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Setting the Stage for Deeper Learning
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What separates a classroom where students are genuinely invested from one where they’re simply going through the motions?
Harvard professor Jal Mehta has spent years studying what deeper learning looks like, and found answers in some decidedly unexpected places. In this episode, we explore what sports teams and theater productions can teach us about student engagement, why the “tyranny of content” may be working against meaningful learning, and what changes when students get to actually do the work of a discipline rather than simply learn about it.
From rethinking the role of the professor to making small changes in your next class, this conversation offers a compelling case for learning that students don’t just complete, but carry with them.
Guest Bio
Jal Mehta is a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education whose work explores deeper learning, school improvement, and educational innovation. He is the co-author, with Sarah Fine, of In Search of Deeper Learning: The Quest to Remake the American High School.
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Teaching As A Pitch
SPEAKER_02Any semester is just a small taste in a lifelong journey to try to understand a subject. And so what you're really trying to do is hook them, give them the experience of what it's like to be someone who explores that subject. And then once once you've done that, then the most powerful thing you could do as a teacher is give someone a new identity, like start start them on this journey of seeing themselves as a person who does a kind of work. And if you do that, then the rest of life will take care of bringing them further along that journey.
SPEAKER_00Every class is a pitch, which is an interesting way to think about teaching because whether we realize it or not, every time we walk into a classroom, we're asking students to buy into something, to care about a question, or spend the next hour or so doing something they might otherwise happily avoid. So, what separates classrooms where students are simply going through the motions from those where they're genuinely invested in learning? That's the question Jal Meta, professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and co-author of In Search of Deeper Learning, has spent years looking to answer. Our conversation takes us from the theater stage to the college classroom, looking at why purpose can be such a powerful motivator, how the tyranny of content gets in the way of deeper learning, and what happens when students stop watching from the sidelines and actually get to do the work of the discipline. So consider this our pitch. And welcome to Higher Listings. Jell,
What We Saw In Real Classrooms
SPEAKER_00it's great to have you with us.
SPEAKER_02Thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_00So you and Sarah Fine spent years visiting schools in search of deeper learning. So before we define what that means, can you take us through that experience? Like what surprised you once you started walking into classrooms and talking with students and educators?
SPEAKER_02So Sarah and I spent a good portion of the 2010s visiting high schools across the United States. These were recommended high schools, so high schools that in somebody had thought were doing quote unquote deeper learning in one way or another. I would say the surprising thing was there was kind of a good news, bad news surprise. The bad news was that these like quote unquote recommended high schools, if you just stapled yourself to a kid and followed them through a day, you would find a lot of classrooms that were pretty disengaged, pretty what's going to be on the test. Our first question whenever we had entered a classroom was just like, what's going on in this class? And people would say things like, Ask that girl over there, she's the one who knows what's going on. So that was the bad news. But the good news was in every school, there were some classes, some spaces, some extracurriculars that were lively, intellectually engaging. The school where the kid said, Ask that girl over there, she knows what's going on. Like literally the next period, we walked across from a that was a history class to a chemistry class. And immediately the kids' affect changed. And they said, Mister, if you're going to be in this class, you need to put on your goggles. And they started showing me what was happening and why, and so forth. So the magic of the individual teacher and what teachers can do is uh alive and well in in every school.
SPEAKER_00Was there a particular classroom or school where you thought, okay, these folks are really dialed in this exactly what we've been looking for?
SPEAKER_02I would say on the whole, they were places where people were given a little bit more space to explore something in more depth. I remember a a high school where a guy said something like, My kids got really interested in the fact that uh this is in the Bronx, that my kids got really interested in the fact that the the founding fathers were slaveholders. And he said, you know, if I had been an earlier in my career, I would have said, that's that's nice, but we need to get to the Civil War before Christmas. But with more experience, I was like, hey, we got a bunch of kids here who are really interested in a really foundational question, which is how can the documents upon which our country is founded be written by people who are themselves holding slaves? Like what is what does that mean about those documents about our country? And so once you have a bunch of interested kids, you go with it.
