“You get to create 3D models, do research, and exhibitions. You do projects. You come up with your own topics and problems. You create the questions and answer them. You write theme, plot, and character essays. You do visuals. [The teachers] don’t want it to be boring for you.”
Student at Vanguard High School68
What Students Need
As factory-model schools were designed, the curriculum was intended to cover a body of content—differentiated by track—transmitted to students largely for recall and reproduction. Guided by textbooks, it has often consisted of disconnected facts that are not deeply explored. Pacing guides assume that students all learn at the same rate, by absorbing information in the same way. Standardized tests often reinforce this approach by encouraging coverage of vast amounts of material and using superficial multiple-choice questions to assess students. Rather than feeling like drivers of their own learning, students understand that what is expected of them each day is to follow the teachers’ directions and complete a required set of tasks that may not be challenging, meaningful, or interesting to them. This factory-model approach is a major reason students say they disengage or drop out.69
We know from research in the learning sciences that students learn at different paces and in different ways that build on their prior experiences and connect to their interests, modes of processing and expression, and cultural contexts. Further, the most powerful mode of learning for human beings is generated by meaningful inquiry that awakens the brain to search for answers.70 An inquiry-oriented curriculum aimed at transferable learning—that is, learning that can be tapped and used in other settings—engages students and challenges them to understand concepts deeply, find and integrate information, assemble evidence, weigh ideas, and develop skills of analysis and expression.
Even well-intentioned efforts to ensure that all students learn to high standards can miss the most important part of the equation: the students themselves and their ability to make meaning of information, experience, and the world they live in so that they can use knowledge for their own purposes. Especially at the secondary level, students come to school with a wealth of knowledge, skills, habits, and views about the world and their role in it. As educator Deborah Meier explains, a good school should offer “a rich and interesting curriculum full of powerful ideas and experiences aimed at inspiring its students with the desire to know more, a curriculum that sustains students’ natural drive to make sense of the world and trusts in their capacity to have an impact upon it.”71
Key Practices
Learning Through Inquiry
Schools that motivate and succeed with diverse learners do not focus on getting through the textbook or touching topics superficially. They demand intellectually challenging work, and they are focused on preparing all students to meet the skill and content demands of college and careers—what is now known as deeper learning. Curriculum focuses not just on content expertise but on other essential competencies as well, including critical thinking and problem-solving, collaboration, effective communication, self-directed learning, and academic mindsets. (See Table 2.) In schools that enable students to learn deeply, students are typically asked to engage in inquiry in all classes, applying their learning to novel problems and tasks and producing significant pieces of analytic work, including research papers, projects, models, and designs.
Bob Moses, founder of the Algebra Project, used to say that in traditional classrooms, students often seem like spectators, watching the teacher perform. It should be the other way around, he said, with the students “on the field playing the game,” and the teacher acting as a coach.72 In inquiry-based teaching, lessons are often structured around essential questions that get to the heart of an issue and allow in-depth exploration. For example, a history class might approach a unit featuring student research on the European “discovery” of the Americas using a question such as, “How should we remember Christopher Columbus today?” Within individual lessons, teachers or students themselves can facilitate inquiry-based discussions during which students listen deeply to one another’s points of view, explore evidence, and agree or disagree with their peers’ analysis. Inquiry can also involve longer-term research projects in which, rather than just reporting information, students ask questions, consider alternatives, conduct analysis, and apply their knowledge.
Transforming from a school with… | Toward a school with… |
Transmission teaching of disconnected facts | Inquiry into meaningful problems that connect areas of learning |
A focus on memorization of facts and formulas | A focus on exhibitions of deeper learning |
Standardized materials, pacing, and modes of learning | Multiple pathways for learning and demonstrating knowledge |
A view that students are motivated—or not | An understanding that students are motivated by engaging tasks that are well supported |
A focus on individual work; consulting with others is “cheating” | A focus on collaborative work; consulting with others is a major resource for learning |
Curricula and instruction rooted in a canonical view of the dominant culture | Curricula and instruction that are culturally responsive, building on students’ experiences |
Tracking, based on the view that ability is fixed and requires differential curriculum | Heterogeneous grouping, based on the understanding that ability is developed in rich learning environments |
In inquiry-based classrooms, students are engaged in activities aimed at the mastery of facts as well as in-depth understanding. A student from Vanguard High School (a member school of the New York Performance Standards Consortium) explains how this impacts students:
You get to create 3D models, do research, and exhibitions. You do projects. You come up with your own topics and problems. You create the questions and answer them. You write theme, plot, and character essays. You do visuals. [The teachers] don’t want it to be boring for you.73
A student from another school explained how his humanities teacher took an inquiry-based approach by asking her students real questions and taking their answers seriously:
Some other teachers, when they ask a question, you know they’re looking for a certain answer. But when Amina asked a question, she was asking us a real question. She wouldn’t directly contradict students’ ideas, or gloss over them and move on if she thought they were not the right answer. She would try and build on them and try to get students to think critically about them and let students come to their own conclusions.74
Project-Based Learning
One form of inquiry-based teaching links curriculum topics to real-world issues through project-based learning, in which students are engaged in challenging tasks that usually involve knowledge and skills from more than one academic discipline. Many classes require students to do investigations that entail critical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, and communication. Students must engage in sustained inquiry, make choices about questions to explore, get critiques and make revisions, and present a real-world product to an authentic audience, including written documentation and, often, an oral presentation and defense.75 These tasks, which are key components of a performance assessment system, allow students to show that they have met high standards. (For more on performance assessment, see Feature 6: Authentic Assessment.)
