Defining deep and transformational, learner-centered schooling
We are often asked about our organization’s name. The short answer is that “DKDK” stands for what you don’t even know you don’t even know. It’s shorthand for our educational philosophy and our most deeply held values about what schooling might be.
Interested to know more? Read on.
Here’s what we believe: Far too many students - particularly high school students - see the purpose of school as solely moving from not knowing to knowing. This paradigm of learning gives primacy to the idea that there is a single, core body of knowledge that can be absorbed and to the notion that students are receptacles to be filled. In this model, the game of school is strategic and often motivated almost solely by external factors (grades, college admission, approval, pick your poison). Students perform what they know by remembering and repeating ideas they encounter in class. The knowing, in this model, is often static and surface in nature. Too often the knowing isn’t retained or transferred to other domains. School is a waystation between now and a disconnected future. The result, too often, is a dampening of curiosity, a fixed mindset around intelligence and a listlessness about the future. “Good” students put all their eggs in the future (when “real life” will start). “Struggling” students and those without the necessary social network and economic prowess to ensure success in an abysmally expensive higher education system, stagger into the future wonder if knowing/not knowing will get them anywhere at all.
By way of contrast, deep and transformational learning expands our sense of ourselves and the world by inviting us to incorporate new ideas and experiences that challenge our most deeply held premises and paradigms. Deep and transformation learning encompasses the core academic skills we value and the durable, twenty-first century skills we know are important. This kind of learning exposes the limitations of factory model schooling. It insists we tinker with the “grammar” of school by embracing learning that makes the walls of the traditional school porous. Deep and transformational learning values future-ready experiences and authentic engagement with the world. It values the classroom and a range of experiences that make the walls of our schools more porous, including internships, career and technical exploration, alternative creditially, mentorship and shadowing and more. Lastly, deep and transformational learning is equity-focused. It meets students were they are and knows no ceiling on where they might go next. It values many ways of knowing and allows for a strengths-based, inquiry focused approach to learning.
Deep and transformational learning occurs when we encounter what we didn’t even know we didn’t even know: the DKDK. In our own lives we can point to examples of this: playing improvisational jazz, traveling within a culture that is not our own, doing original research in a lab or an archive, writing a novel or a piece of history, serving as an apprentice in a professional setting. Experiences like these challenge us to stretch, to use a range of skills, to embrace ambiguity, to make choices, to fail and try again through experimentation. Entering into the DKDK requires risk, vulnerability, a sense of humor, a willingness to collaborate and more. The rewards are long-lasting: increased intrinsic motivation, confidence, resilience, empathy, connection, self-knowledge.
The DKDK Project is committed to refining our collective understanding of transformational learning - what it is and how it happens - alongside like-minded practitioners. We do this by supporting strategic initiatives, project managing innovative educational ventures and/or by building capacity in organizations.
“The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration- how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?”
We Believe Schools are at a Crossroads
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Students, motivated largely by the external reward of admission to a selective college, are suffering from alarmingly high rates of anxiety, depression and suicide. Smartphones, the internet and social media are ubiquitous and yet students today struggle to find connection.
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Schools are increasingly aware that they must support students’ social, emotional and intellectual development in order to prepare them for a quickly changing world. But how?
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Shifting the grammar of schooling is complex. We must move from a culture of compliance that focuses on absorbing knowledge to a culture of learning that focuses on skill development, the construction of knowledge and building confident, self-aware learnerss. To do this teachers must consider what we now know about learning, adolescent psychology and the brain.