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Quizizz | Free Online Quizzes, Lessons, Activities and Homework

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Motivate every student to mastery with easy-to-customize content plus tools for inclusive assessment, instruction, and practice. Engage students with Quizizz today!

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The Secret to Better Learning in the Classroom

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We know that creativity is vital for student learning. We also know that we tend to value the things we assess. However, when we assess creativity, we can unwittingly cause students to become risk-averse. So, how do we assess creativity in a way that encourages students to become more creative?

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Truth #1: If we don't assess it, we're likely to neglect it

When I wear my Apple Watch, I pay greater attention to my activity level throughout the day. I find myself standing up to move in order to get that "move" circle closed. I make sure I am standing up at least once an hour. By contrast, when I am not wearing my watch, I tend to sit down more often. The visual cues not only provide data but they also change my behavior. Similarly, for the last 18 months, I have tracked what I eat so I don't unintentionally fall back on old habits of mindlessly overeating or even choosing junk food as my go-to when I am feeling anxious.

I notice this in other areas of my life. I have progress bars that I use to gauge whether I am on track for various projects. Whether intentional or not, I notice the percentage of likes to dislikes on my YouTube videos. But it's not just quantitative data. When I am intentional about reflecting on how I am doing as a dad, I am more likely to set boundaries on my time and plan activities we can do together. When my wife and I have a deep conversation about our marriage, we are both more intentional about spending quality time together or writing each other notes or planning date nights (which is admittedly hard during the pandemic). While I wouldn't tend to think of these conversations or reflections as assessments (indeed, I would cringe at filling out a marriage rubric), at the core, that's what they are.

So in every facet of life, the areas we assess become the things we value. Similarly, we tend to assess the things we value. If you value money, you're more likely to check your bank accounts and retirement portfolio. If you value running, you are more likely to track your mileage - which, in turn, keeps you focused on running.

The same phenomenon is true in teaching. We value what we assess and we tend to assess what we value. A school might have a vision statement about developing lifelong learners who fall in love with learning. However, when teachers keep data charts on reading fluency or on benchmark test scores, there is a higher likelihood that teachers will teach to the test. Lifelong learning becomes a lofty goal but the frequent use of standardized tests can shift the focus away from the love of learning and toward higher academic achievement.

When we don't assess something, we tend to under-emphasize it. Students, in turn, might internalize the message that it's less important. So, while we may value creativity, if we don't assess it, we might neglect it. When I began as a self-contained teacher (teaching all subjects), I was far more likely to neglect creative thinking in math and language arts because these were tested subjects and I felt the pressure to have students score well on our district assessments. Creative work became the thing I would get to "when we have time for it." If I wasn't careful, I would treat creative work as a dessert rather than the main course. I was cautious about implementing project-based learning until I could see that it led to higher achievement gains. In other words, the school-wide focus on test scores reshaped my teaching.

So, we have this reality that we value what we assess. If we fail to assess something, we are far more likely to neglect it. It would seem, then, that teachers should assess student creativity.

Truth #2: Assessing creativity can backfire

When I first began crafting PBL units, I would create rubrics that included a category for creativity. I wanted students to value creative thinking. I would point out that section on the rubric and talk about the need for creative risk-taking. However, I noticed that certain students became risk-averse. What if their work wasn't creative enough? What if I gave them a low score? Students would ask for examples of a creative versus a non-creative project. A few teams would pull me aside and ask, "Is this creative enough?" or simply, "Is this what you're looking for?"

By assessing creativity, I had turned creative thinking into something high-stakes. Rather than focusing on the intrinsic enjoyment of the creative process, students were fixating on the extrinsic score of the rubric. They took fewer creative risks and engaged in less divergent thinking. They were far more likely to copy the exemplars rather than find their own creative voice. In a few cases, this external pressure led to higher performance and better creative thinking. These students wanted to prove how creative they could be. The rubric seemed to light a fire in them. But even then, most of these groups fixated on how I would perceive their creative work.

I was left with these dueling truths. On the one hand, if I didn't assess something, I would be likely to neglect it. On the other hand, when I gave students a score on the creativity of their project, it actually led to creative risk-aversion. At that point, I began to experiment with different ways of assessing creativity. I eventually realized that the issue isn't whether or not we should assess creativity so much as the way we assess creativity.

Three Key Shifts in Thinking About Assessing Creativity

Over time, I began to shift away from having me assess the creative product and toward having students assess their own creative process. Along the way, I made three key paradigm shifts in how I approached assessment and creativity.

Shift #1: Focus on the Creative Process rather than the Product or the Person

When I first added creativity to the project rubric, students grew risk-averse. They were worried that their finished work wouldn't be "creative enough." The fixation on the product actually led to a decrease in creative risk-taking. I've noticed the same thing in my own life. If I try to make something creative, I end up trying too hard. The end result is either something derivative or something overtly weird. This happens with avante-garde artists who focus too hard on trying to be different rather than trying to make something meaningful. It happens with authors who get stuck in their own head trying to avoid anything cliche who end up creating a novel that doesn't have any narrative structure at all.

There's a similar danger when people self-assess how creative they are as people. You end up with people who say, "I'm not really the creative type." But there's no such thing as a creative type. We're all creative. Every one of us. It's just that we often need a bigger definition of creativity.

Instead of focusing on the creativity of a product or treating creativity as an inherent personal trait, we can re-frame creativity as a process. It's not a singular process, either. Creativity involves things like:

divergent thinking and the ability to use creative constraint for new ideas

connective thinking and the notion of mash-ups

iterative thinking and the ability to make revisions

ideation and the ability to formulate new concepts

original thinking

lateral thinking and the idea of solving problems in a slower, more indirect way

problem-solving

hands-on prototoyping

communicating key ideas

empathy

inquiry and curiosity

creative risk-taking

experimentation and data gathering

This is by no means and exhaustive list. At first glance, these might seem like creative thinking skills. And that's certainly a part of it. But these are also processes that students can master and mindsets they can adopt. Empathy, problem-solving, and creative risk-taking are all specific actions in the creative process.

By focusing on the creative process, we move away from conversations about creative potential and toward the idea of creative momentum. This is the idea that we don't have a fixed amount of creative potential. It's not innate or tied to our personalities. Instead, creative thinking is a skill that we can develop over time.

Shift #2: Focus on Growth and Improvement Rather than Achievement

I once worked with a colleague who had students share their "epic fail" at the end of the class period. Students would use the sentence stem, "My epic fail was _____. I learned ______. Tomorrow I will try _______."

This approach might seem to promote lower academic standards. However, it actually led to better performance and an increase in creative risk-taking. Students internalized the difference between fail-ure and fail-ing.

I walked in one day and watched as this teacher pulled his name out of the cup. He said, "My epic fail was how I taught vocabulary. Students were confused. I learned that I need to simplify the process and make it visible. Tomorrow I will try a TPR approach." Students stood up and gave him a standing ovation. In this moment, he was modeling humility and creative risk-taking but he was also modeling a growth mindset:

I want students to have a growth mindset around creativity. I don't want to see students define creativity as an inherent, innate talent. So, as we think about assessing creativity, it's important that we focus on growth. For this reason, we might want to avoid having students compare their creative process to other students:

Instead, we can ask students to reflect on how they are growing as creative thinkers. This might include a reflection or a self-assessment survey. It might also include comparing their creative work (yes, I realize that this is a focus on the product and not the process) and examine their growth. They might even create portfolios where they share their work but also reflect on their process:

If students are focusing on growth and improvement, they are likely going to do so with a critical eye. So, how do we do this without leading to risk aversion? How do we help students apply a critical lens without falling into self defeat? One way is focus on assessment rather than grading. In other words, teachers can provide feedback on the creative process without assigning a specific grade to the assessment. Students will still value the feedback and focus on their creative process but they can do so without worrying about how it will be graded.

It also helps to ask what assessment strategies promote creative thinking. For example, the fixation on a single right answer in multiple choice tests might harm divergent thinking. However, a concept map might lead to deeper connective thinking and divergent thinking. Allowing students to revise and resubmit work might actually lead to greater creative risk-taking because students will feel the freedom to make mistakes.

Shift #3: Empower Students to Self-Assess Instead of Depending on the Teacher

When I look back at that failed rubric category, I realize that students were looking externally for an evaluation of their creativity instead of going inward through self-reflection. By focusing on the creative process and using feedback rather than grading, I was able to assess student creativity in a way that still promoted creative risk-taking. However, the biggest shift occurred when students began to engage in self-assessment. In life, most of our key growth occurs through self-assessment and peer assessment. This is why it helps to empower students to own the assessment process.

As we think about creativity, students can own the assessment process by reflecting on their creative thinking, filling out surveys on their creative process, or creating their own portfolios. However, self-assessment doesn't always need to be self-evaluation. It includes analysis and diagnosis, as students reflect on new ways to solve problems or different ways to engage in a creative work. Here, the assessment focuses less on "better" and more on "different." We might ask students a question like, "Is there a different way to solve that problem?" or even "How did you approach it this way versus last time?"

In some cases, assessment is descriptive and reflective. When students describe their creative process, it can take some of the judgement an risk-aversion out of the assessment process. Here, they might document their creative process in the form of a video or a podcast where they share what they are doing and what they are learning along the way.

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We Want Students to Be Creative, But How Do We Assess This?

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We know that creativity is vital for student learning. We also know that we tend to value the things we assess. However, when we assess creativity, we can unwittingly cause students to become risk-averse. So, how do we assess creativity in a way that encourages students to become more creative?

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Four key actions influence employee mind-sets and behavior. Here’s why they’re critical in achieving effective change management.

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From Stanford Online's "How To Learn Math for Teachers and Parents": Brain Plasticity

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Online Timer - Online Stopwatch [Free] | Toggl Track

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Free online timer and stopwatch for robust time clocking with start, pause and reset buttons. For advanced features, sign up for a free Toggl Track account.

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Visible Learning means an enhanced role for teachers as they become evaluators of their own teaching. Visible Teaching and Learning occurs when teachers see learning through the eyes of students and help them become their own teachers.

Visible Learning plus is a professional development programme for teachers. It provides an in-depth review and change model for schools based on John Hattie's research. With a seminar and support series the Visible Learning plus team helps schools to find out about the impact they are having on student achievement. www.visiblelearningplus.com

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Hattie Ranking: Teacher Effects - VISIBLE LEARNING

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Visible Learning means an enhanced role for teachers as they become evaluators of their own teaching. Visible Teaching and Learning occurs when teachers see learning through the eyes of students and help them become their own teachers. Visible Learning plus is a professional development programme for teachers.

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Listen to this post as a podcast:

Sponsored by Write About and Peergrade

Some of our most powerful instructional tools have been hanging around forever, just waiting for us to notice them.

One of those tools is the graphic organizer. It's so simple-just a few shapes and lines, nothing fabulous, no bells or whistles-and yet beneath its simplicity lies an absolute dynamo, a vehicle that can cement learning more firmly than a lot of the other stuff we try, in a lot less time.

Let's look at why graphic organizers are so powerful, explore some ways to use them that you may not have tried, and consider a few important tips for using them with the greatest impact.

Why Graphic Organizers Work So Well

According to Allan Paivio's theory of dual coding, humans process information in both visual and verbal form. When we see the word "book," we picture a book in our minds, because we've had plenty of real-life experiences with books. When we're learning new words or concepts, it's helpful to try to form mental images for those ideas to reinforce their meanings.

While some approaches like doodling and the mind's eye strategy apply this theory by having learners create physical and mental pictures of concepts, a graphic organizer keeps the words, but arranges them on a page visually so we better understand how concepts are related. Decades of research with various age groups and in different content areas has shown that in general, when graphic organizers are incorporated into instruction, student learning improves (Hall & Strangman, 2002).

Graphic organizers also help us meet the needs of all learners. Presenting information in both text and graphic formats is one of the most basic ways to make a lesson accessible to more students-the basis of Universal Design for Learning -and graphic organizers definitely fit the bill there. In fact, much of the research on graphic organizers has focused on how powerfully they can impact the learning of students with learning disabilities and special needs (Dexter, Park, & Hughes, 2011; Douglas, Ayres, Langone, & Bramlett, 2011).

10 Uses for Graphic Organizers

1. Note Taking

Have students use graphic organizers to take notes on their reading, when doing research, while watching a film, or while listening to a podcast. If you are already familiar with the content and how it's structured, you might choose or design an organizer ahead of time for students, which research says can be more effective and efficient than having students create their own. (See the Tips section below for more information on this.)

2. Lecture Support

Instead of giving a lecture with a standard PowerPoint or an outline, present your content in a graphic organizer. This will instantly give students a way to visualize how the concepts are related to each other. If students ever give their own presentations, have them try using graphic organizers to present their information.

3. Pre-Writing

Having students use graphic organizers to plan and structure their ideas before putting them into a draft is a common practice in English language arts classes. If you've never tried it, it's worth adding this into your writing process, especially if you teach a content area where writing isn't a regular part of student work. A warning: Do not treat the organizers as the writing piece; have students just jot notes down in these, rather than complete sentences. The bulk of student writing time should be spent actually drafting their piece.

4. Text Illustrations

When students do expository or argumentative writing, consider having them add a graphic organizer to their finished product to illustrate a concept in their piece. In this case, the organizer would NOT be a pre-writing tool, but a supportive diagram to aid in their own readers' comprehension. This may not work for all topics, but if a student is writing about how bees make honey, for example, a diagram that shows the process from flower to honey would go a lot further to help the reader understand than a downloaded image of a bee hovering over a flower. As students create diagrams to support their own texts, they will be more likely to pay attention to those that appear in the texts they read.

5. Pre-Reading

As students get older and are faced with more challenging texts, especially in content areas outside of English language arts, their comprehension gets a considerable boost if they are trained to identify the text structure prior to reading (Baxter & Reddy, 2007, p. 23). Some common text structures are compare and contrast, description, problem-solution, cause and effect, and sequence of events. Once the structure has been identified, students can complete a supporting graphic organizer while they read and fill in the components as they encounter them.

Another pre-reading graphic organizer is the KWL chart, which helps activate prior knowledge before reading and primes students to read with a purpose. KWL charts can work for any age group and can be used for single texts or at the beginning, middle, and end of an entire unit.

To read a comprehensive overview of research on graphic organizers as a reading strategy, see Manoli & Papadopoulou, 2012.

6. Assessment

Instead of assessing student learning with a quiz, try having students complete a graphic organizer that shows the relationships between various terms or concepts, or use this type of activity as one question on a quiz or assessment. Although this will not work for all content, it might be just right for evaluating whether a student understands the bigger picture of a body of content.

7. Thinking Tools

When we deliver content to students through lecture, readings, or video, our next step should be to have students interact with the content in some way. This can be accomplished with class discussions, lab work, or project-based learning. Another simple class activity that gives students a chance to grapple with the content is completing a graphic organizer: In groups, pairs, or even on their own, have students organize chunks of the content into graphic organizers, then compare their results to other groups. For example, if a foreign language class is studying vocabulary words for food, they could use a hierarchical organizer (like the one shown above) to organize "food" words into smaller groups, like meats, fruits, vegetables, and so on. This kind of sorting gives them more interaction with the terms and helps them work with similarities and differences, another powerful instructional strategy.

8. Unit Planning

When introducing a unit to students, show them how the parts of the unit fit together with a graphic organizer. Not only will this give them a sense of where you are in the unit at any given time, it should also help them understand why they are learning the individual parts. Bonus: Doing this exercise yourself could help you decide what concepts are most important for students to learn, and identify other things that may be "nice to know," but aren't necessarily vital to student understanding.

9. Classroom Management

Too often we hear "management" and think of dealing with problems, but a huge part of effectively managing a classroom is making your policies, procedures, and expectations crystal clear. Teachers often make signs listing class rules and procedures in writing, but putting the most important ones into graphic form will increase the likelihood that students will follow them.

10. Retrieval Practice

Just recently we covered the power of retrieval practice to help students learn and retain information more effectively. One retrieval practice technique is called a Brain Dump, where students try to recall as much as they can about a given topic, without the aid of any supporting texts. After doing the dump, students are then allowed to check their texts to confirm, correct, or add to the information they retrieved. But if we added a step-having students sort their dumped information into some kind of graphic organizer, possibly even working in pairs to do so- then have them go to the text, it could further solidify the benefit of the retrieval and help them get very clear on where they have gaps in their knowledge.

Tips for Using Graphic Organizers Effectively

Model how to use the organizers.
If students aren't taught how to use graphic organizers through teacher modeling and guided practice, they won't get much from them. So take the extra step and model their use.

