I recently attended a Global Cities Education Network meeting in Shanghai. Present were representatives from East and West—five cities from North America, plus Shanghai, Singapore, Seoul, Hiroshima, and Melbourne. Despite their varied histories and cultures, all were part of a “twenty-first century learning” working group, which was seeking ways to help their students develop the knowledge and skills—critical thinking, collaboration, communication, problem solving—that have always been valuable but are now increasingly central to educational agendas worldwide.

EL Education (formerly known as Expeditionary Learning) started working on these issues twenty-five years ago. Founded on a conviction that students need to master core academic knowledge and skills, become producers of high-quality work, and develop into ethical, caring, and responsible human beings, EL Education is one of the few networks of schools that was tackling a “twenty-first century agenda” before the term was coined. There are now more than 150 EL Education schools. They include both charter and regular public schools, and they are located in urban centers, rural outposts, and everywhere in between. They have some hard evidence of success in core skills: for example, a recent Mathematica evaluation found that a sample of EL Education middle schools produced statistically significant gains in both math and reading compared to otherwise similar middle schools.1 But what is distinctive about EL Education is that when it achieves success it does so through a model that does not prize test scores as the ultimate goal. Rather, its approach is rooted in a vision of both what it wants its learners to become and what sort of pedagogy might get them there.

To step back for a moment, part of the reason that creating good education is so difficult is that it requires integrating different kinds of virtues. On the one hand, powerful education is exciting: it connects to students’ identities and their sense of life’s purpose, and, in so doing, creates the energy and momentum that we see and feel in classrooms at their best. At the same time, if learning is going to be worth much, it requires discipline and persistence on the students’ part—a willingness to acknowledge that subjects are complex, that learning is hard, and that it is only by doing and re-doing that real quality is produced. On the teachers’ part, it similarly requires the creativity to craft challenges that will capture the students’ imagination—often by taking what is on the surface and setting it slightly askew—and it requires the exceptionally careful planning and attention to detail that, together, organize how that learning will be carried out.

Many places have one or the other halves of this equation in place, but it is rare to find both. This is what my colleague, Sarah Fine, and I found over five years of researching a wide variety of American schools. There are a number of schools, particularly those of the No Excuses variety, that have embraced the more conservative virtues of discipline and practice, and, in so doing, have enabled their students to acquire more core disciplinary knowledge than had previously been the case. Many of these schools are now discovering that some of their students are struggling in the more open-ended environment of college, and are trying to revisit how to keep their core virtues and practices while also making learning more engaging and self-directed. Conversely, many of the more progressive, project-based schools that we have researched have been relatively successful in creating projects that tap into students’ identities and motivation, but they worry that their students are often not adequately developing core content knowledge in disciplinary subjects. The challenge of integrating these contrasting virtues is what makes deeper learning, and the deeper instruction that would produce it, so difficult to achieve.

EL Education puts this integration front and center. Take the issue of standards and its relationship to project-based instruction. The typical approach makes traditional instruction the meat and potatoes of the diet—follow the textbook, do the problems—and intersperses occasional forays into projects which are largely disconnected from the core content but are intended to be the more engaging part of the curriculum. In the EL Education approach, teachers get together during the summer, examine the core standards that students are expected to master over the coming year, and then develop units which are anchored by meaningful projects but which simultaneously incorporate the content that targets the standards. Such an approach makes the learning purposeful and integrated for the students, while easing teachers’ anxiety that projects are stealing time from the core content that will be measured on state tests.

A related idea that EL Education has championed is that the same standard can give rise to very different lessons. Say that the standard asks students to understand data scatterplots. A typical lesson might give students some fictional data—for example, thirty students’ height and weight—and ask them to graph it, draw a best fit line, and reach a conclusion about the relationship between height and weight. An EL Education lesson might ask students to take repeated samples of the local water supply and see whether there is a relationship between the cleanliness of the water and the rate of toxic dumping. This investigation might then spark an effort to fight pollution in their cities. Both lessons would teach students how to plot data and think about the relationships between X and Y, but the EL Education lesson invites students into a real world context and shows them why statistics is worth learning. Perhaps for these reasons, EL Education’s open-source curriculum has become an increasingly popular resource for traditional public schools: its grades 3 through 8 ELA curriculum is now being used in more than 500 districts in 39 states, including half of New York state’s 700 districts.

