Moving Beyond Maslow: Why Elementary Schools Need Self-Determination Theory

Picture this: A fourth-grade teacher posts Maslow's pyramid on her wall, believing she must fix her students' home lives before they can learn. Meanwhile, a child who skipped breakfast is completely engaged in writing a story about dragons, forgetting their hunger entirely. Another student, from a wealthy family with every physical need met, sits disengaged and miserable, feeling controlled and incompetent. That pyramid on the wall isn't just wrong—it's actively harmful to how we understand motivation in our schools.

For decades, elementary schools have operated on Maslow's Hierarchy, assuming children must have their basic needs met before they can learn. This creates three toxic problems. First, it gives teachers an excuse: "These kids can't learn because they're poor, hungry, or from broken homes." Second, it ignores reality: children in refugee camps pursue education, kids in poverty become passionate learners, and wealthy children with every physical need met can be completely unmotivated. Third, and most dangerously, it blinds us to what actually drives human motivation. We're using a 1940s theory that Maslow himself never properly tested and has failed to meet proper scientific scrutiny ever since then, and we're failing our students because of it.

Self-Determination Theory, backed by 40 years of rigorous research, shows that three psychological needs drive motivation for everyone—regardless of their circumstances.
Autonomy: the need to have choice and voice.
Competence: the need to grow and feel capable.
Relatedness: the need to connect and belong.

Here's the revolutionary part: these needs aren't hierarchical. A hungry child can be deeply motivated when they feel autonomous, competent, and connected (naturally, their learning will be far more effective when they are not hungry). A wealthy child with every physical comfort can be miserable and unmotivated when these three needs are crushed.

When schools focus on these three needs, magic happens. Students from all backgrounds become engaged. The child who hasn't eaten breakfast forgets their hunger while leading their reading group (autonomy), mastering new skills (competence), and helping peers (relatedness). Teachers stop making excuses and start making changes they can actually control.

Imagine walking into an elementary school that has abandoned Maslow's pyramid for SDT's three needs. In one classroom, students choose from different ways to demonstrate their learning—some write, some build, some perform. That's autonomy. On the walls, instead of behavior charts showing who's "good" or "bad," there are growth portfolios showing each child's journey toward mastery. That's competence. During morning meeting, the teacher shares her own struggles with learning something new, and students support each other through peer mentoring. That's relatedness.

The hungry child? She's so engaged in teaching another student her method for solving word problems that she forgets she's hungry (and she will be fed through the school meal program). The wealthy child who has everything? He's finally excited about school because he gets to choose his research topic and work with friends who value his ideas, not his possessions.

Teachers stop saying, "These kids can't learn until their home lives improve"—something they can't control. Instead, they say, "Every child can be motivated when I support their autonomy, competence, and relatedness"—something they can control every single day.

Starting tomorrow, take down Maslow's pyramid from your classroom wall. It's not just outdated—it's an excuse that prevents us from doing what we actually can do. Replace it with three simple questions: How can I give students more choice? How can I help them feel capable? How can I build genuine connection?

For administrators: Stop asking teachers to identify which "level of Maslow's hierarchy" their struggling students are on. Start asking: "How are you supporting autonomy, competence, and relatedness today?"

For teachers: Stop waiting for students' home lives to improve before expecting engagement. Start creating classrooms where every child—regardless of their breakfast or bank account—can experience choice, growth, and belonging.

The research is clear. The evidence is overwhelming. Self-Determination Theory works because it addresses what humans actually need to thrive, not what we assume they need based on their circumstances. Our students don't need us to fix their lives. They need us to support their autonomy, competence, and relatedness. And unlike poverty or family dysfunction, that's something we can actually do. Today. In our classrooms.

The pyramid has fallen. It's time to build something better.

For a more precise analysis read Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is Wrong - Now Stop Using It!

Teaching vs. raising children

 The idea that schools should ONLY teach, as if nurturing children is separable from teaching, contradicts both common sense and the legal principle of in loco parentis.

It is common sense that anybody that takes custody of a child is responsible for that child’s well-being. No reasonable parent would give their child to a teacher that recklessly starved, suffocated, or dehydrated students. Nor should they send their children to a teacher that routinely alienated, controlled, and frustrated the skills of their students. All human have primary psychological needs for relatedness, autonomy, and competence which are just as important to well-being as the other more well-known needs. I take nurturing to mean, at minimum, the support of primary human needs. It is common sense that anyone who takes custody of a child has a duty to ensure that their psychological needs are supported. Independent of anything else they may be obligated or committed to accomplishing with that child this is the minimum of care that Is owed to the child. 

This common sense view was put into common law through a principle called in loco parentis. The following series of quotes, mostly from legal decisions, will help illuminate the principle. 

In Sir William Blackstone's compilation of English law from 1770 he made it clear that the “exercise of power [by a tutor or school master] is limited to what is ‘necessary to answer the purposes for which he is employed.’” (p. 271, Zirkel & Reichner, 1986)

“[T]he courts have accepted with relative ease the notion that in loco parentis gives rise to duties as well as rights of educators.” (p. 281, Zirkel & Reichner, 1986) 

“The status of a parent, with some of the parent's privileges, is given a school teacher by law in aid of the education and training of the child…” (Guerrierri v. Tyson, 1942)

Blackstone assigned three duties to parents that are “transfer[ed] to teachers: maintenance, protection, and education.” (Worley, 2003)

“We are not here concerned with the law applicable to punishment of a pupil by a teacher; but rather with the law applicable to the duties of a teacher in the care and custody of a pupil. In the faithful discharge of such duties the teacher is bound to use reasonable care….” (Gaincott v. Davis, 1937)

There are a variety of ways that a school institution cannot act like a parent and the law carves out limitations and deviations accordingly. But the foundational principle of in loco parentis is that parents are responsible for ensuring the well-being of their child AND when they entrust their child to school personnel, that makes those school folks into caregivers who are likewise obligated to support the child’s well-being. 