Avoid complete sentences.
Unless you have a very good reason to insist that students use complete sentences on their organizers, don't do it. Complete sentences take up too much space, they take longer to write, and the effort to hold students accountable misses the whole point of the organizer. Show students how to use bullet points and sentence fragments to get ideas down and show how they are related.

For complex material, consider teacher-generated organizers.
In a 2007 study, students who were presented with author-created graphic organizers along with reading materials produced evidence of deeper learning in less time than those who had to produce their own graphic organizers (Stull & Mayer, 2007). When you present these to students, consider filling them only partially and having students complete the rest; this has been shown to help students recall information more effectively and teach them how to take graphic organizer notes on their own (Robinson et al., 2006).

Let students color outside the lines. Literally.
As sketchnotes grow in popularity, educators are starting to recognize the power of doodling as a learning tool. Graphic organizers can be enhanced with small doodles and other notes that fall outside the basic structure of the organizer. As long as the student can still see the original structure and the drawings make sense to him or her, these "enhanced" organizers can reinforce concepts even more deeply.

Offer a variety of organizers for day-to-day use.
Once students become familiar with a certain type of organizer, they may find other uses for it that you haven't even thought of. If you make these available to them in the same way that you might provide dictionaries or pencil sharpeners, you might find that students start using them even when they haven't been assigned.

Want Them Ready-Made?

My Graphic Organizer Multi-Pack contains 15 beautiful designs, all done on editable PowerPoints and Google Slides, so you can customize them to suit your needs. The pack also includes video tutorials that show you exactly HOW to customize them. Click here to get a pack for your classroom!

References:
Baxter, S., & Reddy, L. (2007). What content-area teachers should know about adolescent literacy. National Institute for Literacy. Retrieved from https://lincs.ed.gov/publications/pdf/adolescent_literacy07.pdf. PDF

Dexter, D. D., Park, Y. J., & Hughes, C. A. (2011). A meta‐analytic review of graphic organizers and science instruction for adolescents with learning disabilities: Implications for the intermediate and secondary science classroom. Learning Disabilities Research & Practice, 26(4), 204-213. PDF

Douglas, K. H., Ayres, K. M., Langone, J., & Bramlett, V. B. (2011). The effectiveness of electronic text and pictorial graphic organizers to improve comprehension related to functional skills. Journal of Special Education Technology, 26(1), 43-56. PDF

Hall, T., & Strangman, N. (2002). Graphic organizers. Wakefield, MA: National Center on Accessing the General Curriculum. Retrieved March 20, 2009. PDF

Manoli, P., & Papadopoulou, M. (2012). Graphic organizers as a reading strategy: Research findings and issues. Creative education, 3(03), 348. PDF

Robinson, D. H., Katayama, A. D., Beth, A., Odom, S., Hsieh, Y. P., & Vanderveen, A. (2006). Increasing text comprehension and graphic note taking using a partial graphic organizer. The Journal of Educational Research, 100(2), 103-111. PDF

Stull, A. T., & Mayer, R. E. (2007). Learning by doing versus learning by viewing: Three experimental comparisons of learner-generated versus author-provided graphic organizers. Journal of Educational Psychology, 99(4), 808. PDF

There's more where this came from.
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The Great and Powerful Graphic Organizer

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Listen to this post as a podcast: Sponsored by Write About and Peergrade Some of our most powerful instructional tools have been hanging around forever, just waiting for us to notice them. One of those tools is the graphic organizer.

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Getting it Together: from colonies to Federation is a Museum of Australian Democracy schools learning product where students use historical sources such as newspaper extracts, cartoons, speeches and biographies in a series of classroom activities.

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By Shaun Killian (MEd, MLead)
In his book, Hattie synthesised over 500,000+ studies related to student achievement. This expansive synthesis concluded that:

Teachers can make a difference even in challenging circumstances

Most teaching practices have some degree of positive impact on learning

Some teaching practices have far more impact than others

Some factors and practices have a negative impact on learning

According to Hattie: What Should Teachers Do?

John Hattie discovered that teachers are far more likely to have a large and positive impact if they:

What Should You Avoid Doing?

According to the research that John Hattie collated and shared, teachers and schools should generally avoid:

Repeating students

Whole language

Labelling students

Lowering expectations

Open classrooms

What Types of Teaching Strategies Work Best?

From analysing this vast collection of research, John Hattie concluded that learning is enhanced when:

Teaching was focused on and responsive too students learning

Teachers are clear about what they want their students to learn and select teaching approaches accordingly

Explicitly explaining what students need to understand and demonstrating what they need to be able to do is critical

Teachers get students to mentally engage with the material the students need to learn

Teachers give meaningful feedback to their students

What You Teach Matters Too

While John Hattie emphasised how you can have more impact by focusing on how you teach, that wasn't the whole story. He also found that curriculum matters too.

In general, the research that Hattie reviewed revealed that the curriculum should be well-structured and systematically sequenced.

At a more specific level, the research supported teaching:

Knowledge and the vocabulary associated with it

Phonics and phonemic awareness

Creativity

Visual perception

Self-regulation and meta-cognition

Hattie's review of research did not support teaching perceptual motor programs.
In a nutshell, Hattie advises teachers to focus on:
Hattie in a Nutshell

What you can control - there is no doubt that many factors can help or hinder students success at school. While some of these factors are outside your control, focus on those one you can control or at least influence

Learning - know what you want your students to learn, know where they are currently at and then focus on closing the gap

Teaching - choosing strategies that are likely to have the highest impact, monitor your impact and adjust your teaching accordingly.

For a full and up-to-date list of Hattie's influences on student achievement, visit Visible Learning Metax

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Hattie and His High-Impact Teaching Strategies: A Summary

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By Shaun Killian (MEd, MLead) In his book, Hattie synthesised over 500,000+ studies related to student achievement.

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You can't search for something you've already found, can you? In the case of deeper learning, it appears we've been doing just that: aiming in the dark at a concept that's right under our noses.

"Sometimes our understanding of deep learning isn't all that deep," says Maryellen Weimer, PhD, retired Professor Emeritus of Teaching and Learning at Penn State. "Typically, it's defined by what it is not. It's not memorising only to forget and it's not reciting or regurgitating what really isn't understood and can't be applied."

Here's another: "Deeper learning is the process of learning for transfer, meaning it allows a student to take what's learned in one situation and apply it to another."

If all this sounds familiar, that's because it is. It describes the aim of every reasonably devoted educator since the dawn of time. But therein lies the problem: aim and execution are two very different things. When it comes to deeper learning, we're aiming for something we understand fully in theory but barely at all in practice. What was once a pedagogical fantasy is now an indispensible necessity, and it's time for us to wake up.

A Good Approach By Any Other Name...

Right, says Berger, but have we been doing it all along?

Deeper learning recommends teaching strategies that have long been considered good practice, like project-based learning, long-term cumulative assessments, advisory courses, and block scheduling. These practices aren't new, but they're not being practised, either. They've been devalued.

"The push in [education] has been so deeply around accountability based on high-stakes assessments that educators have become more and more fearful that the kind of going deeper [learning emphasised by deeper learning] has not been celebrated and prioritised," says Berger. A high-achieving educational institution in this country, he says, is one with high test scores. The goal of deeper learning is to expand that measure of achievement to include more than just standardised tests.

What separates the deeper learning method from traditional methods, says AIR fellow Jennifer O'Day, is a systemic, institution-wide dedication to pursuing communication and "soft" skills-which sometimes get pushed to the back burner as standards are increasingly tied to test scores-just as aggressively as mastery of academic content.

Deeper learning, then, is also about deeper commitment. It's about shedding our resistance to "another new name of something that's being forced on us" and recognising the affirmation of some of our longest-held instincts. This is the real deal, folks. And there's plenty of evidence to back it up.

Deeper Learning in Practice

In New South Wales, the deeper learning movement has been spreading its roots since 2011. The Catholic Education Diocese of Parramatta, a system of almost 80 academic institutions and 40,000 students, was one of the first systems to adopt the technique. At Parramatta Marist High School, one of the diocese's leading institutions, the students themselves sing the praises of deeper learning.

One seventh grader spoke about how working in small teams helped shy students make friends more easily. Students who otherwise would hold back in a large discussion tend to open up in small groups, he told Wise.

Many noted that students would often teach each other. Student-led tutorials permitted each individual's skills to complement others'. "One student observed that in traditional lecture [courses], he 'just wrote down for no reason.' Now he is linking information to what he needs to know."

As an added bonus, Wise observed a direct relationship between deeper learning and digital learning.