A teacher at Vanguard High School in New York City explains how he prepares his students, most of whom come from low-income households, to engage in rigorous project-based learning of the sort that many students do not encounter until after high school:
I use in-depth approaches and assign college-level research projects. For 2 months, each morning, we teach students research skills and essay skills so that they can do a minimum 20-page research paper in history. They choose the topic. We develop their topic together. We develop an angle to the topic. I take them to the Donnell Library. First, I call the librarian and she gets books on their topics together. They browse through different books, take notes, and order their thoughts in an outline. Then, the kids have to listen to their teachers and peers criticizing their work. Then they have to rewrite. They have to cite references, show evidence, and prove their thesis.76
Project-based learning develops a wide range of language and collaboration skills, along with content knowledge. For this reason, it is used as a primary mode of instruction in the Internationals Network for Public Schools, which comprises more than 30 public secondary schools serving recent immigrant students from more than 100 countries in New York and New Jersey, the San Francisco Bay Area, and the Washington, DC, metro area. (See “In Practice: Project-Based Learning.”)
There is evidence that this kind of teaching can change student outcomes.77 For example, a study of more than 2,000 students in 23 restructured schools, most of them in urban areas, found much higher levels of achievement on complex performance tasks for students who experienced what these researchers termed “authentic pedagogy”—instruction focused on active learning in real-world contexts calling for higher-order thinking, consideration of alternatives, extended writing, and an audience for student work.78 An analysis of national data found that students in restructured schools where “authentic instruction” was widespread experienced greater achievement gains on conventional tests.79
Recent studies found that middle schoolers, including English learners, who participated in rigorous project-based learning in science outperformed their peers, and that high schoolers in Advanced Placement classes with project-based components did better on AP exams.80 As a result of these studies, the College Board is adding project-based components to many of its courses and using them as part of the assessment process.
Schools can demand rigorous intellectual work from students only if they are willing to forgo the goal of superficial content coverage. Successful schools follow the Coalition of Essential Schools’ guiding principle of “less is more,” carefully choosing what to focus on so students gain in-depth understanding rather than simply exposure to large quantities of information that may be poorly understood.81 In-depth study does not imply haphazard selection of a few interesting ideas to focus on. Instead, topics are judiciously selected to provide a framework for many related key ideas, so students come away with an understanding of the core concepts and modes of inquiry in the academic disciplines they are studying.
In effective schools that create a high-leverage and highly supported learning experience, “less is more” applies not only to curricular choices but also to the overall school program. The traditional high school often takes a “shopping mall” approach,82 offering many electives for students to choose without guaranteeing they will graduate with serious mastery of essential skills for college, career, and life. Effective schools make deliberate choices about what is most essential and do those important things well for all students. They also supplement their own core offerings with out-of-school experiences such as community service, internships, online courses, and courses at local colleges. These programs, which require partnerships with community-based organizations and other agencies, allow secondary schools to provide choices and give students the opportunity to understand the world in which they are growing up.
Linked Learning
Powerful learning is about making connections between what we already know and what we want to learn, between and among ideas and people, and between schoolwork and real-life contexts and goals. To make a rigorous deeper learning curriculum effective, teachers make strong efforts to link the curriculum to students’ own lives and interests, their communities, and their goals for the future.