SPEAKER_01I love what you just shared there about the the experience and wisdom of an instructor. To pivot in the moment to meet the interests of the students in the moment. And I want to come back to that. But before we go on, let's go a little deeper
Mastery Identity And Creativity Defined
SPEAKER_01into this idea of deeper learning. So you describe this as an intersection really of three things of mastery, identity, and creativity. Can you untie that a bit? Why it's so important, what it is, and maybe a really good example of how those elements work together to generate that kind of deeper learning.
SPEAKER_02So mastery is developing knowledge and skill in a domain. Identity is coming to think of yourself as the kind of person who does that kind of work. And creativity is not just taking in knowledge and producing the same thing that hundreds of thousands of people before you have produced, but trying to develop an original interpretation. At whatever level you can do it. So originality for a fourth grader is not going to be the same as originality for a PhD in a field, but at whatever level they can do it. Let's say you're becoming a singer. And so let's say that you discover that you just like music, you sing to the radio, maybe you go to church, maybe you're in a choir, maybe you start to develop some technique. The research on this says that somewhere between eight and twelve, you generally shift from like, I'm someone who sings to I'm a singer, I'm someone who swims to I'm a swimmer, I'm someone who cooks to I'm a cook. So you start to see yourself as the kind of person who does this. And this is also where race, gender, sexual orientation comes in. Like, is this the kind of space that welcomes people like me? Becomes an important question and an important question for schools and institutions that are trying to build love of different things. Okay, so now you you start to sing, you start to see yourself as a singer, you start to add your own flourishes to things. You don't just sing it exactly the way that the person before you has sung it, you start to develop some sort of style, and then a big performance comes and you fail to hit a high note or your souffle falls flat or whatever it is. And then you're like, hmm, the the sort of the mastery piece is not that well developed. And so then you go back and you practice and you get more lessons and so forth. And this whole thing just kind of continues in an upward uh spiral, which never ends, and where there are some steps back as well as steps forward. So I think the implications of this for schools is that you think as a teacher, I'm sure you've been in this position, the two of you, I've definitely been in it, which is you have a semester with the students and you have a thousand books on your shelf, and you're like, well, what if we don't read this one? Or what if we don't read that one? How can they possibly know the subject without this or that? Because those books have been really important to you. And in reality, any semester is just a small taste in a lifelong journey to try to understand a subject. And so what you're really trying to do is hook them, give them the experience of what it's like to be someone who explores that subject. And then once once you've done that, then hopefully that, I mean, the most powerful thing you can do as a teacher is give someone a new identity, like start start them on this journey of seeing themselves as a person who does a kind of work. And if you do that, then the rest of life will take care of bringing them further along that journey.
SPEAKER_01I wonder if really excellent teachers also have to be really sensitive to the kind of moment a learner is in and the kind of learner they are. I don't want to say learning styles because we all know that they're such a problematic notion, but do you think people in different stages may benefit from a different kind of experience in the in learning? Is that part of your framework and all or what you've discovered in your business with the classrooms and teachers in high school?
Learning Through Apprenticeship
SPEAKER_02I will say the sort of more general idea that I came to, though, is there is a theory of learning called the sociocultural theory of learning, which basically says that most people learn most things through a process of apprenticeship where they start on the periphery and they move gradually to the core. So this theory was developed, started with midwives in Africa. So you start by you're in the room and you watch the birth, and then you catch the baby, and then you gradually sort of uh move into a more central role. And extracurriculars, both athletics and arts, have that character that you're the doer and you gradually take on more responsibility as you get more skilled. Most work environments have that have that cadence. Uh, crafts, guilds have that cadence. So I think there's a lot to be said for a kind of mode that's neither like didactic, like I just tell you and you write it down, nor like totally exploratory. You just do what you want. But this kind of like you're the doer, and I'm sitting at your elbow offering you suggestions because I've been down the road before, that is, I think, on the whole, the most consistently powerful mode by which people learn things.