Marco Rubio’s comment quoted in the meme demonstrates his ignorance of the principle of in loco parentis, ignorance of children’s needs, and/or a reckless impulse that will harm school children.

Motivation Does Not Cause Learning, But You’re Missing the Point

There seems to be a misunderstanding about the relationship between motivation and the duty of care known as in loco parentis among folks in the education field. It is true that motivation is only indirectly related to academic performance, but that is a trivial fact. The important fact that seems to be overlooked is that when children are in the custody of educators that means that need satisfaction is a prior obligation to academically educating them. The moment you took custody of the child from their parent you became obligated to ensure their well-being as a pre-condition to providing instruction. That means that you do not have an option about providing support for their primary human needs. Primary human needs are the most central CAUSES of well-being, by definition, and they also cause motivation to be certain ways, too. Both parents, and by extension all adults that they entrust custody of their children to, are duty bound to ensure their well-being, which necessarily means providing support for their primary needs and ensuring their motivations are more autonomous than controlled. 

No reasonable parent or teacher would accept the existence of a school that recklessly starved, suffocated, dehydrated, or exposed children to the elements. It should be equally abhorrent to accept schools that routinely thwart psychological needs which will manifest as a pattern of controlled motivations in their students and teachers.

Against Magical Beliefs About Language and Schools

I periodically run into claims about the role of language in thinking that are dangerously close to assuming that language has magical powers over the human mind. One recent example is from an article defending the need for classical liberal education by a philosophy professor named Chris Nadon in an article entitled “Against Lived Experience.”  In a paragraph that is constructing the straw man version of “student-centered” schools that he so valiantly slays with his argument, he said, “We cannot think without language.” 

If we decide to take this statement at face value we have to assume that deaf children who have not yet learned sign language are not thinking. We have to assume that all pre-verbal children are not yet thinking, either. We also have to assume that all animals are unthinking, as well. I live at a llama ranch and train llamas. The idea that they don’t think is utterly absurd. Or to be more precise, due to having a substantial basis in lived experience with pre-verbal children and other non-verbal animals, I can’t take seriously any definition of thinking that could be used to support that claim. 

An important question we need to ask is, What do we really know about thinking? For simplicity I will rely on probably the most famous authority on thinking today: the late Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman. In 2011 he wrote the best-selling book Thinking Fast and Slow, which is his review of how one conclusion about thinking has become pervasively accepted within psychology: we have two types of thought, a fast intuitive type of thinking and a slow deliberative type of thinking. It might be plausible to posit the idea that our slow deliberative type of thinking involves the substantial use of language; however the fast intuitive type of thinking is plainly not dependent on language. In order to take Nadon’s statement to be true either means that, because an estimated 90 to 99% of what occurs in our brains is in the fast intuitive category, we have to ignore the majority of our thoughts or we have to redefine the word “thinking” so radically that we reject the possibility that pre-verbal children and all animals even think at all. 

Why should we care about claims about the role of language in thinking? The problem is that when we misunderstand the role of language in thinking we put our focus on language; which usually leads us to ignore the more subtle aspects of thought that do most of the real work in determining our actions in the real world. 

In the case of someone like professor Nadon, he might be deceiving himself about the importance of language in educating children and as a consequence of being a school leader may be imposing requirements upon students and teachers that do psychological harm. His straw man argument against “student-centered classrooms” is premised on language having the magical property of restraining thought. Continuing from the prior quote, he said, “With limited words come limited thoughts.” This is a version of linguistic determinism which is typically stated as the idea that if Eskimos have more words for snow and we-who-are-not-Eskimos have less words for snow, we are unable to think the same kinds of thoughts about snow that the Eskimos have. A similar example is that if a language has terms for colors but does not include a word for, say purple, then the people who speak that language might not perceive that color. This hypothesis has been proven false. The ability to perceive gradations of color and properties of snow are not magically limited by the language that people speak and/or think with. The linguistically limited repertoire of words might make reasoning slower and communicating more difficult, but it does not limit the thinking that is possible. 

Language does influence thought. However, those influences are subtle and difficult to tease out. For a deeper understanding of how language is influenced by how our bodies exist in the world, I rely primarily on the works of cognitive linguist George Lakoff and his collaborations with philosopher Mark Johnson. Their main work together is book called Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. The idea is that there are universal perceptual experiences that are wired into our brains starting in our pre-verbal younger lives and they determine some key aspects of how we construct our linguistic abilities and patterns of reasoning. A whole lot of thinking, shaped by bodily experiences of taking action and other perceptions, determines the development of language. This is the opposite of linguistic determinism. It is important to take this into account when we are thinking deeply about how language works in our minds and how our minds shape our actions. 

Nadon singles out in quotation marks the word “agency” which he implies is “[a]n immediate cause of our failure … [to] … demonstrate the tangible benefits of reading and writing about difficult books.” This is of personal interest because I have written a book called The Agentic Schools Manifesto which is about the importance of agency in educating children. Unfortunately, he must have relied on claims about agency and definitions of agency that are imprecise and poorly articulated given his portrayal of what he thinks it means and how it would be implemented. His portrayal of “student-centered” schooling seems like a cartoon version of how such schools are written about. Most writers who criticize that kind of school also create cartoon versions, therefore his version appears to me to be a cartoon of a cartoon with no basis in or connection to reality. 

