Additional Resources
When planning a Deeper Learning experience, consider the following insights from experts.
Authenticity
When students know their experience will have a public component, they are encouraged to produce professional, high quality work for the world to consume.
A member of the National Faculty at BIE suggests, "As you design a project, think about who might benefit from your students’ learning. Seek strategic partnerships that could support your teaching goals and empower students to learn."
Challenging Problems
Whether it's called a driving question, an essential question, challenge, prime question, Wild Hog question, focus question or smart question, it is the driving force.
The driving question can solve a problem, teach others, persuade an audience, tackle a big idea, analyze an issue to form and justify an opinion, make predictions, or take on a fictional role with a defined mission. As important as it is to get this question or statement correctly framed for your project, it is often difficult to formulate.
Parameters & Feasibility
Although Deeper Learning is usually associated with 'authenticity,' there is not universal agreement on what this means.
- On one end of the scale, not authentic is described as having no public audience for students' work, no one actually uses what they create, and the work they do is not what people do in the real world.
- Somewhat authentic simulates what happens in the world outside of school. For example, students create products that, although they will not actually be used by people in the real world, they are the kinds of products people do use.
- Fully authentic refers to those projects in which "students are doing work that is real to them, it is authentic to their lives, or the work has a direct impact on, or use in, the real world."
To explore the spectrum of authenticity, see: