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In preparing students for the world outside school, what skills are important to learn? This goes to the heart of the research addressed in the Deeper Learning Report released by the National Research Council of the National Academies of Science in Washington.

Simply defined, “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, explained James Pellegrino, one of the authors of the report. “You can use knowledge in ways that make it useful in new situations,” he said in a recent webinar. “You have procedural knowledge of how, why, and when to apply it to answer questions and solve problems.”

To deconstruct the definition of deeper learning further, the researchers came up with what they call three domains of competence: cognitive, intrapersonal and interpersonal. Cognitive refers to reasoning and problem solving; intrapersonal refers to self-management, self-directedness, and conscientiousness; and interpersonal refers to expressing ideas and communicating and working with others.

These three broad competencies are related to each other, Pellegrino said, and there’s good evidence that shows they can lead to success in not only education, but also in career and health. In fact, conscientiousness is most highly correlated with successful outcomes.

If deeper learning is the ultimate goal, can it be taught? To a certain degree. But for educators to engage in deeper learning with students, researchers say they must begin with clear goals and let students know what’s expected of them. They must provide multiple and different kinds of ideas and tasks. They must encourage questioning and discussion, challenge them and offer support and guidance. They must use carefully selected curriculum and use formative assessments to measure and support students’ progress.

“Students can’t learn in an absence of feedback,” Pellegrino said. “It’s not just assessing, but providing feedback that’s actionable on the part of students.”

HOW TO SUPPORT DEEPER LEARNING THROUGH POLICY

In order for deeper learning to become the norm rather than the exception, it has to be a priority for local, state, and national policymakers, said Linda Darling-Hammond, professor of education at the Stanford and advocate for education reform. Common Core State Standards, which begin to push towards critical reasoning and problem solving and application of knowledge, are only being applied to math and literacy, she said. “What about other subjects?”

What’s more, social-emotional skills have to be taken into account anytime we address deeper learning, she said. Some states have developed standards for social emotional skills, and it could be good strategy for others to follow as well.

The way to achieve deeper learning is through curriculum and instruction, in assessments, and teachers’ professional development, she said.

The curriculum schools use now was created by a 10-member committee of men in 1893, Darling-Hammond said.”We need a new committee,” she said. “Maybe with women and with people color, and maybe even with 20 people.”

Curriculum should go deeper into application of skills, cover fewer topics that are more carefully selected and more deeply taught, and she said Common Core tries to do this. She repeated the mantra of many progressive educators: “Teach less, learn more.”

As for assessment, Darling-Hammond said our goals must be far more ambitious than they are now. Policymakers should follow the lead of schools that have been using digital portfolios and projects as assessments, rather than relying on standardized tests. “Students are able to take feedback and revise their work,” she said. “Their conscientiousness is tested. We know that in contexts like that, we have evidence that students are making it through college in higher numbers.”

Our current standardized tests focus on recall of facts and procedures, the lowest levels of types of learning, Pellegrino added. “They’re easily scored and quantified for accountability procedures. They’re not optimal in measuring the kinds of competencies that represent deeper learning,” he said.

But in order to use assessments that are valuable to students, we need to invest more money and time. “The kinds of tasks we need to assess take kids more time to enact and more time to score,” she said. Currently, the U.S. spends $10 to $20 per child on assessments, but in other countries where kids are doing deep inquiries and investigations, assessments cost about $200 per student.

“We need to rethink the way we make those investments, as part of our policy agendas,” she said, because, as Pellegrino put it, what gets tested governs what gets taught.

Another big component of deeper learning involves collaboration, she said, and “collaboration is not cheating… it’s part of problem-solving. Collaboration is a skill not a deficit.”

Professional development is another key part of bringing deeper learning to students. School principals, who play a big role in curriculum adoption, as well as educators, must learn about problem-solving, child development, and content pedagogy in order to understand how to set up collaborative and project-based learning.