SPEAKER_01In the book, you mentioned this, you highlight the fact that in the extracurricular space, across the schools you visited, that students seem to be much more naturally and more broadly engaged, uh, you know, very different kind of energy and focus and commitment to the learning and to the participation in the
What Extracurriculars Get Right
SPEAKER_01process. Could you talk a little bit about what that discovery meant to you and Sarah? And how can educators, particularly in a college environment, draw from that in their own practice?
SPEAKER_02If you're a higher ed professor out there, you know your subject a lot better than I do. So you'll have to do some of the bridging of like what this might mean for you. So we studied a theater production from auditions through the production, like a 10-week fall production. And some of the attributes that seemed really important to this experience, as defined by observations and interviews with students, were purpose. Everybody knew what they were doing and why they were doing it. And that created a lot of the momentum for the whole things. I don't know if either of you have ever done any theater, but like 10 weeks is like not a very long time when you're trying to do a three-act play. There are hundreds of lines, there are blocking cues, there are lights, there's just a set, the whole thing has to fit together. It's like a massive coordination task. And it starts with people like you don't know the play, you don't know the lines, you don't know the period, you don't know the accents, you don't know the characters, you know very little, and you need to be in a wildly different place in a relatively short period of time. So there's no, is this going to be on the test? Because the purpose and the motivation really, really clear. Community, some of the kids told us, I don't even like theater that much. I just like to have a place to go after school where everybody knows me. My kid was on a basketball team once and he came back and he said, I made a friend, and I said, What is he like? What are his interests? Does he have any brothers and sisters? He's like, I don't know any of that. I just know that when there's a drill and we need to pair off, I've got a kid to pair off with. You know, like that's that's where kids are. So community was another one. Uh, interdependent roles. So there were this production had a couple of adults, a director and a technical lighting person, but there's so many decisions to be made that the only way to do it is to have students taking various kinds of leadership roles. And the, you know, basically you've got a ninth grader learning how to string lights from a tenth grader. That's how it goes. One year you're the learner and the next year you're the teacher. And our colleague at the ed school, Dave Perkins, has this idea of the whole game at the junior level. And so Dave's idea is that if you take something like baseball, you don't spend a year throwing and a year catching and a year batting, and then say, when we get to graduate school, you'll play baseball. You've got seven-year-olds playing T-ball as best they can. And so, yes, you practice the parts, but you do it in light of the whole. And so if you've been part of a high school production, you haven't been to Broadway, but you have some idea of how a production comes together. And so once we got this idea from David, we began to think that schools have a lot of parts and not so many holes. You do lots of things, but you don't really see where they're where they're going. So all of those things come together in a sort of a system to help create a powerful, thick learning trajectory. There's also, for those of you who do creative work, they say that like the it's like 90% is in the last 10%. There's a lot of truth to that, right? You figure out like roughly how you're going to play the character and where you're going to go, but then you work a lot on like making particular lines land and how to position yourself and so forth. That's the mastery part, attention to detail. And the whole thing is much more authentic. So why don't I pause there and then let's we can sort of try to unpack how you might do some of those things in a regular class.
Beating The Tyranny Of Content
SPEAKER_00I think you've highlighted some of the challenges that we face, particularly in in higher education. On the one hand, often you have significantly larger class sizes. So that can make things just more challenging from the get-go. You've got obviously time limits in terms of how long a class can run. There's the tyranny of content of instructors feeling compelled to, I've got to get through the material because they're going to be evaluated on this. With that, maybe as some of the context, how do you recommend a faculty member who might be teaching a really large introductory course? Embrace some of the practices that that you've surfaced through your work.