Linking Curriculum to Students’ Experiences. Connecting curriculum to students’ experiences does not imply that the content is watered down or confined to the students’ own immediate concerns. Instead, assignments are designed to link students’ experiences to the demands of a liberal arts curriculum that blends classical studies with contemporary and multicultural elements to which students can relate. For example, students compare works by Henrik Ibsen and Anton Chekhov to pieces by Gabriel García Márquez and Toni Morrison. Sonia Sanchez sits alongside William Shakespeare. The study of constitutional rights is linked to issues students understand. As a teacher at Manhattan Village Academy, a high school in New York City, describes:
We try to relate historical issues to the present day. We connected Fourth Amendment rights to locker searches when a book bag was stolen. We discuss individual responsibility and what you want the government to take over. We discuss and debate to push them to develop their thoughts.
Similarly, calculations used on the basketball court can provide a foundation for certain math concepts if teachers are alert to support the transfer by building on this kind of real-world knowledge. Educators might also illustrate symbolic meanings in literature by beginning with rap lyrics and texts the students know and carrying their insights into study of more formal canonic texts.83
Linking curriculum to students also means knowing them well enough to understand their preconceptions about the concepts being studied, in some instances building on them and in others explicitly challenging them. There is a classic example among science teachers trying to teach students about the phases of the moon. Many people have a misconception that the moon’s phases are caused by the Earth casting a shadow over the surface of the moon. If this misconception is not explicitly unpacked by showing more accurate models to provoke a new understanding, students may sit through an engaging lesson about the phases of the moon and emerge still not knowing that the moon’s phases are actually caused by its positioning relative to the Earth and the sun.84 Good teachers understand that new learning sometimes requires taking the time to unlearn old ways of looking at the world.
Linking Learning to the Real World. Other linkages to the real world and to students’ interests are forged through community service and internships. These opportunities not only extend the curriculum and make it more authentic, but they also allow young people to become responsible, linking the experiences to their futures. Knowing that adolescents want and need to become more self-directed, it is important that schools not infantilize adolescents by treating them as if they need to be constantly monitored and controlled. Effective schools give young people progressively more responsibility so they can grow and take ownership of their own learning. As they are responsible for the welfare of others, they develop pride and confidence in themselves and greater maturity in their perspectives about others. Community service activities and internships allow students to explore their interests and future career goals, contribute to the lives of others, and learn how to engage the world outside of home and school. This real-world work, which is typically accompanied by seminars and reflective assignments that help students process what they are learning, is part of the authentic curriculum experience.
Dual enrollment, another effective way to link students to their futures, establishes connections with local community colleges that allow students to enroll in selected courses or even an entire course of study that prepares them for a vocational credential or a start on a particular major. These experiences enable students to gain insight into the demands of college study and help them prepare for it. Rather than teachers saying, “You’ll need this when you get to college,” students experience what they need firsthand, which can help them develop commitment to the learning process. Moreover, students who complete dual enrollment courses get college credit that is usually transferable, eliminating the need to take expensive Advanced Placement exams in the hope of gaining college units. Studies have shown that dual enrollment participation is positively related to college enrollment and persistence and higher college GPAs.85
All these features are part of the design of Linked Learning academies, which restructure high schools by connecting them to communities, career pathways, and college opportunities while personalizing the learning environment. The Linked Learning approach, which has launched more than 600 industry-themed pathways that prepare students for both college and careers, began in California and has spread to more than 20 states. It challenges a major source of historic high school segregation: the design of two very separate tracks—college prep and vocational education—differentiated by perceived academic ability as well as race and class. In a world where knowledge explosion and rapid technological change mean that the vast majority of jobs require some postsecondary education and where young people are predicted to change jobs at least 10 times in their lives, neither of these tracks provides students with all the knowledge and skills they need to thrive in today’s world. Linked Learning pathways reject this false choice by bringing together college and career preparation through:
- small learning communities that are personalized through advisement systems and curriculum design;
- rigorous academics that are aligned to admissions requirements for state colleges and universities and designed around authentic curriculum with real-world applications and performance assessments that show what students can do in applying their learning;
- industry partnerships in fields ranging from health professions to law and social justice to aviation to STEM to teaching and the arts that coconstruct career learning opportunities, making both academic and career courses more relevant by applying knowledge and skills to these contexts;
- work-based learning, providing students with exposure to workplaces through job shadowing, apprenticeships, internships, and more; and
- comprehensive support services, including counseling and supplemental instruction in reading, writing, and math, to address individual needs.86
Students of all incomes and prior achievement levels in Linked Learning academies have lower dropout rates, higher graduation rates, and higher college-going rates than students in traditional schools.87 These schools are successful because they support deeper learning in personalized settings that support equitable opportunities and outcomes, enabling students to connect to their futures.
School Profile: Connecting Students to Their Futures at Life Academy
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