Commentary: Leading for deeper learning: why a human vision of schooling demands a human vision of leadership

Abstract

This issue marks a heartening development in educational scholarship. It brings together research on deeper learning with work on educational leadership, offering us new and detailed empirical evidence about what it takes to transform an industrial era school system, featuring mostly rote and disengaged learning, into modern schools that create passion and purpose for both students and adults. Building on earlier work on the importance of symmetry (Mehta and Fine, 2019;Roberts, 2012), I argue here that birthing this new vision of schooling requires a similarly transformed vision of leadership.We should not underestimate the magnitude of leadership that is needed to create this transformation. As has been amply documented in the scholarly literature, modern schooling was born in the early 20th century during a period of industrialization in which the goals of schooling were to sort and batch-process students, assimilate them to American values, and reproduce inequalities of race and class. The ambitions of contemporary reformersto build a system in which students see meaning and purpose in their learning, to challenge longstanding hierarchies in schools and in society, and to change the grammar of schooling in ways that would make learning more fluid, dynamic and connected to the worldare not things which the industrial era public school system was created to do.Leaders face what organizational scholars call third order changenot simply changing the settings on the dial, but rather significantly rethinking the purposes of the system itself, which, in turn, requires changes to both the mindsets and the structures which permeate educational institutions. Particularly challenging is that this transformation is necessarily distributedit will need to be held and led by many teachers, principals and other adults in schools. At the same time, most of these people have never experienced the kind of schooling that we are trying to generate, and, in fact, have considerable experience in the traditional system that we are seeking to hospice. Thus leaders have to negotiate a paradox: the work needs to be led by many people who have not themselves experienced what they are trying to create.More challenging still, schools sit in an ecosystem of parent, community, district, state, federal and college expectations, all of which, on the whole, tend toward an institutionally conservative vision of schooling. State tests, district pacing guides, advanced placement exams, college admission standards and parental concerns about their children's prospects all work against significant change. As our wise mentor David Cohen said to Sarah Fine and me midway through our study of deeper learning in American high schools: "Well? Have you found any yet? There are no incentives for it."Thus while this issue mostly focuses on school-level leadership, in the longer run, change at scale will require leadership across all levels of the system. Provinces and states can change the competencies that guide the system, moving away from detailed subject...