SPEAKER_02I think it starts with the level of purpose. You have to think really hard about what it is you're trying to accomplish and what are the most sort of important parts of what you're trying to accomplish. I know this is anathema, but we don't remember a lot of what we quote unquote learned. If I went to my university and I gave all the professors there a test on like mitochondria and the French Revolution and all sorts of things that surely passed before them at some point in life, a lot of my Harvard colleagues, myself included, would fail parts of that test because we haven't done anything with huge parts of that knowledge in a long time. So let's just remember that at best, people will remember a few big concepts or ideas or pieces, unless it's right in their major and they'll use it immediately the next semester and so on and so forth. So I think the first thing is a little bit of humility in terms of what is actually gonna stick in the long run. So that might free us a little bit from the idea of and so then I might say if I were teaching a 13-week class, maybe four. What are four big skills and four big ideas or pieces of content that I would want to make sure that everybody had grappled with by the end of the semester? So that so starting with that might like free up a lot of space and worry, like once you had identified those things. And then more pedagogically, the way that I teach is there's some readings, there's a a question or an idea for the day. I frame the issue briefly, and then I usually give people some sort of activity to do in groups of three or four, and then we debrief that together, and I add some thoughts. And depending on how long the class is, we might do several rounds of that. They might do that for 20, 25 minutes, and then we might do something together for 10 or 15 minutes, and that might lead to the sort of next uh chunk of things. So, like for example, so we were talking about earlier the question of how deeper learning unfolds over the longer run. Like you, you like deep learning is not something that happens in a class, it happens over time. So I might ask them to interview each other about a skill in which they themselves feel pretty knowledgeable and competent. I might ask them to, so you interview someone, they interview you. Then we have two sets of I we have two sets of content. Then I might ask them to draw some sort of concept map that covered both of their stories, so make it more general. And I might ask them to put those things up. Then I might ask them to exchange those concept maps with someone who is in a different pair and see what that made them think. And then I might ask them to connect that to the readings of what other people have found as they have studied this issue. And then I might conclude with some thoughts from me. I often tend to put my sort of synthesis thoughts either in email after class or at the beginning of the next class because I find that if I write them beforehand, it feels too cooked, like we're gonna do this exploration, but at the end, like here's the answer. Whereas if I let the exploration emerge and then I connect what they've developed to what I know, that usually makes it feel more alive. So you'd have to think about how this makes sense in different fields, but roughly I think that's how it could go.
SPEAKER_00It's probably easy in some ways to say, I'm gonna think about how I'm gonna wrap this up and what I want students to take away at the end of the class, and you just bang that out before you're done, but to actually weave in what that journey in the class itself actually resulted in, and weaving that together, I think, is particularly powerful. I I also think too, it shows the students a sense of their own mattering because their ideas, their roadblock, their inspiration, their creativity actually found its way in, I'm presuming into your summary of that particular class.
SPEAKER_02100%. People always have interesting angles because they are coming at it from different places or experiences. And I also think sometimes people think this is a lot more work. I mean, yes, there might be work in preparing a new synthesis, but this is a three-hour class. Think of I just prepare a slide with five directions, and that's 20 minutes of class. So imagine how long it would take to write a 20-minute lecture. You know, you've got to prepare, but you're not like you don't have to prepare something you're gonna say for every second because you're not it's the person who's doing the talking is doing most of the learning. So we want them to be doing most of the talking.
SPEAKER_01So we're a friendly group, Eric and I. Like you're singing our songs. Um, there are a growing number of dissenters to
Rigor Without The False Dichotomy
SPEAKER_01this conversation. So I want to try to capture a little bit of a concern about going too far in this direction. So, particularly the kinds of objections I've heard have been that that rigor requires standards that are very difficult, that create stress, and stress is a good thing, and we shouldn't try to minimize or marginalize that stress. How do you how do you react to that kind of impulse to say that's joy is all going good in theater, but this is a chemistry class, and they better learn the details of the table of elements?