Here’s the crux of the issue for me: taking language as the be all and end all of educating children has led to global systems of schooling that value the 3Rs of symbol manipulation (a.k.a. academics) to be their central defining feature. In the course of delivering all the knowledge, skills, and information out of the teachers heads into the heads of the children they have taken up institutional forms, policies, and practices that do psychological harm to children. But Nadon claims the classical academy approach would, rather than merely transfer information, “[turn] around … the whole soul.” I don’t buy his assertion because decades of research into the psychological needs, motivations, and engagement of schoolchildren in academically focused schools all over the world has consistently shown that they have their needs neglected (sometimes actively thwarted), their motivations are more controlled than autonomous, and their engagement is usually behavioral, not agentic. I mention the motivation and engagement to be thorough, but the most important causal piece is the needs. I know of no basis for claiming that the classical academies approach to academic schooling satisfies psychological needs any better than any other kind of academic approach. However, in my books I have presented an abundance of arguments and evidence to support the claim that schools that take agency as their focus do a better job of routinely satisfying psychological needs. 

You would not send your child to a school that starves, dehydrates, suffocates, or recklessly exposes your child to the elements. School personnel that did those things, or even allowed them, would be criminally prosecuted for negligence at the very least. That is because those are all physiological needs that can kill someone when they are neglected or thwarted. It is utterly mystifying to me that schools that routinely neglect the primary psychological needs of children and their teachers still dominate the industry. 

I don’t care if a school calls itself a classical academy, claims to be student-centered, or applies any other label to their school; what I do care about is that every school meets their obligation to provide the kind of psychological conditions that satisfy the needs of all the humans in the school. When they do anything less they are undermining their own educative goals and causing harm, too. The children and their teachers don’t usually die from this kind of neglect, but they are harmed, nonetheless. All schools can do better on this account. The words we apply to schools do not have the magical power of educating students. Words don’t limit our ability to think and act on behalf of children and their teachers.

Independent of the words we apply to schools, they need to be places where children are nurtured, where every child and every teacher has their primary psychological needs satisfied on a routine basis. School leaders can’t control whether or not their students’ and teachers' needs are satisfied in other places and times, but they can ensure that needs are met in their space and in their time. That is the least we should expect of them.  

Holistic? What does that mean?

Before you can understand what I mean by "Holistic Equity" you have to have some ides of what I mean by "holistic." The video linked below will take you through a quick exploration of what "holism" has come to mean in education. My newest video, What Is A Holistic Approach To Education?, will clarify what holism is and how it applies to education in about 13 minutes.

Abusive Isolation is a Problem, not Homeschooling: Responding to Bartholet's Proposed Ban

To hear Elizabeth Bartholet tell it, children in homeschooling families are in immanent peril. The Arizona Law Review published an article by Bartholet entitled “Homeschooling: Parent Rights Absolutism vs. Child Rights To Education & Protection.” She paints a picture of grave danger for children who are homeschooled which leads her to propose “a presumptive ban on homeschooling.” I agree with Bartholet that children have rights to protection and education that may need to be bolstered by both constitutional acknowledgment and some form of enforcement that would probably impinge on the perceived prerogatives of ideologically radical parents. I disagree with Bartholet's conceptions of education and schooling because they mislead the author to conclusions that are not going to ultimately serve the proper end of education, even if they might marginally improve the situation with regards to protection. 

To enable us to get traction on this issue let's consider an analogous situation of protection. Lightning strikes are a potential danger. How much of the freedom of our children and our budget should be devoted to protecting against this danger? We do not routinely dress children in chain mail Faraday suits that would safely channel a lightning strike around their bodies into the ground because such things are both expensive and everyday use would curtail a child's freedom to learn effectively about the world. In fact, no precautions are taken to protect children against lightning on an everyday basis in any family or school that I know about. Lightning strikes are so rare that taking such precautions would be simply ridiculous. Even when there is stormy weather no one routinely takes the precaution of wearing a Faraday suit. Faraday suits are only routinely worn by workers who handle high voltage power lines on a daily basis and performance artists who routinely use high voltage Tesla coils. 

I suspect that Bartholet's fears are stoked by an unreasonable assessment of how isolated homeschooled children are on a routine basis and by an unreasonable assessment of how likely it is that a homeschooling family could become a harmful situation for a child. Bartholet admits she does not have the data to prove it but she nonetheless tells a story suggesting that a significant portion of homeschooled children are endangered by the possibility of a lightning strike of child abuse and that this grave situation warrants dressing every child in the regulatory equivalent of a chainmail Faraday suit. But before I more carefully construct this analogy there are a few points to be made first. 

Both “sides” of this issue are wrong in some important ways. Human nature, as established by the primary human needs empirically established within the Self-Determination Theory community, contradicts both sides. The primary psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness and their role in engagement with learning activities imply that the ideological notions of how to educate children promoted by the parent's rights absolutists are contradicted by human nature. Those same needs also imply that school practices used to educate children in the majority of schools are also contradicted by human nature. Therefore, the promotion of schools as the standard to which parents must measure up in order to homeschool is misguided. 

What those two “educational” contexts erroneously share in common all to often is an over-emphasis on obedience. Being merely obedient to the dictates of adults, no matter whether they are parents or teachers, is not going to result in a child becoming educated. What will result in an educated child is consistent exposure to an environment in which their primary human needs are satisfied. The two “educational” contexts that are discussed in the article have mostly been places in which the primary human psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness are not recognized, thus are not meaningfully addressed as central features of the educational enterprise. This particular problem is an inadvertent consequence of simply not realizing that these specific features of human nature exist and how crucial they are to educating children.