But in order to do their jobs well, educators must be given enough time to create thoughtful curriculum. In other countries, Darling-Hammond said, educators are allotted 15 to 20 hours a week just dedicated to curriculum creation.

For those interested in pursuing deeper learning strategies in class, she suggested pulling out the key ideas from current standards and going deep into those subjects, such as ratio and proportion in math. She also suggested reading books and learning more about complex instruction and how to develop collaborative group work, even in classes where there’s a wide range of student skills.

BYPRODUCT OF DEEPER LEARNING

From an Edweek article that reported on findings from the same study:

The committee pointed to one 2008 five-year longitudinal study of 700 California students in three high schools: one urban and one rural school, each with large proportions of minority and English-language learner students, and another overwhelmingly wealthy, white school. While at the start of the study, incoming 9th graders in the diverse urban school performed significantly below the students in the other schools in mathematics, the school designed its algebra and geometry courses to highlight multiple dimensions of math concepts and approaches to problem-solving, self- and group-assessment and developing good questions. When tested at the end of the first year, the students exposed to the “deeper learning” math had caught up with their peers in algebra, and they performed significantly better than students in the other schools in the following year. By the 4th year of the study, 41 percent of students at the urban diverse school were taking calculus, in comparison to only 27 percent at the other two schools.

The study was partially funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

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By Aran Levasseur

Innovation is the currency of progress. In our world of seismic changes, innovation has become a holy grail that promises to shepherd us through these uncertain and challenging times. And there isn’t a more visible symbol of innovation than the iPad. It’s captured the hearts and minds of disparate subcultures and organizations.

In education it’s been widely hailed as a revolutionary device, promising to transform education as we know it. Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as bulk purchasing iPads and deploying them into the wilds of education. Innovation can’t be installed. It has to be grown — and generally from the margins.

The profusion of digital technology at work, home and everywhere in between is evident to even the most causal observer. In this climate, it’s understandable why many schools are interested in technological integration and innovation. While it seems clear that students will increasingly be expected to be adept at using digital tools in their professional and personal lives, there isn’t great clarity on how exactly these tools should be used. Often visions and goals are nebulous — if they exist at all. We can’t just buy iPads (or any device), add water, and hope that strategy will usher schools to the leading edge of 21st century education. Technology, by itself, isn’t curative. Human agency shapes the path.

In light of this dynamic, two critical questions need to be asked and provisionally answered when integrating technology into education. The first question, while obvious at first glance, isn’t always fully articulated: “What are the educational goals of technology integration?”

The second question is equally important and often more elusive: “Do the current systems and processes support the integrative and innovative goals?”

Adapting Teaching To Technology

The answer to the first question — about the goals of technology integration — often orbits around 21st century skills. The problem is that most of the curriculum within schools today is distinctly tied to the 20th century. The first phase of technology integration usually focuses on the transition from an analog to a digital environment, but after that happens, the use of technology raises deeper pedagogical questions.

The best schools throughout history prepared their students for the social and economic realities of their time. Our system of universal education was designed to meet the social and economic needs of the industrial revolution, which was defined by a world of standardization. While the industrial revolution has been added to the annals of history, our system of education has not.

The social and economic world of today and tomorrow require people who can critically and creatively work in teams to solve problems. Technology widens the spectrum of how individuals and teams can access, construct and communicate knowledge. Education, for the most part, isn’t creating learners along these lines. Meanwhile, computers are challenging the legitimacy of expert-driven knowledge, i.e., of the teacher at the front of the classroom being the authority. All computing devices — from laptops to tablets to smartphones — are dismantling knowledge silos and are therefore transforming the role of a teacher into something that is more of a facilitator and coach.

This isn’t to say that teachers are becoming obsolete. Great teachers are needed now more than ever. But what it means to be a teacher and student is changing — as it has throughout history. The main point is that technology is helping to drive a pedagogical change, and schools need to be mindful of this influence and thoughtful of how they’d like to facilitate this transition. This is why linking technology to learning objectives is so important. Otherwise, schools could find themselves in a position where the cart (technology) is before the horse (pedagogy).