SPEAKER_02Well, okay, I appreciate you playing devil's advocate. I think it's good. At the same time, I I think there are a whole bunch of straw people in what you just said. So if someone told me we're trying to create pilots, and so we're gonna put them in a flight simulator and put them under some pressure so that they know what to do in a storm, I'd be like, great, go to it. You could tell me that doing a lot of those trainings really helps. We could explore that. But no one is putting that level of thought and care into the majority of the problematic higher ed classrooms. But I I always think there's sort of a false dichotomy between kind of content and skills. Sometimes people criticize people like me for being too focused on skills at the expense of content. And I'm just sort of like, you're sort of creating a false dichotomy that I am not participating in. You can't offer an interpretation of the French Revolution without knowing who the Jacobins are, but what use is it to know who the major characters are in the French Revolution if you're not trying to do something with that knowledge? Some fields have a lot of technical specific information. And so there may be times where you need to learn it. And so I'm not saying that every moment of learning will be enjoyable and fun and that there won't be some boring parts. That's just part of life. But I am saying that it should. Be in service of something that seems purposeful and meaningful.
SPEAKER_01I really appreciate that response. That has been my principal response to the objection when I've received it directly, which is this false dichotomy idea. It's you can have very high standards and you can have what are objectively not very interesting, you know, factoids that have to be mastered in service of some larger goal. But if that larger goal isn't clear, then it's an empty exercise in meeting the standards of a test and then forgetting it, like we all were talking about earlier. Alternatively, I think you can create the conditions for mastering those details in the context of a much more engaging set of activities, right?
SPEAKER_02And also I think if you've ever taken a corner kick, done a pirouette, written a lead to a newspaper story, you remember those things because you were central to doing them. And so they require knowledge. But because the knowledge is incorporated in an action trajectory where there's some purpose, it just stays with you in a way that, you know, passing a test on a thing doesn't.
SPEAKER_00I'm curious to know, do you do anything in your practice to try to communicate a larger sense of purpose around what your students are learning?
SPEAKER_02Every class starts with a question or an exploration. I once talked to an English teacher who said that he spends 95% of his time thinking about the first question because he's like, if I get that right, then the whole class is going to go. And if I don't, then no matter what I do, it's going to be hard to rescue it. And I think there's a lot of truth to that. I think every time you come into a class, you're essentially making a pitch. This is what we're going to do today. And this is why it's interesting and important. And this is why you should wonder about it. And this is how it connects to the sort of the overall arc of what we're what we've been doing. So I think hard about that pitch because I think that English teacher was right. If that pitch doesn't carry, then people are sort of like going through the motions.
SPEAKER_00I'd like to come back to identity.
Helping Students Rewrite Their Identity
SPEAKER_00I think we know many students, myself included, arrive at higher end with a lot of self-talk, a lot of personal narratives. I'm not a math person. That was probably me. Definitely me. I'm a bad writer. I'm just trying to survive chemistry. I'm wondering what role can a professor or faculty member play in helping students see themselves differently as learners.