In the pages that follow, Ron Berger, Libby Woodfin, and Anne Vilen show you how to create such lessons. Much of the existing literature is either at the level of theory, with little practical guidance, or it offers oversimplified prescriptions that tend not to survive contact with real students. This book is different. It treats its reader with respect—it firmly acknowledges that the discretion and wisdom of the teacher are central in bringing any lesson to life. But, at the same time, it offers many concrete examples, in different disciplines for different ages, of how to create lessons that both connect to standards and connect to students. And it organizes these examples into categories, so that as teachers are trying to develop their practice within a particular type of lesson (say, a workshop approach to math), they can see what such a practice might look like at its best. All of these lessons come from EL Education schools—they draw on the work of practicing EL Education teachers, and you hear the voices of real EL Education students. Many of the lessons are illustrated with videos or photos of student work, consistent with EL Education’s longtime emphasis on examining models as a central vehicle for learning.

To be sure, these lessons represent EL Education at its best; not every school or every classroom in its network meets this formidable standard. As you will see in a few pages, a critique that Sarah and I wrote about one of its schools became a catalyst for some of EL Education’s recent efforts to help its schools to live up to the network’s considerable aspirations. The challenge for EL Education schools, like the challenge for the nation, is to discover how to embed the deeper instruction described in this book in many more classrooms.

To achieve that goal, each and every teacher will need to grapple with what it means to do deep or powerful instruction. And this book can help with that. Its lessons are not the kind you read once and then just “apply” to practice; rather, the book is a resource that is meant to be used in conversation with practice. Try some of these ideas with your students; see what catches and what falls flat; and then return to these pages and see whether there is a refinement, a wrinkle, or a different lesson that might better suit your needs. And do this in a community of like-minded teachers with whom you can share your discoveries and vent your frustrations as you seek to move from your current teaching self to its next iteration.

* * *

Each year, Ron Berger has come to visit my class at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Ron’s approach is always the same: he radiates optimism about the potential of what students can do, and then he shows a series of slides and videos depicting how work unfolds in the best EL Education classrooms. Frequently these videos feature students developing multiple drafts of a single piece of work—a first sketch of a butterfly or snake done by a first or second grader, looking like the typical drawing of a young child, and then, after student critiques and revisions and several subsequent drafts, a final version, looking like something you might want to hang on your living room wall. Each year, this visit is described by many students as their most consequential moment of learning—not only in my class, not only during their time at Harvard, but over their professional careers—because the students and their first drafts are so recognizable and their final results are so exceptional.

I recently read the book Resonate, which argues that the most powerful presentations are ones in which the audience is the hero and the presenter is the guide.2 The idea is that giving a presentation is like inviting the audience to go on a quest with you, inspiring them towards the limits of the possible, acknowledging that getting there will be difficult, and offering an idea, tool, or concept that will help them on this journey, a journey that will long outlast the short occasion of the talk. Ron’s work is like that—people come into contact with him only for a little while, but they leave inspired to try to incorporate his ideas into their practice for a lifetime.¹ I hope this book will help you on your own journey; the ideas contained within it and the people who developed them have certainly been consequential for mine.²

Jal Mehta

Cambridge, MA

Learning That Lasts addresses the most important challenge in education today: teaching quality. The research on this topic is unequivocal; there is no factor more closely correlated with student success. We often frame the problem as a “teacher quality” problem, rather than a “teaching quality” problem. Unfortunately, this small distinction has held us back from taking meaningful steps toward improvement. In this country we tend to believe that great teachers are born great, and therefore a student's experience in school is tied to the immutable personality traits or innate skills of his or her teachers. In other professions, such beliefs would seem ridiculous. We would never assume that doctors or firefighters are born good at what they do. Instead, we would assume that they have had extensive training and that they are continually learning new skills and staying motivated to do their best.

This is a book about teaching quality. It is about the capacity of teachers—all teachers—to get better at what they do. It honors their creativity and independence, but also provides them with the tools and inspiration they need to grow as professionals. This is also a book about the capacity of students. When they are challenged, engaged, and empowered through deeper instruction, they can fulfill their highest aspirations as students and people.

