Over the summer, in preparation for this school year, Summers-Knoll teachers read The Project Habit: Making Rigorous PBL Doable (2022) by Michael McDowell and Kelley S. Miller. In this text, McDowell and Miller outline and describe 15 “habits” that teachers can adopt to ensure “rigorous” project-based teaching and learning. “Rigor” has become a buzzword in education – people use it, but they don’t often define it. McDowell and Miller, however, provide an explicit and concrete definition of rigor: learning at surface, deep, and transfer levels. For learning to be meaningful, students must construct discipline-specific knowledge (surface), understand the relationships among facts and skills within a discipline (deep), and connect or apply those ideas to other disciplines and contexts (transfer).
McDowell and Miller’s very practical book provides lots of examples of how to plan for and enact project-based instruction at all three levels. They also point out that a lack of rigor is a potential pitfall for teachers who try to facilitate project-based learning but do so without understanding how to 1) create learning intentions at surface, deep, and transfer levels and 2) follow through with teaching that supports students’ learning at all three levels throughout a given project.
This week at Summers-Knoll, although teachers and students are in the thick of their first projects, Project 2 is on the horizon. During our weekly Wednesday professional learning session on October 18th, teachers crafted learning intentions for their second projects at all three levels: surface, deep, and transfer. Although our learning sessions are scheduled for 3:15pm – 4:45pm, the teachers kept working (of their own volition) well beyond 4:45pm, and we’ll continue this work at our Wednesday professional learning session next week. SK teachers’ dedication, care, and excellence is evident in everything they do, which makes my work as an instructional coach incredibly satisfying.
Below, I outline the meanings and purposes of transfer, deep, and surface learning so that you can see and appreciate the rigor with which SK teachers are planning for rigor in their projects this year.
Teaching for Transfer – Leveraging what we’re learning about rigorous PBL, at SK, we plan backwards. We start with the end goal in mind, and this involves crafting an overall learning intention for transfer. This “transfer” learning intention articulates how students will demonstrate a transfer of knowledge and/or skills at the end of a project. Examples of verbs and verb phrases that reflect this notion of transfer include design and conduct, produce and present, critique, reflect, and compare and contrast across contexts.
Teaching for Deep Learning – Each overarching learning intention for a project is made up of sub-learning intentions, which are written using verbs at the “deep” or “transfer” levels. Examples of verbs or verb phrases that reflect the cognitive nature of deep learning include analyze, draw conclusions, argue, extend patterns, infer, interpret, verify. There are also “deep learning” success criteria that teachers identify and students meet along the way as a project unfolds.
Teaching for Surface Learning – And then there are the success criteria at the surface level that students need to meet to be able to dive deeper and apply their knowledge using their higher order thinking skills. Examples of verbs or verb phrases that reflect the cognitive nature of surface learning include name, tell, recall, measure, list, label, perform a procedure. Interestingly, research shows that project-based learning often falls short when students engage in inquiry without being given opportunities to first build surface knowledge. “Students need to have a thorough understanding of core content knowledge by understanding facts and using skills within a discipline” (McDowell, 2017, p.14).
Surface learning, deep learning, and learning for transfer are all important. They work together and build upon one another. Knowledge begets knowledge – the more you know, the more you are able to learn. At SK, teachers’ thoughtful planning and enactment of project-based learning ignites students’ joy of building knowledge, seeking knowledge, and applying knowledge.