Does Our Current System Support Innovation?

Answers to the second question (Do the current systems and processes support the integrative and innovative goals?) are rarely offered because the question is seldom asked.

The organization of schools — their systems, processes and values — were deliberately designed to accomplish specific objectives. Departments, 50-minute classes, bells, rows of desks, lectures, textbooks, standardized tests, and grades are all aspects of schools’ organizational structure that were conceived to train students in the image of industrial society. Within this model, standardization and mass production rule supreme.

The systems and values of industrial education were not designed with innovation and digital tools in mind. Innovation, whether it’s with technology, assessment or instruction, requires time and space for experimentation and a high tolerance for uncertainty. Disruption of established patterns is the modus operandi of innovation. We like the fruits of innovation, but few of us have the mettle to run the gauntlet of innovation.

Innovation from the Margins

Because integration and innovation with technology can be so disruptive to established systems, innovation is more likely to take root if it is grown on the margins. The margin can be a small percentage of class time that’s carved out each week for experimentation, or it can be a technology incubator designed to function beyond the conventional boundaries of school systems.

Wherever the appropriate margin is identified for technological innovation, the climate within the margin needs to be such that teachers and students are supported in exploring the edges of uncertainty. This is critical because uncertainty and experimentation are perceived as a waste of time within the current model because there is curriculum that needs to be covered and tests that need to be taken within a prescribed schedule. One can’t begin to have more time and space for innovating in class unless one loosens the reigns on traditional objectives and creates more flexibility and leverage within classrooms and schools.

This is easier said than done. To varying degrees we’ve all come through the traditional model of education that has trained us to seek certainty. Combine that with the fact that we are wired to look for negative information — and uncertainty would definitely fit into the negative category for most of us — and we have a compound society that is increasingly risk averse. Yet without taking risks, we can’t have breakthroughs.

Learning environments of the future are in incubation. And therein lies the challenge: Learning environments that don’t exist can’t be analyzed. Moving into the unknown requires a pioneering spirit. Helen Keller reminds us that is the truth of not only our age, but of all ages: “Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.”

Aran Levasseur taught middle school history and science for five years, where he integrated technology into his classes to enhance his teaching and student learning and is currently the Academic Technology Coordinator at San Francisco University High School. You can follow him @fusionjones on Twitter.

This post originally appeared on MediaShift, which covers the intersection of media and technology. Follow @PBSMediaShift for Twitter updates, or join us on Facebook.

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What do educators mean when they talk about 21st century skills? If they’re referring to things like collaboration, resourcefulness, smart use of technology, and problem-solving, here’s strong evidence showing how these skills are becoming a natural part of students’ daily lives. Sharon Noguchi writes in the San Jose Mercury News about the changes student activists in the Bay Area are making in their own schools.

Exhibit A: An eighth-grade class at Renaissance Academy that’s on a mission to bring updated technology to its school. They tested all different kinds of gadgets to figure out what they need, sent out newsletters, applied and received a grant, wrote to elected officials, and created a site on Donors Choose to raise enough money to buy tech tools for the class. They’ve still got $1,700 to go, but they’re making progress — and they’ll keep the effort going despite the fact that they’re graduating this year.

Exhibit B: One junior took it upon himself to include students’ voices in changing the school-year calendar. He took a comprehensive survey and presented the results to the school board, influencing one of the trustees to vote for the students’ choice.

Exhibit C: A 13-year-old created a Facebook page to lobby to keep three of his teachers who’d been pink-slipped. He also emailed the school district’s superintendent — twice — to let his opinions be known. The outcome? Two of the three teachers’ layoff notices were rescinded.