A more empirically responsible conception of learning is needed in order to better understand the nature of education and the possible role that both parents and states can play. I favor the inclusion of all types of organizations that serve children in the solving of the problem of ensuring that all children are educated properly. I also accept that it is in everyone's best interests for children to have routine exposure to mandatory reporters as a protection against abuse. 

To be clear, the state’s interest is not in schooling, per se. The state’s interest lies in having a citizenry that is actively empowered to learn without restricting each citizen's view of what phenomena within their environment is worth learning more about. Every citizen of a state is an embodiment of that state. A state literally cannot exist without citizens that can each serve as its embodiment. The state is going to be the best it can be when each and every one of its citizens can perceive accurately, think clearly, and act effectively on self-selected goals and aspirations that are appropriate to their situation. If there are obstructions that impair or distort a citizen’s view of the situation in which they exist, they will fail to accurately perceive, clearly think about, effectively act on, and formulate appropriate goals and aspirations within the situation they occupy. Obstructions can include ideological commitments, community norms, individual physiological or psychological imbalances, and a variety of other mechanisms that exist both within and beyond an individual person. 

Schooling is a formal institutional structure for facilitating learning. Learning is inherently about mapping the reality of the situation in which a person is located such that they can assess the nature of their circumstances and formulate appropriate goals and aspirations. Their goals and aspirations should serve both them, as an individual, and simultaneously the organizations and the society within which they are embedded. There are inherent problems that will inevitably arise whenever the interests of one person or group of people become mutually exclusive with another person or group of people. If a family exclusively serves the needs of children at the expense of parents, then that is just as problematic as the family exclusively serving the needs of parents at the expense of children, states over parents, states over children, parents over states, or children over states. 

These issues could be resolved if objective assessments of the well-being of each actor in the drama could be attained. This requires two or more institutions that can be trusted to make objective observations of the state of each actor (where our interest currently is children). Since we can never fully trust any institution to always and forever act in the best interests of all its members we need redundancy in the over all system. The idea of designating mandatory reporters is how the state has created this necessary redundancy. 

Bartholet's conception of homeschooling families that can so thoroughly isolate their children from mandatory reporters is an extreme situation. There is no question that it can happen. But there is a question about how frequently it happens. Do we have the resources and the political will to prevent every single instance of child abuse at all costs to our freedoms and budgets? Do we have the callousness to take the parent's rights absolutist position that no child is worth compromising each parent's freedom? Naturally, the answer lies somewhere in between. 

Advocates for investing in protection regimes need to prove that the danger is preventable by the means they propose. Contrary to the impression that Bartholet creates, the limited research on homeschooling and my experience with homeschooling families suggests that the vast majority of families expose their children to mandatory reporters in a variety of non-school contexts such as 4-H, scouting, classes, medical appointments, sporting activities, etc. I suspect that Bartholet's proposed ban would complicate the lives of millions of children without providing any additional societal benefit simply because those families most affected by her plan already expose their children to mandatory reporters on a regular basis. The people Bartholet imagines might be exposed as abusers are the very people who are most unlikely to comply in the first place. Regardless of their choice of schooling option the abusers are isolating their children from others and that is the central problem to be solved. That problem is not substantively addressed by banning homeschooling.

What is needed is objective, trustworthy measures of the psychological conditions that children experience in any educational environment that they encounter, regardless of whether the responsible institution is the family, a school, or some other organization. Since we know that certain psychological conditions lead to better learning, then we know that any environment that consistently provides those conditions is providing the basis for an optimally educational environment (note: merely the basis, not the full extent). One of the central conditions for that kind of environment is relatedness. Parents who are controlling their children so thoroughly as to isolate them from mandatory reporters are, at minimum, likely to be thwarting their child's needs for autonomy and relatedness. But abusive levels of isolation can be achieved even while sending a child to school due to the problematic ways that too many schools can also ignore the autonomy and relatedness needs of children. When schools are more focused on getting obedience rather than engagement from their students then they are just as complicit in the psychological neglect of that child as an isolating parent. 

As an education researcher and advocate who has directly interacted with homeschooling families I assume my assessment of the situation of homeschooling is better than Bartholet's. Her misguided assessment of the dangers posed by homeschooling leads her to faulty conclusions about how plausible it is that homeschooling will lead to abuse that escapes the attention of mandatory reporters. However, even if the danger were real, her proposed remedy would not solve the problem, except only marginally, because it fails to address the central issue of children being isolated by their parents, which can be accomplished independent of their schooling choices. 

Teaching Math Teaching Podcast Interview with Don Berg

Here is a link to my interview on the Teaching Math Teaching Podcast with Eva Thanheiser, Dusty Jones, and Joel Amidon hosting. 

https://www.teachingmathteachingpodcast.com/16

We discussed the work of Deeper Learning Advocates, the hidden curriculum, deeper learning, and the one thing that all teachers should do.

Here's the timepoints for each of their main questions:

What are some examples of the "hidden curriculum?"

2:00

What decisions should students be making?

2:54

What you mean by "deeper learning?

10:45

What is one thing a teacher can take from this podcast?

19:30

Your books?

22:50

A Better Proxy: How to Evaluate Equity in K-12 Schools

Even though I'm a white male soaked in privilege I have a personal history with busing, like presidential candidate Kamala Harris who brought up her busing experience in the Democratic debate in Miami, Florida, on June 28, 2019. In the Long Beach Unified School District, where I grew up in California, they decided to invite kids, like me, to be bused into predominantly black schools in poorer neighborhoods in order to participate in magnet programs. I took advantage of two of those options; in 5^th and 6^th grades I went to SHARP at Signal Hill Elementary and all through high school I attended PACE at Long Beach Polytechnic High. 