"While pedagogy and a culture of learning clearly dominated at both the Catholic high school and elementary school I visited that day, underneath both learning systems was a strong technology foundation." Quoting Greg Whitby, he adds, "The importance of technology is to personalise education. Multimedia is a real hook in the digital age. It makes kids the co-creators of knowledge."

The case extends to online learning settings, too. At the Sydney Distance Education High School, leaders are implementing the same deeper learning concepts-only in a largely digital environment.

"The very structure of digital learning-personalising education, competency-based, 24-7 learning, and the ability for constant communication-makes this a powerful learning tool for deeper-learning strategies," administrators say.

Like the United States, Australia relies largely on standardised testing. Just because the institutions Wise visited are "nongovernment institutions" doesn't mean their students can skip the Australian national exams. That's not the point, anyway. The point is this: adopting the deeper learning method has actually improved these students' test scores.

And it's doing the same thing in the U.S.

O'Day, who co-led the study, says it's the first of its kind to provide data-driven incentives for educators to adopt institution-wide deeper learning.

"This is not some fluke," she says. "It is what happens inside the [institutions] for the kids and the kinds of opportunities they have that makes a difference to these outcomes."

These are the same opportunities that make up a typical day at High Tech High Chula Vista in California, where in math students study the relationship between surface and volume in a piece of origami; in world history they demonstrate what they've learned about ancient Egypt by writing and illustrating a children's book; and in science lab they're test-firing the rocket they built in partnership with their peers. Course projects require students to learn across disciplines so that they understand the connections between academics and the world in which they live and will some day work.

Contrast this with a long day at a public academy in San Diego, where students are expected to earn good grades, prepare for higher education, and work well with others.

It's that job readiness factor-the ability to navigate the real world with relevant knowledge and problem solving skills-that makes deeper learning so effective.

"It's an approach that should be championed by everyone concerned about the future of high-quality job creation," says Meier Wright, former California secretary of trade & commerce. "I say this as someone who has worked for more than 25 years with entrepreneurs and civic and business leaders to create fertile ground for the growth of major employers statewide. Virtually every task force, every economic summit and every conversation about our success was influenced by our need for a well-educated workforce."

Here's How You Can Make It Work For You

What constitutes a deep learning strategy? It's a question that deserves some serious consideration. Take a look at the following five principles and give some thought to what you might add.

1. The Three Competencies

2. Test Format

Cognitively passive learning behaviours (surface learning approaches):
I attended my course.
I reviewed my course notes.
I made index cards.
I highlighted the text.

Cognitively active learning behaviours (deep learning approaches):
I wrote my own study questions.
I tried to figure out the answer before looking it up.
I closed my notes and tested how much I remembered.
I broke down complex processes step-by-step.

Stanger-Hall included both kinds of behaviours on a survey that she had students complete at the beginning, during, and at the end of a course. Her students identified which of the behaviours they were using as they prepared for course exams. Stanger-Hall wanted to document whether having to answer some test questions not formatted as multiple-choice questions changed the approaches students said they were using to study. Her data show that it did. Not only did students in the experimental group use more of the deep learning approaches, but their exam scores were significantly better than those in the control group.

"Until teachers stop relying on questions that can be answered with details plucked from short-term memory," observes Weimer, who wrote about the report in a recent Faculty Focus blog post, "there isn't much chance that students will opt for the deep learning approaches."

3. Predicting and Retrieving

He cites a 2009 article in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in which researchers gave participants test questions on subject matter before they had the opportunity to study or learn it correctly. One of the researchers' interests was determining whether incorrect answers on a pre-test (which are likely to happen when the subjects have not yet been exposed to the material) would create further difficulties for the learner down the line. In other words, if learners gave a wrong answer on a pre-test, would that answer stick in their heads and make them more likely to repeat it on subsequent exams?

Not only did the researchers discover that wrong answers on pre-tests do not interfere with subsequent learning; they also discovered that asking learners questions about subject matter before they learned it actually improved their performance on subsequent tests. The authors speculate that this happens because an initial attempt to construct a response to a question create[s] a fertile context for encoding the answer when it is presented.

Lang also cites a substantive body of research around the power of retrieval practice, also sometimes called the "testing effect." In one demonstration, described in a 2008 article in Science magazine, researchers had participants memorise 40 English-Swahili word pairs over the course of a single day of studying and testing. When they brought the participants back a week later to give them a final test on the word pairs, they found that those who had taken multiple tests on all 40 word pairs remembered more than twice as many of the pairs as those who had more study time and fewer tests. Results like these have been replicated in dozens of other contexts and settings, and at all levels of education.

4. Source Diversity

5. Curriculum-Wide Adoption

Most importantly, educators must be given enough time to create a thoughtful deeper learning curriculum. In many countries, Darling-Hammond says, educators are allotted 15 to 20 hours a week just dedicated to curriculum creation. It's a simple formula-one that we've been looking for but already know: The deeper the commitment, the deeper the learning.

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Deeper Learning: What Is It and Why Is It So Effective?

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Discover the power of Deeper Learning and its effectiveness in education. Explore its benefits and impact on student success. Learn more now.

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If it takes a village to raise a child, how large a community does it take to transform an entire education system?

That's the question that a consortium called Deeper Learning Dozen (DLD) is attempting to answer by bringing together a dozen superintendents from districts across the United States and Canada committed to creating equitable, accessible deeper learning experiences for their students and teachers.

The DLD founded by Harvard Graduate School of Education Professor Jal Mehta and educator John Watkins, Ed.D.'97, in part based on Mehta's decade-long hunt for innovative examples of deeper learning - educational experiences where students develop mastery, identity, and creativity.

"There are a lot of teachers and some great schools doing great work around deeper learning, but very few examples at the district level," Mehta says. While they are harder to spot, there are district leaders interested in working to upend traditional learning environments, and Mehta and Watkins selected 12 to come together as a network, to share deeper learning experiences, refine new ideas, and to scale change.

"Jal and I both came in with the aspiration of fundamental district transformation and the reality that that has never worked and is incredibly difficult to do," Watkins says. "We didn't think we had the answer, but we thought the best way to tackle the problem was to get together a group of like-minded superintendents and their leadership teams and see what we could learn together."
>> Watch a video of the third Deeper Learning Dozen Community of Practice Convening held in Cowichan, British Columbia in 2019
Through initial funding from the Hewlett Foundation, and current funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Grantmakers for Thriving Youth Policy Working Group, and the Stuart Family Foundation, the DLD originally began with a plan to work with 12 districts for three years. Now, the program is entering its fourth year with no plans to slow down. The group is also starting to share the impact its partners are having with folks beyond the dozen with the release of a new podcast.

"The way schools are organized is not aligned with the best of what we know about learning," Mehta says. "Schools were designed to sort, batch-process, and reproduce racial and socio-economic privilege. We're working with people to transform and humanize schools and the larger institutions that house them."

Three original DLD partners - the Abbotsford School District in British Columbia, Revere (Massachusetts) Public Schools, and Jeffco Public Schools in Colorado - offer prime examples of the innovative efforts of district leaders working to transform their schools. Mehta says the superintendents in each of these districts reflect "the desire and courage to do something new."

"We said, there's an approach to help you realize what you already feel inside, and they were ready for the kinds of things we were saying," Mehta says. "We didn't have all the answers, and we learned a lot from them, and they from each other."

Together, DLD partners are guided by three distinct principles: that equity (and inequity) is structural; that adult and student learning happens in symmetry; and that leadership accelerates the emergence of deeper learning. A look inside the work done by the leaders in Abbotsford, Revere, and Jeffco show how these ideas have been put into action to transform their school systems.

Abbotsford School District

About 45 minutes east of Vancouver you'll find Abbotsford, British Columbia, one of the most ethnically diverse cities in Canada. For the last decade, its schools have become known as innovators in transforming their education system, in particular by ensuring that their community diversity is reflected in student learning.

For a decade, Abbotsford Superintendent Kevin Godden has been working to completely overhaul the district's curriculum, which he described as "a mile wide and an inch thick," to give students a chance to really explore topics about which they are passionate.

"One of the knocks on the curriculum was that the learning outcomes were too many and they weren't really connected to the lives of our kids," Godden says. Teachers now have the time to dive deep into the curriculum, and students can discover areas that are topical and meaningful.

One of the significant ways the school has accomplished this is by weaving Indigenous history and culture into all subject matters. Those efforts were spurred by Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which encouraged not only incorporating Indigenous curriculum but to utilize Indigenous teaching methods and consult with Indigenous elders.

