wants their students to have a superficial understanding of the content. Read the marketing of almost any school and you are likely to find some statement about the deep-learning that is achieved as a result of their excellent teaching and learning platform. Likewise, ask any teacher about their philosophy of teaching and you will hear how they engage their students with learning that promotes a deep-understanding.
The trouble is, when you look at what is happening, there are often degrees of inconsistency between the stated aims and the reality of what is achieved on a day to day basis. Teaching for this sort of deep-learning is challenging and doing so routinely can be exhausting.
Research by Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine in schools across the United States of America confirm that even in schools with a reputation for deep learning, the reality of the experience often falls short. This research led to the publication of “In Search of Deeper Learning” in which the authors note that few schools manage to achieve deep learning across all of their programmes. To be sure, there were pockets of excellence, and much to be celebrated, but very few schools came close to systematically embracing deep-learning.
Most classrooms were spaces to sit passively and listen. Most academic work instructed students to recall, or minimally apply, what they had been told. When we asked students the purpose of what they were doing, the most common responses were “I dunno—it’s in the textbook,” and “maybe it’ll help me in college.” (Mehta & Fine. 2019)
With this in mind, what strategies might we routinely adopt so that deep-learning can be achieved and sustained? How do we get started and what pedagogies are likely to have the desired effect while avoiding fatigue for teachers and students?
We begin with the planning process. Deep-learning is not going to be achieved if we rely on the curriculum or packets of resources as a guide. Instead, we begin with a set of questions that allow us as teachers to clarify what it is that we want our students to understand as a results of their learning.
There are some crucial concepts to be unpacked here and when we begin the process of teaching for deep-learning it is important that we clarify what these concepts mean to us. Perhaps the most important concept to be unpacked is understanding. Like most terms in common use, we feel we have a sense of what the word understanding means up to the point where we share our definition with a colleague and find that our’s does not align well with their’s.
How we define understanding is a crucial point when our goal is deep-learning. Indeed, our goal is likely to be understanding. Benjamin Bloom’s taxonomy of thinking skills is commonly used to identify what are referenced as high-order-thinking skills. In Bloom’s taxonomy, understanding is a low order skill, one rung on the ladder above remembering. It requires the learner to comprehend what they have remembered and be able to explain it to another person. By contrast, in teaching for understanding or understanding by design terms, understanding requires a capacity to use what one knows and can do in unique context. In this definition, understanding would combine the ability to apply, analyse, synthesise and evaluate knowledge, concepts, ideas, skills and capabilities.
The critical distinction is that in a deep-learning model, understanding involves the capacity to do useful things with one’s knowledge and skills; a performative perspective of understanding. According to Blythe and associates, (1998) “The performance perspective says, in brief, that understanding is a matter of being able to do a variety of thought-provoking things with a topic, such as explaining, finding evidence and examples, generalizing, applying, analogizing, and representing the topic in new ways.”
The idea of learning is similarly open to interpretation. In this instance we are describing an active process that the learner is heavily engaged in and ultimately responsible for. This goes far beyond what might be achieved through mere exposure to content regardless of how well it might be delivered.
“Meaningful learning cannot be delivered to high school students like pizza to be consumed or videos to be observed. Lasting learning develops largely through the labor of the student, who must be enticed to participate in a continuous cycle of studying, producing, correcting mistakes, and starting over again.“ (Newman. 1992 p.3)
The other key term to be unpacked here is “deep”. What might be special about deep learning? According to Mehta & Fine (2019), “Research suggests that deep learners have schemas that enable them to see how discrete pieces of knowledge in a domain are connected; rather than seeing isolated facts, they see patterns and connections because they understand the underlying structures of the domain they are exploring.” Deep learning goes beyond perceiving the world as a collection of facts to be understood in isolation but requires the capacity and a disposition to bring ideas together in novel ways. Deep learning is the difference between seeing a painting of a hay bale and the capacity to extrapolate from that same image as a lucid commentary on the evolving relationship between artist, environment and society.
The discussion of these terms offered above is intended only to offer a possible interpretation. The crucial part of defining terms of such importance as these is the process rather than the product. While it might be convenient to find and publish to stakeholders a definition of key terms, engaging teachers in the process of making meaning is likely to be more productive. A crucial process in any change effort is the building of ownership of it by those ultimately charged with implementing it. With this in mind, engaging stakeholders in the process of defining these terms can be a significant role in building support. The collective understanding of these key terms that is developed through the initial phase of moving towards teaching for “deep-learning” will allow them to fulfil their place as the ultimate goal of subsequent teaching and learning.
In the next article we will explore essential questions to be asked as we begin to strategise for deep-learning.
By Nigel Coutts
Blythe, T. (1998) "The teaching for understanding guide”, San Francisco, Jossey-Bass Publishers.
Mehta, J. & Fine, S. (2019) In Search of Deeper Learning: The Quest to Remake the American High School Harvard University Press.
Newmann, F. (1992) “Introduction,” in Fred Newmann, ed., Student Engagement and Achievement in American Secondary Schools (New York: Teachers College Press.