Each magnet program made the school populations more diverse, but they took very different approaches to the fact of that diversity. At the elementary school the magnet program classrooms were separate from the rest of the school and our schedules barely overlapped so we had little contact with the mostly black regular program kids. Even though we helped to diversify the demographic numbers of the school-as-a-whole, the school was not really integrated. On the other hand, the high school program took a proactive attitude towards making integration a positive aspect of its culture with good results. Us kids in the program had many opportunities to interact with the kids who were not in it and race was addressed directly. In my experience school integration can be both good and bad, depending on how it is done. It is not enough to take a simple for or against position when it comes to racially integrating schools. 

Shortly after Harris's comments brought busing back into the national discourse, an article came out with the headline, "Did Busing Work?" (https://all4ed.org/did-busing-work/). Based on my experience I am skeptical of claims that busing specifically, and desegregation more broadly, are necessary solutions to inequities in our school system. Even though I did benefit from the programs to which I was bused, I'm not one of the people who needed better access to those benefits. More importantly, my argument for rethinking the equity issue derives more from recent insights into the psychology of learning than on the effects of past policies.

Objectively, desegregation did improve educational outcomes for black children in those places and times when it was achieved, according to a study reported in the Hechinger Report (https://hechingerreport.org/two-generations-desegregation/). But was the difference made by desegregation in and of itself (white and black children sitting in the same classroom or school)? The researchers said the mechanism of improvement was more likely the increases in spending that went with the desegregation. I further suspect that no one would be naive enough to think that spending, per se, is the mechanism for improvement, either. Spending is a proxy for putting capable teachers in front of students who can benefit from their teaching capabilities with some minimal level of material support (in the form of books and other relevant resources for the children to learn with/from). 

We set public policy using proxies for important things quite often. For instance, the state health department's restaurant inspectors do not culture bacteria from each dish in each restaurant in order to count the number of toxic or disease-producing microorganisms as a means for deciding whether the food is safe to eat or not. They use the proxies of good personal hygiene by workers and their implementation of well-established “best practices” for safe handling of foods to stand in for whether or not the food is actually safe for consumption. 

We have been using proxies in the education industry forever. Education is generally considered an ethereal mystery that we can only evaluate through proxies. Test scores, grades and diplomas are proxies for being educated. Desegregation is a proxy for equitable deployment of resources. To be precise, in the absence of a good solid scientific theory that would more clearly indicate where to focus our attention regarding how to produce the kind of learning we need to produce, we use proxies. It is a perfectly rational thing to do. 

Consider further that the particular proxies that have historically been chosen do not reliably indicate what they are assumed to indicate. What if food inspectors were more concerned about the smells in the restaurant than the germs? This is a plausible choice of proxy for an inspectorate that believed in the miasma theory of disease. The miasma theory says that bad smells cause disease, not germs. A miasma-believing inspector might object to the use of harsh smelling chemical disinfectants and prefer the abundant use of perfume to create more pleasing smells instead. (Before the institutional adoption of germ theory the strategic use of perfume was mistakenly considered an acceptable medical practice for combatting the spread of contagious diseases.) Proxy measures are always problematic when they do not do the job we expect them to do. 

What would it mean if desegregation, as a proxy for equitable deployment of teachers and resources, was not valid? What if test scores, grades and diplomas are not valid as proxies for getting an education? Finally, what if we know there are more scientifically valid ways to measure educationally relevant features of classroom and school situations that would be better proxies for indicating our success along the path to attaining an educated citizenry? In short, what if we're getting it all wrong?

I have to clarify three things before continuing. Fair warning: the three things are necessarily a little more technical and/or philosophical in nature, so be patient for four paragraphs. First, I take it as a given that the goal of every individual parent is to ensure that their child is educated and that, in a face-to-face confrontation between two parents of different races, no sane parent would ever openly endorse a desire to sacrifice one child's education for another. In a one-on-one confrontation with someone who shares their identity as a parent, even a die-hard racist would be reluctant to share those stereotyping thoughts that demean that other person and their child. This is a version of the moral dilemma presented in the classic film Sophie's Choice (1982). Spoiler alert: Meryl Streep plays a Jewish mother who survived the Nazi concentration camps and was forced by a guard to choose which one of her children should be killed in order for her and the other child to survive. Every individual parent recognizes, if only intuitively, that being put in the position wherein they are asked to sacrifice their own child's education for the education of someone else's child would put them in a thoroughly unacceptable moral bind. No mentally competent person (parent or not) would wish that kind of moral catch-22 on anyone. 

Our education system currently makes you decide this kind of moral issue without telling you that the decision you made will have that effect. You don't even realize you are being made to choose some children for sacrifice because the children to be sacrificed are usually not your own. And those parents who are enduring (or even actively working against) the sacrifice of their own child's education may be deflected from the real problems because they are paying attention to invalid proxies that do not accurately indicate whether an education is being effectively offered/attained or not. My point, for now, is that we can expect pervasive good intentions on the part of all citizens when they properly understand the nature of the situation as one in which morally bankrupt sacrifices have been forced upon us because we did not understand how those sacrifices were actually happening. We shall proceed on the assumption that everyone has good intentions, no matter how unwittingly we might be undermining them or how unskillfully we may be pursuing them with our current pattern of political choices. To put this in another way, we are acknowledging that there are system-wide effects that are having unintended negative consequences requiring system-level solutions, despite the fact that everyone is doing their best. 