These accounts of student empowerment and savvy exemplify what we mean when we refer to 21st century skills, and why they’re so important. Students can see how much power they have in making an impact in their own lives.

What does that take on the part of the educator?

“It required a lot of giving up control,” said the Renaissance Academy teacher. “Everything has been student done.”

One huge shift in the new learning process: Going from the current focus on learning content to “learning tools and the skills to be creator of remaking the content and becoming the creator and producer,” says Diana Rhoten, who’s interviewed for the documentary.

Here’s the full interview with her.

I spoke to Rhoten a few months ago about her quest to fast-forward mobile learning. Here’s the interview after the jump.

Diana Rhoten: On a Mission to Fast-Forward Mobile Learning

Why all this fuss about iPads and iTouches, Kindles and Knos? It’s more than just about playing with fancy toys. It’s actually changing the way kids learn.

Diana Rhoten certainly believes it. Rhoten is a founding partner of Startl, which recruits innovators and entrepreneurs and helps them bring digital learning products to the market. She says the future is about learner-centered technology that also happens to have the added advantage of being lighter weight and portable. And she’s on a mission to push for progress in this field right now.

“We’re at a point where technology is easier and cheaper to build, it’s easier to use, more intuitive and more ergonomically attuned to the way kids learn,” Rhoten said in an interview last week. Combine the physical ease of using mobile devices with the fact that most kids (93%) are online, and 76% own them, and it’s easy to see why mobile learning is the future.

“Demographically, there’s much more even distribution with mobile devices,” Rhoten says. “Mobile offers a way to close the digital divide even more so than laptops. It allows learning anywhere anytime.”

As part of her mandate to bring mobile products to the market, Rhoten, who spoke at a panel about education at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco last week, thinks it’s crucial to educate the technical talent and help them make progress.

“There’s a viable bottom line. There’s capital, there’s interest, and right now we have a huge opportunity,” she says. “People understand that there’s need for change. But my concern is that we get too much capital in this market before we have the technology in place, we’ll burn out before it reaches its full potential. And that will add another layer of disaster to the education issues.”

That’s one of the reason behind Startl’s Mobile Design Boost event last week in San Francisco, which brought together 10 bright, ambitious innovators for four days to brainstorm and prototype their education-based products to the market.

Two winners emerged: Voxy, which won the audience choice award for the mobile app that’s based on their web-browser product targeting adult Hispanics who want to learn English as a second language; and Motion Math, which won the juried selection award for its second learning-based product.

Each of the 10 innovators who participated in the program went through an intense three-day process that included designing and developing, prototyping, and showing their models to not just end-users (elementary and high school students, parents, teachers), but to potential angel investors and venture capitalists, as well as engineers and product development representatives from big companies.

They had to meet the same criteria as every product designer: Does it advance learning? Can this team execute? Is it scalable over time? Is it sustainable?

But for Rhoten, there’s even a higher threshold than those criteria.

“The holy grail for any company is not just creating a product that gives instant feedback, but that has a truly adaptive learning engine. And there are few that really do,” Rhoten says.

By that, she means the difference between a closed set of simulated pathways (answer one question and get three different options that are predetermined, for example), compared to a product that truly adapts to users’ response – an engine that collects data over time and understands patterns from the user’s mistakes.

“I don’t use the term adaptive learning loosely, but the market is starting to,” she says.

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How do we make schools more relevant to students? Teach them the skills they need in the real world, with tools they use every day. That’s exactly what Esther Wojcicki, a teacher of English and journalism at Palo Alto High School, is attempting to do with the recent launch of the website 21STCenturyLit. I interviewed Esther about the site, and how she hopes it will serve as a useful tool for both students and educators.

- How do you describe the mission for 21STcenturylit?

The mission of 21STcenturylit.org is three fold: it is to teach students how to be intelligent consumers of digital media, to teach students how to be skillful creators of digital media, and to teach students how to search intelligently.  We are living in an age when digital media and new digital tools are revolutionizing the world. Schools need to help student learn these skills, not block and censor the Internet.