At EL Education we take a multidimensional view of student achievement, one that encompasses mastery of knowledge and skills, character, and high-quality work. The prevailing narrow view of student achievement, based primarily on tests of basic skills, does not reflect what families want for their children. Basic skills are vital, but families also want their children to develop higher-order skills and critical thinking, and they want them to be respectful, thoughtful, and happy. Businesses want students who are ready to be productive, independent, and collaborative workers, and creative problem solvers. Communities want students who are informed, contributing citizens and good people.

When students complete their formal education, their achievement will no longer be measured by high stakes tests. Instead, it is the quality of their work and character that will determine their success. The deeper instructional practices described in Learning That Lasts are designed to build students' skills across all three dimension of achievement and prepare them for success in and beyond school.

Like all of EL Education's books, this is not a theoretical text but rather a collection of practices and models from remarkably successful schools and classrooms. Learning That Lasts mines decades of wisdom from our most effective teachers, school leaders, and instructional coaches about how to plan and deliver instruction that is challenging, engaging and empowering for students. We hope this book and the accompanying videos of powerful practice can be both an inspiration and a practical guide for teachers and leaders, helping us all to get better at unleashing the power of students to do more than they ever thought possible.

Scott Hartl

President and CEO, EL Education

New York, NY

Ron Berger is chief academic officer for EL Education, overseeing resources and professional learning for schools nationally. Berger works closely with the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he did his graduate work, and currently teaches a course that uses exemplary student work to illuminate academic standards. Prior to his work with EL Education and Harvard, Berger was a public school teacher and master carpenter in rural Massachusetts for more than twenty-five years. Berger is an Annenberg Foundation Teacher Scholar and received the Autodesk Foundation National Teacher of the Year award. His previous books include An Ethic of Excellence, A Culture of Quality, Leaders of Their Own Learning: Transforming Schools through Student-Engaged Assessment, Transformational Literacy: Making the Common Core Shift with Work That Matters, and Management in the Active Classroom. Berger’s writing and speaking center on inspiring quality and character in students, specifically through project-based learning, original scientific and historical research, service learning, and the infusion of arts. He works with the national character education movement to embed character values into the core of academic work.

Libby Woodfin is the director of publications for EL Education. Woodfin started her career as a fifth- and sixth-grade teacher at the original lab school for the Responsive Classroom in Greenfield, Massachusetts, and went on to become a counselor at a large comprehensive high school. Woodfin started with EL Education in 2007 while completing graduate work at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Throughout her career, Woodfin has written articles, chapters, and books about important issues in education. Her previous books include Leaders of Their Own Learning: Transforming Schools through Student-Engaged Assessment, Transformational Literacy: Making the Common Core Shift with Work That Matters, Management in the Active Classroom, and Familiar Ground: Traditions That Build School Community.

Anne Vilen is a staff writer and school coach for EL Education. She began her career in academic publishing and freelance writing, then earned a master’s degree in teaching and taught language arts at levels ranging from sixth grade to college. Vilen served as director of program and professional development for seven years at an EL Education mentor school before joining EL Education in 2011. In her twenty years as an editor, writer, and teacher, she has published dozens of poems, essays, and articles. Her previous books include Transformational Literacy: Making the Common Core Shift with Work That Matters and Sisters and Workers in the Middle Ages.

EL Education (formerly Expeditionary Learning) is a leading K–12 nonprofit that is meeting the national challenge to raise student achievement across diverse schools and communities. Combining challenging work with the joy of discovery and pride in mastery, EL Education prepares students to become contributing citizens with both the skills and character necessary for success throughout college, work, and life.

EL Education’s portfolio of instructional materials and coaching services draws on 20-plus years of success in more than 150 schools in the EL Education network, serving 4,000 teachers and 45,000 students in 30 states. Based on founding principles of meaningful work, character, and respect for teachers, EL Education’s offerings transform teaching and learning to promote habits of scholarship and character that lead to high student achievement, regardless of student background. In addition to success on standardized tests, EL Education students demonstrate critical thinking, intellectual courage, and emotional resilience; they possess the passion and the capacity to contribute to a better world. For more information, visit www.ELeducation.org.