Second, we are all in this together: the fundamental promise of membership in society is that we will collectively provide for the education of all of our fellow citizens. United we stand, divided we fall, and the only true unifier is education and the very best divider is ignorance. “A rising tide will lift all boats” would be a sound idea if that tide is providing universal opportunities to become educated. We are assuming that an “educated” person is someone who perceives accurately, thinks clearly, and acts effectively on self-selected goals and aspirations that are appropriate to their situation without necessarily being consciously aware that this is what they are doing. Our school system does a poor job of facilitating children to develop the skills of selecting goals and aspirations, in particular, because it pervasively denies them opportunities to make significant choices about their own activities. Learning in schools is mostly shallow because of this pattern of children being prevented from exercising enough control over their own activities. Making the distinction between deep and shallow learning is crucial to understanding how education is sacrificed for some children and how this pervades our school system without anyone intending it to do so. (My book More Joy More Genius has a more complete discussion of this definition of education and how it relates to the patterns of deep and shallow learning in K-12 schools.)

Third, we now have a scientific insight into learning that must inform how we proceed with education strategies from here on out. In particular, over about five decades of psychological research into motivation and engagement has revealed that we can make one critical and universally applicable claim regarding learning that invalidates many of the proxies that we are currently relying upon to manage the system. The claim: Engagement is a necessary precondition for deeper learning and, conversely, the observed disengagement of a majority of students and teachers causes a pervasive pattern of shallow and fake learning (getting good grades or passing tests without understanding the material). The reason that this claim is “critical” is because it inherently calls into question many of the assumptions about learning that appear to be embedded in the system. The research tradition that this claim draws from, Self-Determination Theory (SDT), has been carefully accumulating empirical evidence for decades to support its explanation of the roles of motivation and engagement in human behavior. The researchers investigating and articulating SDT did not set out to create a theory of learning, but they have inadvertently laid the foundation for a more scientifically respectable one than we have ever had available before. The foundation is a causal chain that clearly sets out necessary (but not sufficient) psychological conditions for deeper learning. In other words, we know that there are some critically important prerequisites to the deeper learning that is necessary to be a productive citizen in our globalized society today. The pervasive disengagement of both teachers and students shows that some of those prerequisites are consistently undermined instead of supported in most schools. 

Remember the magnet programs I attended in school? Despite being busy and jumping through the hoops to look good enough to get into an elite college, I was mostly disengaged throughout much of my schooling. I was encouraged to attend those magnet programs because I was bored with the regular classes, an even more extreme form of disengagement than the fake learning I practiced. I’m now a psychologist who specializes in motivation and engagement in schools and the fact is that disengagement is bad for learning. Jumping through the hoops as an expression of fake learning is one of the most severe problems in our school system. It is a severe problem because the system itself does not recognize how it fails to educate many children who look like they are successful. Thank you for your patience, now back to the main subject of this essay.

What role should desegregation play in our school system today? Here's a radical thought that might get me into hot water with some hard-core desegregationists when it gets taken out of context: What if we focus on the educational quality of the environments into which children are placed rather than the demographic characteristics? The trouble I anticipate is that this seems like a restatement of the failed "separate but equal" legal standard that the Brown decision over turned. 

The court, in Brown v. Board of Education, took a prudent step toward revising their view of how to ensure that all American citizens, regardless of race, would be supported by their states to become educated. The prior "separate but equal" legal standard established in 1896 by Plessy v. Ferguson was not getting the job done. Jim Crow was the law of the land in the South which meant that black people were too often being treated as if they were slaves (despite slavery being illegal) and otherwise being oppressed in a highly systematic way, according to Douglas Blackmon's book Slavery By Another Name and other analyses of that period in American history. In schools this took the form of separate black schools that were not given adequate funding or other forms of support that would have enabled them to function at the most minimal levels. They were separate and unsupported, thus unable to provide equal educational opportunities. 

The "separate but equal" legal standard failed because systemic racism undermined the minimal deployment of teachers and resources to serve minority children. White school boards throughout the country were failing to make equal provisions for teachers and resources in schools that served black communities, though most egregiously in the South. Those black communities were shorted but they were also subjected to the power of those boards without effective political recourse to righting those wrongs, until they eventually got the highest court in the land to decide in their favor and use federal power to force states to put new strategies into play as a result of the Brown decision. Desegregation was, in essence, a strategy for ensuring that teachers and resources were deployed more equitably. There was never an argument that shifting the demographics of schools was actually going to be a direct causal mechanism for improving educational outcomes. The argument was always, I believe, that desegregation was a reasonable proxy measure for the equitable deployment of teachers and other resources.

My new claim, that the pursuit of “equality” is now more plausible, is based on that fact that we now have a whole different context for attempting to achieve the educational outcomes that are at the heart of these issues. When "separate but equal" was first established, there was no federal department of education, the federal government had a very limited record of intervention in education issues, Jim Crow was in full force, and there were no accurate scientific insights into learning that would subsequently withstand prolonged scientific inquiry. To be clear, I am still against the "separate" part when it is enforced by any state or corporate entity, but I believe we are in a different position as a society in terms of making effective efforts to achieve the "equal" part.

We now know that psychological engagement is a fundamental part of the deeper learning that is required to understand and make a productive contribution to our global society. Engagement in a classroom does not depend on the demographics of the students and teachers. It can be negatively affected by a classroom or school culture that creates a hostile environment for some minority of students, but a denigrated minority can be created by putting a focus on just about any demographic detail and even some non-demographic details, e.g. the “dumb kids.” There is a fundamental problem that affects learning when there is any kind of threat to some of the learners in a classroom. Threats are barriers to deeper learning. That kind of threat cannot be ameliorated by adjusting the demographic details of each classroom. It needs to be addressed by adjusting the classroom and school culture (referred to as “climate” in education parlance). 