While the curriculum helps Indigenous students find greater connection and meaning in their learning, Godden says it has supported all students in finding new ways to learn. As a former teacher himself, Godden says he is thrilled with how the Indigenous curriculum has transformed schools in Abbotsford, but the change is also a stark reminder of the DLD principle that inequity is structural to all school systems.

"As a former teacher, it's with great sadness that I followed the old curriculum and taught Indigenous students and feel I did them a tremendous disservice," Godden says. "We have these structures we've built over time and because we're in it, we don't notice, and we create these inequities. Unless we can be thoughtful about it, we can't disrupt it."

Today, Abbotsford works closely with the Indigenous population of the Sumas First Nation and Matsqui First Nation, on whose land the schools are located. Teachers are trained to deliver Indigenous curriculum and, through funding by the Canadian government to support this work, the district features an Indigenous Education Department, comprised of Indigenous administrators and cultural support workers who serve as guides for teachers to add historic and local context to lessons.

"We've been on this journey, in particular in British Columbia, about what it means to make learning more meaningful and experiential, and not hold kids victim to a school system created for the 19th century," says Godden.

The DLD has been an important resource supporting Abbotsford's work to deeply engage students and teachers in disrupting past learning practices, but it has also been a tremendous experience for Godden personally. He credits the DLD with helping him bring the love he had for teaching into his role as a district leader.

"I count myself a pretty capable teacher, but I also lamented the joy I lost when I stopped teaching kids," Godden says. "Thinking like a teacher is what the DLD brought back to me, and to bring that same joy to my interaction with my principals and my board."

Revere Public Schools

Revere Public Schools in Massachusetts has enjoyed nearly a quarter century of steady leadership. Dianne Kelly is only the third superintendent of the district in that time, having started off as a high school math teacher 27 years ago. This past year she finished her sixth as superintendent.

Over that time, the district has revitalized teacher engagement, revamping everything from educator evaluations to career ladders for teachers, and their efforts to get teachers a voice at the table in decision making aligned perfectly with the DLD.

"It's created a culture of stability and a common vision," Kelly says, crediting her predecessors for helping to establish the foundation for a community that embraces teacher leadership. But under Kelly, educator empowerment has truly thrived.

For her, it was natural then that the DLD principle of adult learning and student learning being symmetrical would resonate so strongly, and she says that after all the work the district had done, joining the DLD showed her how much more they could be doing.

When students are engaged in deeper learning, their voice is at the center of their learning, giving them opportunities to direct their learning to topics that interest them, she says. Teachers had started to receive similar choice, like being able to select which professional development topics to cover over the course of the school year.

"But we hadn't explored it as deeply at the adult level," Kelly says. "We hadn't embraced fully the whole idea of deeper learning, of exploring and delving deeply into a topic."

What they came up with was a new program called Colleague 2 Colleague (C2C). Teachers who are experts in an area of focus can apply to become consulting teachers. If selected, they are relieved of their academic duties for two years and are partnered with participating teachers to focus on a particular topic.

While many schools offer programs like math and literacy coaches, C2C is unique in both its expectations for teachers and its scope. While coaches often move on to administrative positions, consulting teachers intentionally are able to return to the classroom after two years, where they can bring with them the new ideas and resources developed as consultants.

The program also covers a wider variety of fields, like a social worker who recently consulted with teachers to think about how to embed mindfulness in their lessons. "To extend to other ideas and areas is a unique piece of it, and for teachers to have the leeway to explore," Kelly says.

That freedom has been a large part of the success of the program, and Kelly credits her teachers who have gone in front of the school committee over the years to share why it's been such a rewarding experience for both themselves and their students, helping convince the district to expand the program.

Kelly says her experience in the DLD gave her important insights into how to convince folks who are often skeptical at first about deeper learning.

"It's really helpful to hear what other superintendents' experiences are and how they've overcome challenges. The larger challenge around deeper learning work is that it's nontraditional. It doesn't feel familiar to school committees and parents," she says. "It takes a level of patience to make something take hold."

Jeffco Public Schools

The Jefferson County School District in Colorado is a study in contrasts. It serves a wide geographical area, from the western edge of Denver to the rural foothills of the Rockies.

The schools that make up the district are just as varied, including neighborhood schools that uniquely reflect their communities, to charter schools focused on Montessori and Core Knowledge curriculum, to option schools focused on experiential learning and technical training.

To say it is a challenge to get all these different schools to agree on anything is an understatement according to former Jeffco Superintendent Jason Glass. So, as he thought about how to transform the instructional model of the district, he knew he wouldn't be able to simply hand down a directive.

"There is a longstanding tradition of site-based decision making in Jeffco," says Glass. "There is a huge variety of different instructional philosophies operating in the district, and the community appreciates that diversity, so we needed a way to talk about changing the experience of the students that transcended the different approaches."

What Glass landed on was the daily student task - that time when the teacher hands work over to the student, typically to solve a problem or practice a concept. It's a feature of every school day, whether in a traditional public school or a Montessori classroom, and a moment that could be changed across the district to provide students more engaging, authentic learning.

Through his Transforming the Task initiative, Glass asked teachers at every school to think about student activities, like worksheets that mostly encouraged memorization or repetitive procedures, and turn them into something more valuable.

"We talked about what was under the hood of [daily] student tasks and how we could change the work into a project-based and problem-based model, and intentionally include deeper learning skills," Glass says, including communication, entrepreneurship, innovation, and a student's own life experiences.

Glass' efforts at the district level are a prime example of the third principle of the DLD, that leadership accelerates emergence. Glass says rather than forcing change on everyone, he sought out examples where deeper learning had successfully been instituted and used those schools and leaders as examples and inspiration for others in the district.

"There was no way we could mandate things from the district level and think it would happen," says Glass, who, in a new role as commissioner of education for the Kentucky Department of Education, is continuing as the first state level member of the DLD. "The idea of emergence and solutions coming from the practitioners helped us reframe our work to support and highlight the places making breakthroughs."

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How Deeper Learning Can Transform Schools

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Twelve districts in the United States and Canada are remaking their schools to bring deeper learning for all, and their stories could change the entire field.

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The Universal Learning Programme - PASSION

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The Universal Learning Programme - MASTERY

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Let's teach for mastery -- not test scores | Sal Khan

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Stop searching for your passion | Terri Trespicio | TEDxKC

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More Important: Talent or Good Character?

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A few months into my career at Facebook, my manager, Yishan, found out that I was rubbing my colleagues the wrong way. Turned out that I was a jerk, and I didn't even know it!

Left unimproved, this would have thwarted my ability to contribute at Facebook. Fortunately, to my great luck and eternal appreciation, Yishan was determined to see me succeed. First, he asked all of my colleagues for specific feedback about how I was doing-the good, the bad, even the ugly. He then typed up that feedback, printed it out, and asked me to go through it in detail. My homework was to extract the major themes and write a short essay on each one.

While initially a hard pill to swallow, seeing such a clear reflection-and, more importantly, having space to reflect on how to improve-was ultimately both humbling and inspiring. The final list of essays read like a "Management 101" course: listening to feedback, sharing credit, focusing on "we" instead of "me." I had my work cut out for me.

With Yishan's help and support, I chose one theme to tackle first. Along the way, the two of us met regularly, during which Yishan "held space" for me, asked probing questions, and guided me toward specific goals, without interjecting his own ego. Once one theme was sufficiently addressed, I chose another, and then the next. Six months later, he asked the same colleagues what they thought of working with me, and many said they felt like they were working with a completely different person. They liked this person better.

That experience marked a major turning point in my life, fundamentally changing the way I relate to others and even myself. And it's just one example of how effective coaching can have a profound impact on not only the lives of your teammates, but on your entire company.

Branches on the tree: what coaching is (and isn't)

A company is a group of people who come together to achieve a goal. So it makes sense that helping the people you hire reach their full potential is an extremely effective strategy. In fact, one study found that leadership coaching delivers an ROI of 5.7 times the cost.

Companies traditionally draw org charts with the CEO at the top, an illustration depicting managers giving commands to reports. But a more empowering view is to think of an organization like a tree, with the CEO on the bottom. The individual contributors are the fruit-the people doing the work-and managers are their supportive branches. Coaching is a key tool for ensuring your teammates fully ripen.

