Welcome to 2017! This week’s Digest includes a few stories of how deeper learning is working in and out the classroom.
Personalized, Social Learning
Education Week’s Learning Deeply blog explores how project-based learning (PBL) incorporates a personalized, social learning experience for students. Kristen Vogt, the knowledge management officer at Next Generation Learning Challenges, explains that even though personalized learning is focused on the needs of individual students and puts the student at the center of the learning experience, social interaction is a large part of this process. She writes that it is this logic that inspires schools to personalize learning through project-based learning.
“PBL requires students to practice social skills like collaboration and communication. It also requires students to figure out how their individual learning goals fit within and are advanced by their engagement with the world around them,” writes Vogt. “In this way, PBL helps students develop a richer, deeper, more personally-meaningful set of outcomes.” Read more: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/learning_deeply/2017/01/when_projects_are_personalized_learning_is_social.html
Hands-On Learning in New York
A charter school principal shares the school’s “hands-on” learning style to engage students with academics and connect them to the real world in an interview with DNAinfo. Richard Lee, head of Academy of the City Charter School in Queens, New York, explains his philosophy of how these connections are the “key to meaningful learning.”
“Having a number of trips and experiences, having children re-create what they see on trips, what they see in books, into real life,” he said, “We try to bring real-life examples in for children as much as possible.” Learn more: https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20170102/woodside/academy-of-the-city-charter-school-principal-richard-lee-interview
Learning Through Internships
Two ninth grade students from a Big Picture Learning school in the Highline School District share their experiences and a few takeaways from their high school internships in a blog post for Getting Smart. At Big Picture Learning schools, students complete internships in their areas of interest as part of a “place-based education” experience. Iris and Kemberly discuss the importance of communication, the value of having real world opportunities, and how exploring interests through work enhances academics. Read their post.
Library-to-Makerspace Transformation
In General McLane School District, libraries are incorporating makerspaces to enrich student learning and expand imagination and creativity, reports GoErie.com. The makerspaces allow student to “create, invent, discover – and most importantly, try something new through various tools and materials.” One of the elementary schools in the district has focused their makerspace on Science, Technology Engineering, Arts and Math (S.T.E.A.M.) learning. Read more about this transformation and how it is benefitting students: http://www.goerie.com/news/20170101/general-mclane-makerspaces-encourage-learning.
Diving into Deeper Learning Work in Six Minutes
The Student Experience Lab at the Business Innovation Factory put together a six minute and forty second presentation about their deeper learning work as part of the Hewlett Foundation’s “(un)convening” on deeper learning (more on that in the last Digest). This presentation, given in the PechaKucha style of twenty slides shown for twenty seconds each, focuses on the barriers and enablers of deeper learning in K-12 institutions. Check it out:
The ‘Deeper Learning Digest’ is a bi-weekly roundup of articles, blog posts, and other content around deeper learning. Be sure to follow @deeperlearning on Twitter and like Deeper Learning on Facebook to stay up to date on all deeper learning news.