Successful implementation of “equal” educational opportunities was not possible prior to the development of a scientifically respectable understanding of deeper learning. But now that we have the beginning of that understanding we need to use it and revisit the possibility of ensuring a baseline of educational quality through measures of engagement in classrooms and schools. I am not advocating for separation, but I am advocating for a scientifically informed foundation of quality, regardless of existing demographics. Academic measures need to be recognized as proxies for what matters, they do not matter in and of themselves. What matters is children being fully engaged with subjects and activities that are valued by their local communities. If we can measure that engagement, then we are measuring what matters in education. One way of doing that, which has already been scientifically validated, is the Hope Survey. The Hope Survey was the subject of the book Assessing What Really Matters in Schools: Creating Hope for the Future by Ronald Newell and Mark Van Ryzin. The Hope Survey is a school and classroom climate measure. Other measures have been validated within the Self-Determination Theory community, but they have not yet been adapted for the kind of widespread use that will help transform the school system. Another measure that includes engagement and is readily available to many schools, but does not have the same scientific provenance as the Hope Survey, is the Gallup Student Poll.

Desegregation is an unreliable proxy for what really matters in schools. Test scores, grades, and diplomas are also unreliable proxies. Let's take on a new and better kind of proxy for indicating our progress towards educating all children: engagement. Every policy or strategy for the improvement of equity in schools today needs to be evaluated against how well it improves the engagement of teachers and students. When we can clearly see, based on scientifically valid and reliable measures, that the majority of both teachers and students are engaged, we will have effected a major transformation of the school system. That transformation will make better proxies out of test scores, grades, and diplomas (assuming they survive the culling of practices that create disengagement). More importantly, that transformation will be taking us down the path to achieving our true aspiration: the education of all of our fellow citizens. 

Rube Goldberg Machines for Motivation

In a recent Edutopia article Anthony Palma said, “[I]n my experience, reform policies [that encourage flexibility about retaking tests and giving multiple chances to complete assignments] benefit a small portion of the student body, whereas traditional policies [that encourage rigidity] better serve a majority of students.” Unfortunately, Mr. Palma misunderstands motivation and is perpetuating the use of Rube Goldberg Motivation Machines. The truth is that the strictness or flexibility of the policies are not going to have direct effects on motivation, they are only going to have indirect effects that are dependent on the psychological conditions in which those policies are used.

His first defense for his point of view was in reference to motivation. I'm a researcher and author in the area of motivation in educational settings and I am familiar with that area of research. Based on what I know, his experience appears to be at odds with research on motivation in school age children. Taking the broadest view, Gallup reported in 2018 that 53% of K-12 students are disengaged; therefore, on the face of it, “traditional policies,” in general, clearly do not serve the majority well. And Gallup's reported rate for disengagement is likely low. (In my book More Joy More Genius I cite other experts who arrived at higher figures and based on published data I estimate 65-75% of the overall student population will ultimately be affected.)

A more specific claim about motivation that is problematic in the article is when Mr. Palma refers to a study of college-age students to justify a claim that deadlines should be strict for K-12 students. In research done within the tradition of Self-Determination Theory (SDT) on K-12 students the opposite was found. Rigid deadlines can be a hindrance not a help. Finding the opposite across these two contexts might seem strange. But it makes sense if you consider the fact that college students have more of a choice about being in their classes than K-12 students and the need for autonomy that can be satisfied through choice making is as psychologically important for motivation as water and food are to physiological health. The published recommendations based on research with K-12 children is for teachers to be flexible, not rigid. But, I will come back to this in a little bit to clarify further because the question that is being answered by relative levels of rigidity to flexibility is more problematic than any given answer.

Let's consider another potentially problematic quote from Mr. Palma, “A key flaw in the reform policies is the assumption about motivation. Many students—not all, but many—require extrinsic motivation. Due dates, one-time assessments, and late penalties provide motivation for the majority of our students.” The problem I have is that Mr. Palma is correct that inaccurate assumptions about motivation are embedded in many policies but he is also making an inaccurate assumption about motivation. This is a bit ironic since he is drawing from motivational research to bolster his misunderstanding. Motivation was the topic of my thesis research and is a central theme in my books. When I look at the school system from a motivational perspective it looks like a Rube Goldberg machine. Just in case you are not familiar with a Rube Goldberg machine it is an extraordinary collection of seemingly random junk cobbled together to accomplish the most mundane of tasks like making breakfast. They are a popular way to convey a cute version of the “mad” scientist image, such as Robin Williams' character in Flubber or the Wallace and Gromit movie Curse of the Were Rabbit. Another popular version is the Mousetrap Game that came out in 1963. The original cover for the game (below) shows a nice diagram of how the trap works in only 16 easy steps: a real world mass-produced Rube Goldberg machine. Each step is itself a simple machine. There is a sense that the inventors of these things operate under the misguided sense that mechanical wizardry should be applied to even the most trivial tasks that can otherwise be completed with only moderate efforts using simple tools.

In order to better reflect an accurate understanding about motivation I would strengthen his first claim about the “key flaw” I quoted above by substituting the phrase “almost all” for the phrase “the reform.” Almost all policies in education are based on assumptions about motivation; and the problem is that those assumptions are almost all wrong. The inaccurate assumptions about motivation embedded in mainstream schools are a constant source of annoyance for those of us who have a deeper understanding of the topic.