Coaching can be defined as "a development process whereby an individual meets on a regular basis to clarify goals, deal with potential stumbling blocks, and improve their performance." In other words, you can help people become better versions of themselves by holding space for them to solve problems and accomplish goals. This should happen over the course of a series of one-on-one sessions that occur at a regular cadence. Unlike your regular weekly 1:1s, these meetings should be specifically dedicated to coaching.

I've found coaching to be most effective in addressing three areas:

1. solving problems

2. developing and achieving long-term goals

3. improving performance

This takes patience and empathy: Always remember that your teammates are people, not computers whose software you're upgrading. But it's worth it. Not only will your team be more capable and better retained, but you'll grow too, as teaching is one of the most effective ways to learn.

1. Problem-solving: Teaching your team to fish

When a teammate comes to their manager with a problem that needs solving, many leaders' first instinct is to give them advice on what to do. If you're good at something that someone else is struggling with, it's only natural to say, "Here's what I would do." But that's at best a short-term solution. When you simply give advice, your teammates never learn how to solve similar problems for themselves in the future.

Instead, you want to "teach them how to fish." To adapt the famous saying, "Give your team a solution, and you empower them for today; teach your team how to solve problems, and you empower them for a lifetime."

Start with active listening: when your teammate brings up the problem they need to solve, reflect back on what they're saying ("What I hear you saying is..."). Sometimes just hearing a problem relayed back inspires someone to realize they already know the answer.

Think of an organization like a tree, with the CEO on the bottom. The individual contributors are the fruit-the people doing the work-and managers are their supportive branches. Coaching is a key tool for ensuring your teammates fully ripen.

Next, ask probing open-ended questions that can help them come to the answer themselves. Walk them through the thought process you would use. Tell them about your own experiences, and how you've seen similar situations go down. Give a specific solution to the problem only as a last resort.

I was once coaching a person on my team who was struggling with another teammate's perceived unwillingness to take feedback. I asked her questions like, "Can you give me an example?" "Is there a chance the opposite of your assessment is also true?" "How do you want him to feel?" "How can you help him to feel that way?" Through this conversation, she came to her own conclusion about how to approach her teammate: Reassuring him about her respect for him without sacrificing directness.

2. Goal-setting: Big hairy audacious goals

Anyone on a career track should have concrete long-term goals. As a coach, it's your job to help them identify those goals and then set them on a realistic path toward achieving them, with a timeline of concrete milestones along the way.

For example, a long-term goal might be to take on new responsibilities that are more aligned with their passions; you can help them identify the skills they need to develop to achieve that, and what projects they could take on to develop those skills gradually. As you do this, it's important to align your teammate's priorities with the wider goals of the team.

Different people have different goals, so you need to listen and probe to understand each person deeply. One person might want more responsibility, another may want to master their craft, or be a better communicator, or become a leader, or increase their productivity, or feel more confident. What obstacles will they need to overcome? What habits do they need to outgrow? You can ask them to introspect on these questions, and you can add your own answers based on your experience.

Many people need help figuring out possible goals, especially when they're early in their careers; they may not know what their career options are. Throughout the course of these conversations, try to unearth their real goals, not just their stated ones. Many people will say that they want to become managers, when their real goal is to have more influence and recognition; you can help them identify other paths to achieving that goal.

Once goals have been identified, it's your job to help set realistic expectations about how long it will take to achieve them. Create intermediate milestones and a plan for tracking progress towards them. Emphasize the value of the journey, rather than being focused on the particular outcome. Ultimately, they should develop their own framing and phrasing of the goal, but you should provide a lot of feedback and input.

I often like to set "BHAGs" with teammates-big hairy audacious goals, moonshot aspirations that at first seem impossible to reach. In early 2014, I was coaching Tyson, the designer on our mobile team. His goal was to do world-class design, but at the time, our mobile apps were only so-so. The BHAG we came up with was for Asana to be recognized as having one of the best mobile apps in the world. Since then, thanks to a team effort to which Tyson was central, we've won many mobile design awards, including Google's own Material Design Award. This may never have happened if Tyson's goal had been to just "make Asana mobile better."

3. Performance improvement: Tough conversations

An inevitable part of any leader's role is to give constructive feedback to a teammate when something isn't going the way it should be. These can go poorly if done without mindfulness; if done well, they can be a huge source of growth and gratitude.

In these conversations, it's important for them to know you're on their side. Be empathetic and maintain eye contact in order to maintain a consistent and trustworthy presence. Disclosing your own weaknesses ("I totally get it; I've been there") can help create a space of trust.

Energetically, you want to be centered. That is, you want to avoid leaning back: beating around the bush, sheepishly prefacing with "Oh, hey, this isn't a big deal, but..." But you also want to avoid leaning forward: scolding aggressively, making the situation feel dire. Instead, remain in your center, like a calm mountain. Be direct, without judgment.

Speak objectively about what you've observed and about your own experience. "I see you doing X. When you do X, I feel Y." Explain why this matters to you-how you think the issue is impacting their effectiveness or the success of the team. Listen deeply to their perspective on it, and be genuinely open to having your mind changed. Help them come to actionable steps about how they can change. Create homework. Then, check in on next steps, homework, and your sense of progress at every 1:1 until you mutually agree the issue feels resolved. Once it is, celebrate!

An inevitable part of any leader's role is to give constructive feedback to a teammate when something isn't going the way it should be.

I once worked with a leader who seemed to be lacking intellectual curiosity. I would see people share good ideas with them, and they would smile and nod, but the ideas never made it into the plan. I don't think they even realized they were doing it. So I gave them feedback. I collected examples anonymously from several people, including their descriptions of what happened as well as how it made them feel. I set up a meeting dedicated to working through this feedback, and compassionately shared the examples I'd collected, as well as my own experience: "When I share an idea with you and don't engage with it, I feel discouraged. I wish that when ideas were put forth, you took the time to actually consider them, and, if you don't like the idea, to at least explain your reasoning."

And it worked: they had been blind to this pattern and hearing how their behavior affected others stoked a new self-awareness. But had I given the feedback less skilfully, I'm not sure it would have landed: leaning too far ("You're not listening!") may have triggered unproductive defensiveness. Leaning too far back (mentioning the problem in passing without clear examples) may have just given them one more piece of feedback for them to ignore.

Coaching is a competitive advantage

In Atul Gawande's TED talk on the importance of coaching, he recounts the origin of coaching in sports: "In 1875, Harvard and Yale played one of the very first American-rules football games. Yale hired a head coach; Harvard did not. The results? Over the next three decades, Harvard won just four times. Harvard hired a coach."

The bottom line: As leader of a team, you want your team to succeed in accomplishing its mission. You've likely put in a lot of effort to find and recruit the talented people you're working with. It's worth it to continue investing in them, to help them be as great as they can be, both for the sake of your project, and for the sake of their natural desire to become great at what they do. Coaching is a highly leveraged way to up your team's game, making you better and better at doing great things together.

***
Ready to implement a few of these practices? Here are a set of questions to guide your coaching sessions:
Assessing how things are going:

How are you feeling?

What went well this week?

What's exciting to you right now?

What's bugging you?

What are your priorities?

What are your goals? Specific action plans for working toward each one?

What are the biggest challenges you currently face?

How can I and the organization can assist you?

Is there anything preventing you from an unqualified "yes" to the question, "Is this organization the place where I can do my best work?" What obstacles can we remove?

How challenged do you feel at work? Do you wish you were more, less, or differently challenged?

Role reflection:

How do you view yourself in your role?

Is there an area we should give you more space, sheltered from the day to day, to shine?

Are there new approaches you're interested in experimenting with in how you do any part of your role?

How would you appraise your current skills and abilities?

What's your pie chart of what you working on? What do you want it to be?

Where are you being under-leveraged?

Where would you like to develop?

Career reflection:

If you were having the best workday ever in your ideal role, what would your schedule look like?

Where do you get your job satisfaction from? What do you find most fulfilling and rewarding? What matters to you most?

What's most unique in your skill sets?

Where have you been most successful in the past? What do those experiences have in common?

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How to coach teammates: A key responsibility of effective leaders

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A few months into my career at Facebook, my manager, Yishan, found out that I was rubbing my colleagues the wrong way. Turned out that I was a jerk, and I didn't even know it! Left unimproved, this would have thwarted my ability to contribute at Facebook.

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The ability to coach is a fundamental skill for team leaders. A successful coaching approach can enable colleagues to solve their own problems, learn from their successes and failures, and unlock insights they had previously been oblivious to.