SPEAKER_02Over the this summer, I've been visiting some camps just to see if there's anything we could learn in education from summer camp. And one of the things that has really hit me over the head is that everything is a team sport. So one kid is climbing the rock wall, and the other kids are cheering for the kid who's climbing the rock wall, or one kid is doing the ropes course, and the more athletic kid is helping the less athletic kid up the ropes. I think if we could evoke more of that kind of attitude in our classes, that our goal here is for everybody in this class to get as far as they can with this subject. So when I put you into groups, the groups are not just for you. The groups are part of your responsibility here is to help people move forward. I would say there's sort of three levels of it. One, building a space that feels like a place where you can be authentically yourself. That's important. And then two, with respect to race, gender, sexual orientation, if the the things that you pick really matter. So like you could build the space, you could build the most beautiful space you wanted, but if like all of your authors were white, the students would register that. So you've got to think about who is in front of students and whether. And same thing with guests, when we bring in guests, think very carefully about who the guests are and whether the students can see themselves in those guests. So that's the second level. And then the third level is what you just said, right? Which is that I'm modeling constantly that this is not just an economic subject for me. I care passionately about these things. Usually during the course of the semester, once or twice, I'll need to miss a day because I'll be at a conference or running a convening or something. And I make a plan for that day and have somebody else there to do it and so forth. But when I come back, I'm like, oh, you know, I needed to learn. I just took a course in. I'm interested in, I went to this convening and I was expecting X, but I learned Y. Definitely you want to convey. I mean, they say that for higher ed, sometimes the problem is that people are so far down the road they forgot the question that got them interested in it in the first place. And that's where the students are. And so you got to show students the sort of trajectory from the question that they might be interested in to where it could eventually lead. So you can layer all of those things together without losing much. Like you can layer them in ways that you don't actually lose time.
SPEAKER_01I I really have enjoyed this conversation with Java. Um, we do have a lot of faculty who may be tuning into this in the middle of the course they've already designed and are teaching. Do you have any simple practices that you could recommend they experiment with in just a class period to get a feel for a direction that they might then really explore a bit more deeply and think about reorienting their course more fully in this direction?
Two Simple Practices To Try Tomorrow
SPEAKER_02If you were really just starting down this road, I would just pause after 15 minutes or so. There's some pretty good research at this point that people have trouble taking in information for more than 15 or 20 minutes at a time. So if you are a lecturer, then I would say just watch the audience. And after 15 or 20 minutes, unless you were like a master storyteller, you will have people tuning out. And so at that point, just ask a question and ask them to turn to each other and talk about that question for a few minutes, and then say, I just love to, we don't have time to hear everything in the room, but I'd love to get three or four comments and just see what people say. And that'll give you a little bit of a clue as to what is resonating and what's what's not. Another really simple one is to do some form of an exit ticket. You can do it in a Google form, you can do it on an index card, and you have a TA or something. You could just ask on one side what's one thing you're taking away from this, and what's one thing that you don't understand or are wondering about. And just have the TA sort those cards into piles and see what the big things are that they are taking away and that they're wondering about. And that will at least give you a clue as to what you want to talk about the the next time. So those are a couple of of simple practices.
The Future Professor As Cognitive Coach
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SPEAKER_00So I'm gonna fast forward into the future. So imagine you walk into a college classroom 10 years from now, and your work around deeper learning has really taken hold. What would I see students doing that I don't see maybe nearly enough of today?
SPEAKER_02The number one thing is like the time with the professor is really valuable. That is really what they are paying for in coming to the institution, and that is what you can uniquely do with them. So the content that you know, you can just record that and give it to them. So if if we had flipped classrooms and if people were sort of Eric Missur style using their in-class time to address questions that students had, working on problems, going in more depth, having interaction, that would be better. I'm personally think that human scale is really important and it's sort of you're irreplaceable. And so I think we would gradually figure out ways to make more things smaller. I don't think there is any real substitute for having actual dialogue with people who have conversations. A liberal arts college where you can sit in a group of 15 and talk with a world-leading expert on the topic, that's going to remain. That is a distinctive experience.
SPEAKER_00We had a guest, I guess, a year or so ago talked about the role of the faculty member. And it's what you're basically pointing at is not lecturer and partner of content or knowledge because I can get that watching a recording, or I could ask AI. It's the role of is cognitive coach. And if you're feeling like discernment, judgment, analysis, knowing how to ask a good question, problem identification, if these are the skills that are going to be that much more important given the power of technology today. I think it behooves us to have more access to cognitive coaches, not someone who stands in front of you 30 rows away, who I may never speak to over the course of a semester. Well, Jell, thanks so much for joining us today. It's been uh wonderful speaking with you.
SPEAKER_02Really enjoyed it.
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