![]() ![]() A Moment in History Makes All the Difference They had to experience deeper learning as if they were students themselves. If they were going to implement deeper learning in their classrooms, it was not enough to just know it. I became a teacher, then an administrator, because I knew that students needed educational experiences that crack open what they believe to be true and expand their thinking to new horizons.Īs I shared this story, I felt every teacher in the room turn their eyes toward me. No Google.īased on this assignment, one could argue that my college history class transcended the surface-level exploration endemic to most lessons in school. The caveat was that we could only use the resources in the library. At that moment, I recalled that the course was titled “Introduction to Historical Thought” but when I showed up for the class, I then saw the subtitle: “Introduction to Historical Thought: Mass Atrocities in American History.”Īfter looking silently at the image, our professor gave us one hour to uncover the details of what happened before and after this photo was taken. A white man stood at the edge of a crowd of people, sleeves rolled up and a whisper of a smile on his face, pointing towards a tree where two Black men were lynched. He passed out copies of the image to each member of the class. He looked over the rims of his glasses at my History 410 class gathered in one of the well-appointed reading rooms in the Thompson Library at The Ohio State University. Instead, I decided to try something new and share a story about one of my first experiences with deeper learning during a history course I took in college: My stomach twisted when I saw the 9 inch by 12 inch, black-and-white picture my professor was holding. Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine, authors of the 2019 book “ In Search of Deeper Learning”, define deeper learning as “the understanding of not just the surface features of a subject or discipline, but the underlying structures or ideas.” Even more than that, deeper learning invokes a kind of thinking and doing that transcends subjects and disciplines, going beyond understanding a concept and investigating deeper truths about ourselves, our communities and the world.Īs the Coordinator of Deeper Learning for our district, I frequently present on this topic, but I realized that explaining the concept of deeper learning was not enough for this group of teachers. At the beginning of this school year, I facilitated a professional development (PD) session with middle school teachers about how to use education technology tools for deeper learning.
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