I firmly believe that everyone in the workplace, team leader or not, would benefit from having coaching techniques in their toolbox. In many ways, peer-to-peer coaching is closer to the ideal for a genuine coaching engagement than manager-to-subordinate coaching, with the coach less likely to stumble into a directive approach through habit.

Coaching is a great practice to apply when a colleague is stuck or struggling with a task, problem or new challenge. On these occasions you might not understand the details of the situation they find themselves in or know the solution they should pursue. You just know they need a bit of help. In these situations it is your colleague that holds the pertinent information about the situation; what they have already tried and discounted, what expectations need to be met, what their own abilities are and their preferred approach. They are the best bet for a successful resolution, so how can you help?

Too often we blunder in, full of good intentions, to solve other people's problems like a swooping superhero. Perhaps we succeed, solving it for them with fanfare or modesty. By doing this we deprive them of the satisfaction of conquering their nemesis, or worse, we send them down a faulty path due to our imperfect understanding of the situation. In either case, our colleague doesn't increase their confidence in their ability to tackle a similar situation in the future and may now be less likely to ask for help when it occurs.

Anyone can coach

Coaching is not one thing; it is a continuum of activities and approaches. It takes years to properly explore these, building-up experience of using an array of approaches so you know when and why to apply the right one (I, for one, have barely scratched the surface of coaching - but hope to build my knowledge throughout my career). However, a few simple techniques can go a long way and are relatively easy to pick-up and apply successfully.

The kind of coaching I'm referring to in this post is sometimes referred to as Solution Oriented Coaching. Where the coach is helping their colleague make progress when facing a problem or a challenge. It has a clear future-focus and is not so concerned with how we got here, i.e. how the problem arose. Instead we focus on where the coachee needs to get to and how they going to get there.

Coaching does not have to be complex or intimidating, but it does require the coach to deliberately adopt a different mindset; one where they are not solving the problem for their colleague, but where they are helping their colleague think clearly, anchor learning and make better decisions.

Here are my three steps for providing this kind of coaching for a colleague:

One: Ask open questions

Ask your colleague an open question that gets them talking, really talking, about the problem/challenge/task they are facing. For instance, ask them "How it's going with that gnarly bug fix?". If they answer with a short, closed sentence, "It's a nightmare", don't give up. Ask another open question, "Tell me about why it is a nightmare?". The aim here is to get then to unload as much information as possible about the situation and their thoughts about it.

Two: Shut-up and listen

This is pretty simple; you need to listen, really listen, to your colleague and speak as little as possible. Coaching is not about you saving the day with your awesome idea. It is not about you challenging the coachee's faulty thinking. They know the situation and themselves better than you do. They are the expert here. So, when your colleague is explaining their problem and the little light bulb goes off above your head as you recall a thing you tried last year that worked for you in your situation, keep it to yourself. When you think they've said something that is an incorrect assumption, maintain your silence. There will be time to use those insights you've had later, but at the moment you are shutting-up.

This is the most important step. I only mention it second because it make more sense chronologically to talk about asking a question first before mentioning listening to the answer! But if you only try one thing after reading this post, I recommend "shut-up and listen".

Three: Navigate using the GROW model

Now you have your open questions and your listening sorted, you can use a simple model to help you make progress through a coaching discussion. GROW can be that model*. It's a popular mnemonic that most new workplace coaches learn, as it's made up of pretty self-explanatory words and is applicable in a vast number of scenarios. Think of it as a map of the journey you need to navigate your colleague through, so they can come to a decision over their situation.

Here's what GROW stands for:

G is for Goal: Encourage the coachee to define what their desired end state is. Try to express this in a way that means you both know when it is achieved. This could be as tactical as "to get this customer issue solved by the end of the day" or it could be personal development related, "to be able to spot these problems sooner next time". Use open questions to encourage your colleague to kick the tyres on this goal, "Why do you need to solve the issue by the end of the day?". Creating clarity around the goal might realign your colleague's efforts, as they realise that they have lost sight of what their objective was in the first place.

R is for Reality: Next, establish how far away your colleague feels they are from the goal. Get them to call out where they are right now, what the obstacles they can see are and what they have already tried. Ask open questions to try to get as much information about the current state of things out of their head.

This is where you can, if you must, ask open questions to challenge that faulty assumption that you spotted earlier, "What makes you say that the error logs don't help?". Perhaps they were right and the question will lead the, to re-examine something they have missed.

O is for Options: Mine for ideas for what to do next. Don't settle for one proposed solution - it could be right, or it could just be the most obvious. Try to encourage your colleague to surface at least 3 ideas. Build up a toolbox of re-framing questions for this step to help the coachee look at the problem from a new angle or challenge constraints.

As this is solution-focused coaching, this step is where you can mention the killer idea you had when your colleague first explained their problem. However, offer this idea only when they have exhausted their ideas and ask for permission first, "Would you like to hear something I tried before and worked for me?".

W is for Will: This is where the coach encourages the coachee to make a commitment to an action or actions. Explore the implication and obstacles in the way of the options they have called out previously. Establish whether the will is truly there for the coachee to take concrete action. Ask "What is the first step you will take?" or "What's stopping you taking that next step right now?".

In this step it is important for you to help your colleague be honest with themselves. Are they really going to take action? If not, that can be ok, and accepting this without guilt is important. For instance, during your exploration the coachee might have discovered that the problem is not as important as they first thought - this is a great discovery!

Did I say three steps?

Well, obviously Step Three is made up of four sub-steps, so I cheated (sorry). It's also worth mentioning that there is a Step Zero (I'm such a cheat), which it is to ensure that your colleague is open to being coached through the problem in the first place. Usually, if you are talking to a teammate you know well and trust, then you'll know implicitly that it'll be fine for you to adopt this approach. However, if you do not know your colleague very well or the level of trust in your team is not as high as it should be, then it doesn't hurt to ask something non-threatening like "can I help you work through the problem?" so you are sure your coaching approach is welcome.

I challenge you to a give peer-to-peer coaching a go. See if you get an even greater sense of achievement in helping others help themselves, than you would have if you'd solved their problem for them.
* = Well, coaching-fans, while the GROW model is traditionally used in Behavioral Coaching approaches, I think it works just fine for Solution-Focused Coaching too.

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Everyone in the workplace would benefit from having coaching techniques in their toolbox. Coaching is a great practice to apply when a colleague is stuck or struggling with a task, problem or new challenge. Here's how to coach a colleague in three simple steps.

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Group Work in the Classroom: Types of Small Groups | Centre for Teaching Excellence

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One way to change the pace in your classroom is to do a small group activity.

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Revision Games

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Have everyone lie in a circle with each other's head's on each other's stomachs. On "go", the first person will shout "HA" and then it will be repeated one by one clock-wise around the circle. (When you do this everyone's heads bounce up on the person's stomachs). Then you shout two"HA HA's" and go around. Continue doing this and increase ...

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30 Cooperative Games for All Ages - Ultimate Camp Resource

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These cooperative camp games help participants develop important social and teamwork skills through fun challenges and interactive play.

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The International School of Geneva's La Grande Boissière is both the oldest and the largest of the three campuses of the International School of Geneva. Since its inception, important innovations in education have been designed here to empower students to navigate the world but also contribute to it and make it a more peaceful place.

It was here that the Model United Nations and International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IBDP) were invented. The Model United Nations' aim was to familiarise students with the highest standards of diplomacy so as to understand how negotiation can improve society whereas the IBDP started with an international history course invented and developed by La Grande Boissière teachers to broaden the minds and cultural references of students. Lord Mountbatten, who presented the first IB diplomas to students in our Greek theatre in 1971, said of that moment that it was his contribution to the prevention of World War Three.

Today La Grande Boissière remains wedded to its original mission: to broaden students' horizons and for them to impact the world positively. However, we are no longer in the 1960s. Therefore, educational systems need to prepare young people for a far more complex world.

Societal Challenges

The three fundamental challenges that face humanity are:

1. The Anthropocene era: human economic and consumerist activity, most especially in industrialised nations, is modifying and ultimately destroying the planet. Education needs to respond to this.

2. Industry 4.0: high-performing algorithms, the exploitation of behavioural surplus by tech companies and the outsourcing of human labour by artificial intelligence is challenging what it means to be human and the skills that will be needed in the market place. Educational programmes should be taking this into account.

3. Human relations: although in many ways the world is more peaceful than it has been in its history, the gap between rich and poor is widening, extremist ideology is on the rise in many countries and conflicts break out regularly across the globe. Therefore, an educational response needs to bring people together for humanity's and the planet's future.

Challenges in Schools

Most schools face a number of challenges that present educational structures do not accommodate well enough. The three essential challenges are:

1. Not motivating students. We know enough about the way that the human brain functions, the role of emotions in learning and the importance of a growth mindset to understand that if students are not motivated to learn, little progress will be made. And yet, so many students do not feel inspired or challenged in their lessons and many classroom environments are dull places full of behaviour regulation, regimes of silence and teaching to the middle. Schools need to create dynamic energy for learning to be stimulating.

2. Low standards. A number of educational reforms in the 60s and 70s, mostly influenced by the Romantic idea that too much knowledge retention and rote learning is a bad thing, has led to classroom practices where there is not enough corrective feedback on learning, not enough practice and insufficient testing for deep understanding. Pedagogies filled with jargon are a source of frustration for many parents and students. However, they don't actually help students build up their general knowledge, literacy and numeracy.

3. Not reporting what matters. In many schools, a curious situation exists where everyone agrees that a number of core skills and behaviours are required for success in life and employment, areas such as teamwork, good listening skills, creativity and leadership, but none of these skills are actually assessed formally by schools. Furthermore, for centuries schools have only reported on how well students perform in areas that schools deem important as opposed to reflecting students' strengths, whether these strengths are in or outside the remit of the school programme.

Designing the Universal Learning Programme

La Grande Boissière has been supporting powerful learning since 1924. The Universal Learning Programme design was an opportunity to distil and synthesise the magic in our educational approach. Part of the Universal Learning Programme architecture, therefore, has been to articulate, clearly, what is important and effective in a quality 21 st Century education based on our experience as an international school educating students of over 100 nationalities for close to 100 years.

At the same time, the school decided to enhance its vision by drawing on cutting-edge, research-informed best practice in education. To do this, we partnered officially with UNESCO's International Bureau of Education whose work with think tanks, educational ministries, research hubs and universities present a compelling evidence-based vision.

Students, teachers and parents are part of a strategic group that is involved in measuring the success and impact of the programme and UNESCO audits progress officially as another measure of quality control.

Importantly, much of the scope and sequence of the design has been done by the community, involving all stakeholders: every year, students and teachers vote on broad philosophical questions that are used in the classroom and the whole faculty collaborates on the creation of programme guides.

So what exactly is the Universal Learning Programme?

Deep Understanding

It all starts with deep understanding. The design of our programme means that a considerable amount of time and effort is dedicated to ensuring that students understand what they are learning. Using the findings of cognitive psychology, which tell us that humans store and retrieve information better when it is grouped in units of meaning ("schemata"), our approach is to lead students towards broad definitional statements of what they have learned (which we call "universal understandings").

Universal Learning Programme students will come away from a class not just saying that they are studying "trigonometry" or "colonisation", but will be able to say "trigonometric functions relate angles to sides of a right triangle" or "the effects of colonisation determine the balance of economic power in the world". Guiding students to their own universal understandings takes subtle pedagogical strategy and the use of our universal understanding pyramids, which are teaching tools developed by researchers to model the architecture of learning.

By viewing learning through universal understandings, students can make sense of what they know and apply it.

Competences

Deep understanding is foundational but the Universal Learning Programme goes well beyond this: we assess students not only on their academic knowledge but on the development of their competences. A competence is a unity of knowledge, skill and attitude. Furthermore, it is what determines the quality and impact of our human activity. By assessing competences through projects, feedback loops and reporting structures, we ensure that students become aware of what competences are. This assessment also shows why they are important in life.

We have grouped competences into four broad domains, each with a guiding question:

Character (who am I?)

Human quantum mind power often lies untapped in the recesses of the unconscious. Through coaching, positive psychology, setting values-based challenges and reflecting on outcomes, we bring out our true potential by developing character, associated with grit, intellectual honesty, accountability and humane moral values.

Passion (What is my purpose?)

Emotions govern our learning. We design emotional hooks, emphasise caring relations and strive, at all times, to make learning relevant. Then, finally, by paying homage to the beauty of content, we develop passion for learning. This brings out traits such as self-respect, curiosity, motivation, energy and vision.

Mastery (How can I go further?)

Higher order thinking and transfer emerge from strong domain knowledge. Combatting ignorance and prejudice requires multiliteracy and deep understanding of human history. Skills grow out of knowledge. Ongoing, spaced and deliberate practice allows us to then harness those skills. Mastery is core to our programme. Mastery enhances disciplinary and transdisciplinary fluency, learning how to learn, literateness, cultural awareness and depth of intellect.

Collaboration (How can we work together?)

What we learn must be put to a greater good that will reverse our anthropocene, selfish behaviour. This means much more emphasis on community service, learning to live together and, collectively, respecting resources and, ultimately, ourselves. Collaboration entails effective team work, balancing rights with privileges, responsible consumption,followship, leadership,listening skills, negotiation and interpersonal sensitivity.

These are essential in life and need to be recognised formally and institutionally. The Universal Learning Programme identifies such lifeworthy, futureproof competences and makes them come to life in the classroom by assessing them formally.

Social Impact

The far-reaching purpose of our educational experience is to create good at an individual, collective and public level: students should leave school with more than grades but with the ability to make a positive impact on people around them, the environment and society at large. The Universal Learning Programme offers students the opportunity to do this while they are at school, embedded in the formal curriculum. Students engage in specific Universal Learning Programme projects that have a meaningful social impact. Here are some examples.

The Character Project:

13-year-old students are mentored in philosophical discussions that allow them to reflect on ethical issues around good character. They set themselves challenges throughout the year to push their endurance and grit. They then reflect on the whole in powerful personal testimonies that they film. The project develops students' tenacity, solution seeking, anti-fragility but also their moral compass, empathy and reflection on humanity. Therefore, students set themselves three personal challenges:

A physical challenge that develops mental toughness, self-esteem, and self-efficacy.

A cognitive challenge, based on the discussion and analysis of current affairs, that develops personality, identity and self-discovery.

An emotional challenge, based on community service action which develops humility, empathy and open-mindedness.

The Passion Project:

14-year-old students take a personal passion (whether it is in school or out of school). Then, in a student team, they put it into a social impact project related to a sustainable development goal. This helps students learn about project design, entrepreneurship and connecting school with what they love. Examples of passion projects include the following:

Creating multi-lingual vocabulary resources for students.

Raising awareness of pollution through art.

Transforming plastic waste into a 3D-printer filament.

Creating a clothing exchange at school.

The Mastery Programme:

15-year-old students follow an extended mathematics course and create their own transdisciplinary mathematics and social science project where they learn about statistical modelling and apply this knowledge to indices related to wealth, happiness, mobility and demographics. This allows students to make meaningful connections between an academic domain and its relationship with society. Examples of mastery projects include the following:

The relationship between GDP and happiness.

The reliability of statistics on climate change.

The relationship between education and employment.

Service Learning:

Our philosophy about service learning is that you do not just learn to serve. You serve to learn too by enriching yourself through contact with other people. Some examples of powerful service learning projects include the following:

A student Eco-committee dedicated to sustainability on our campus.

Raising awareness on women in leadership positions through the creation of a mini-summit.

Students designing, 3D printing and laser-cutting props for a fashion show.

Students curating an art exhibition for professional artists.

Universal Questions:

Every year, students and teachers design four powerful transdisciplinary questions that are posted around the school. The aim is to then answer those questions in the classroom. Students present to each other in science classes on scientific innovations in history as they answer one of the Universal Questions. As a result, they grapple with the important constructs of scientific argument and lobbying a scientific idea. This process allows students to reflect on the social impact of science. Examples of Universal Questions that the school has designed and answered include:

What makes something beautiful?

What makes something meaningful?

Next Steps

The Universal Learning programme is in year two of its implementation. Our dream is to see schools across the world adopt this approach. We are currently in the process of partnering with schools in Kenya, India and Australia to empower students globally.

Author Bio

Conrad Hughes (MA, PhD, EdD) is Campus and Secondary Principal at the I nternational School of Geneva, La Grande Boissière, where he teaches philosophy. He is a UNESCO International Bureau of Education Senior Fellow, and research associate with the University of Geneva's Education and Psychology Department. Also, he is a member of the education board for the University of the People. Conrad's most recent book is Understanding Prejudice and Education: The Challenge for Future Generations (Routledge). He has also recently written Educating for the 21st Century: Seven Global Challenges (Brill).

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The International School of Geneva's La Grande Boissière is both the oldest and the largest of the three campuses of the International School of Geneva.