- Why is this important right now?

We need to make school more relevant to the world we live in to combat the huge dropout problem we face. We also need to train kids to have the skills needed in the digital world. They need to know how to communicate using multiple media; they need to know how to read and write for the web; they need to know how to use social media for things other than checking on their friends.  Schools should be teaching this; businesses want to hire kids with these skills.

More than 40 percent of high school students nationwide drop out of school. While there are many reasons why kids drop out including economic factors, lack of reading skills, one of the main reasons cited is that they find school irrelevant, boring, and punitive.

We as a nation also have a critical need for trained IT workers that is not being met by our educational system. If students learn to use digital media in school and go on to computer science courses, it will provide good jobs for them and fill an important need for our country. Right now we are getting IT workers from other countries and kids are not getting the training they need in schools.

How do you think the work of a journalist mirrors that of a media consumer (newspaper reader, web user, etc.)?

The skills of a journalist mirror those of today’s media consumer which is why news literacy is a critical skill for all students. Like journalists, students today are gathering information; however, unlike journalists they do not have the skills for analyzing it, or writing about it. They should be taught these skills in school; we need to teach kids how to critically examine their research and make intelligent decisions about it. We need to teach them how to write for the web so they can feed empowered to participate. Many kids are connected to their Facebook account and their phone, but they do not comment on blogs or even write blogs.

How is this being received by the education community? How are you getting the word out, and how many educators so far have come upon this site?

Most teachers are interested in teaching these skills; however, many don’t feel that they have the necessary skills themselves. Teachers need time to learn these skills through professional development. They need time to learn how they can modify their teaching to incorporate the teaching of digital skills.

Esther Wojcicki

For example, English teachers need to teach students how to collaborate online with their writing projects. Just using the web to collaborate helps student understand what is happening in businesses. Instead of writing a paper, printing it out and turning it in, kids can turn the paper in online and peer-edit their work online before turning it in. One of the most widely used collaboration tools is Google Docs, a free online word processing program. In using this method, students learn more than just how to write a paper; they learn how to use digital tools.

Students should also learn to blog.  At the moment, many schools block blogging because they are worried kids will access ‘inappropriate’ blogs. How is this teaching kids about the real world?

Students can be asked, for example, to do research on health care in America and compare it to health care in other parts of the world. Just doing the research is exciting for students but most of them do not know how to analyze their results. They need to be taught. For example, who created the website, what are their political objectives, how objective is the information. Administrators need to help teachers who in turn help students learn how to analyze their result, not block the web. In too many schools today, the web is blocked!! Yes, blocked. Schools use special censoring services that ensure that kids will never find anything ‘objectionable.’ How is this teaching about the real world when they are never allowed to access the real world, except at home. Schools are making themselves irrelevant by failing to teach kids about the world we live in.

- What’s your hope with this site?

I’m hoping that this site will provide teachers several lesson plans that will help them teach students a) how to search effectively b) how to analyze their search results c) how to differentiate between fact and opinion d) how to write for the web. I have lesson plans to teach how to write a personality feature, how to write a news story, how to write reviews of movies, games, books, websites. There are also lesson plans of how to understand copyright and how to use Creative Commons licenses to modify copyright so students can learn to share and remix legally.

How are educators accessing these kinds of excellent resources online? Do you believe there’s a good system in place to let them know, or do you think it’s still quite fragmented and decentralized?

The system is still quite fragmented and decentralized. There are many sites and many entrepreneurs trying to create materials for teachers but one of the main problems is finding these resources. If the user doesn’t know the key words, then they won’t find them.

What solution do you think might work for creating a central repository of sorts?

I am working with a group of universities who are looking at ways to optimize the finding of Open Educational Resources. Hopefully, this will happen in 2011 but until then teachers need to know the address of the site or the key words to find the materials.