Abstract
When eighth-grade students at King Middle School in Portland, Maine, began a curricular unit on electricity, they were given two guiding questions: “How do we capture and use nature’s energy?” and “How can you change your energy consumption to improve the world?” Teachers used these questions to integrate their course offerings and to provide a context for every assignment, classroom activity, field work experience, and project that the students did. The students quickly discovered that to understand how best to capture and use nature’s energy, they first had to master the concepts of energy and energy transfer presented in science class. They then applied what they were learning through an assignment to conduct an energy audit on their own homes, and they learned in math class how to measure energy consumption as well as how to calculate their own carbon footprints.
Notes
- 1.
Author field notes, October, 25, 2011; author interview with teacher team, June 2, 2012; King Middle School, “Past Expeditions,” http://king.portlandschools.org/news___events/on_expedition.
- 2.
Ibid.
- 3.
Ibid.
- 4.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Education at a Glance (Paris: 2012); Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning To Be Creative (Chichester, U.K.: Capstone Publishing, 2011), 49.
- 5.
American Institutes for Research, Does Deeper Learning Improve Student Outcomes? (Washington, DC: 2016); Pedro Noguera, Linda Darling-Hammond, and Diane Friedlander, Equal Opportunity for Deeper Learning (Washington, DC: Jobs for the Future, October 2015).
- 6.
Author field notes, November 30, 2011.
- 7.
King Middle School, “Past Expeditions.”
- 8.
Larry Rosenstock, Chief Executive Officer, High Tech High, San Diego, CA, personal communication with author, January 15, 2013.
- 9.
Author field notes, October 27 and 28, 2011; Casco Bay High School, “Academics,” https://cbhs.portlandschools.org/academics.
- 10.
Author field notes, November 20, 2011; author interview, November 15, 2012.
- 11.
Author field notes, September 28 and October 24, 2011; Avalon School, “What Is Project-Based Learning?” www.avalonschool.org/pbl.
- 12.
Author field notes, November 24 and 25, 2011.
- 13.
Michael Fullan and Maria Langworthy, A Rich Seam: How New Pedagogies Find Deeper Learning (London: Pearson, 2014), 2.
- 14.
Ibid., 16.
- 15.
Ibid., 19; Richard Elmore, “What Happens When Learning Breaks Out in Rural Mexico?” Education Week Blog, May 18, 2011.
- 16.
European Schoolnet website, www.eun.org; Monica Martinez, Dennis McGrath, and Elizabeth Foster, How Deeper Learning Can Create a New Vision for Teaching (Washington, DC: National Commission on Teaching & America’s Future (NCTAF), 2016); iTEC: Designing the Future Classroom website, http://itec.eun.org.
- 17.
Common Core State Standards Initiative website, www.corestandards.org.
- 18.
Sarah Jenkins et al., The Shifting Paradigm of Teaching: Personalized Learning According to Teachers (Washington, DC: NCTAF and Knowledgeworks, 2016).
- 19.
XQ: The Super School Project, “Ten U.S. ‘Super Schools’ Awarded $10M Each for Reimagining Education,” https://xqsuperschool.org/news/3150; Next Generational Learning Challenges website, http://nextgenlearning.org.
- 20.
Box 11-1 from the following sources: John Dewey, “Self-realization as the Moral Ideal,” The Philosophical Review 2, no. 6 (1893): 652–64; Joe Bryan, “Participatory Mapping,” in Tom Perreault, Gavin Bridge, and James McCarthy, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology (New York: Routledge, 2015), 249–62; TEMA, “Türkiye Su Varliklarina Yönelik Tehditler Haritasi,” http://sertifika.tema.org.tr/_Ki/SuTehditleriHaritasi/.
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McGrath, D., Martinez, M.M. (2017). Deeper Learning and the Future of Education. In: EarthEd. State of the World. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-843-5_11
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