Comparing schools to Rube Goldberg machines might not sit well with teachers and their fans. Let's acknowledge the school folks who have invested their lives in creating the best they could come up with given what they had. It would not be surprising for them to bristle at the suggestion that they are off the mark. To be honest, they are not to blame; the fact that their efforts resulted in Rube Goldbergian motivational schemes was just a natural consequence of trying to manage a complex system with intuitions that misguide most school leaders about their influences on the motivation of both children and teachers. Those teachers are also victims of the same misunderstandings and the Rube Goldberg motivational machines that result from them.

Mr. Palma is, in a certain sense, correct to suggest that extrinsic motivation is OK. However, he appears to be relying on an outdated and inadequate view of motivation as being made up of merely the component pair of intrinsic and extrinsic aspects. He is correct to be skeptical of assuming that only intrinsic motivation is good and all extrinsic motivation is bad. This oversimplified view of a binary pair was abandoned long ago when SDT psychologists realized that extrinsic motivation has a whole spectrum of manifestations.

The current view is that extrinsic motivation has four components which are each a form of regulation: external, introjected, identified, and integrated. That list takes them in ascending order of effectiveness in terms of the sustainability of the behaviors that follow from each of these forms of extrinsic motivation. External regulations (typically punishments and rewards) are the least sustainable. You may get compliant behavior but the long-term prospects for the behavior continuing are not good. On the other hand, if the motivation is a form of integrated regulation, then that is nearly indistinguishable from intrinsic motivation, so the prospects of sustaining those behaviors are very good. The problem with Mr. Palma's claim is that it is not sufficiently specific to be either true or false. It's just too vague. Students, as with all people, are motivated in a variety of ways. They can have both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations for the same behavior at the same time. While it is sort of true that the practices he listed may “provide” motivation, they are unlikely to be “providing” the kind of motivation that is necessary for the deeper learning that is needed for effectively adapting to our global society today. Mr. Palma's strategies will likely result in short term compliance, but lower the quality of learning in the long term.

I'll have more to say about deeper learning at the end but I'd like to return now to the issue of how helpful deadlines and “reform policies” that Mr. Palma addressed can be. The key motivational variable is not really the flexibility or rigidity of the rules and expectations. The arguments made by Mr. Palma and the author he is criticizing are not relevant unless you are making another assumption about the context in which those policies are playing out. To be generous let's make the best possible assumption: teachers are working in schools in which the primary human needs of both them and their students are supported and those provisions for support actually result in the satisfaction of those needs. If this is true, then what we know from many decades of research into human motivation is that they will all be internalizing the aspects of the situation that are consistent with getting their needs met.

Notice the emphasized word “internalizing.” That is where the rubber meets the road in terms of motivation and engagement. Remember that motivation occurs on a spectrum from external regulation through integrated regulation to intrinsic motivation. Internalizing is the process of moving your motivations from the more external end to the more internal end of the spectrum. Are the people in a given situation internalizing the requirements of that situation? The more they internalize the requirements of the situation, the more they will be motivated to meet those requirements and more likely to engage in sustainable behaviors and learning strategies that help them achieve desirable results. This is what has been revealed by decades of research in SDT. You will not have an effective learning environment unless primary needs are being satisfied; a result of need satisfaction is that the people in that situation are internalizing the requirements of the situation. The fact is that merely getting short-term compliance is likely to produce only shallow learning; full engagement with the available activities is the secret to deeper learning. More internal motivations lead to fuller engagement. The internalizing process occurs in the context of primary need satisfaction. So the challenge is to ensure that the pedagogical choices about the rigidity vs. flexibility of testing procedures and deadlines occur in the context of school and classroom climates that are primarily need satisfying. If the need satisfactions are in place then the students and teachers will internalize those situational requirements.

The reason that the flexibility vs. rigidity arguments are ultimately not the right terms for this debate is that those arguments for and against are only pointing at issues that are tangential to the causal path towards deeper learning. If you want better motivation and engagement then you need to create a situation in which the primary human needs of the people in that situation are externally supported and internally satisfied. Those needs happen to include the psychological needs for relatedness, competence, and autonomy. And the implication of the fact that those are needs on a par with air, water, food, shelter, and sleep means that the challenge is not as simple as getting the right curriculum to be delivered by a skilled instructor. The psychological conditions for the learner, it turns out, are more important for deeper learning than the material and organizational conditions of the classroom and school. Don't get me wrong, there are some material and organizational conditions that can prevent deeper learning, but all material and organizational conditions will be rendered irrelevant if the psychological conditions are such that the causal chain for deeper learning is broken (I'll explain the casual chain in a moment).

The point I'm making here is that the retest policies that sparked this debate are one of those Rube Goldberg mechanisms in school; those policies are not direct leverage points for changing motivation and behavior. Let's take a moment to imagine the difference between a Rube Goldberg machine and using physical leverage directly to accomplish a real world task before we return to using it as a metaphor to understand how schools currently work. Moving forward, this distinction between Rube Goldberg machines and leverage can help us understand how to discern a more useful debate from a less useful debate in education.

First, the literal idea of leverage is that when you want to lift a heavy object, say a car or truck, the best way to do that is to use leverage so that you don't hurt yourself when you do the lifting. The more general term for this is mechanical advantage. Levers, pulleys, wheels, and other simple machines are said to provide mechanical advantage when they enable someone to accomplish a task more easily and effectively than without them. The key elements of leverage are 1) the heavy object to be lifted, 2) a lever that can be put under the heavy object, and 3) a fulcrum that is under the lever placed at an optimal distance away from the heavy object. The most efficient way to use this set-up is to apply your effort directly to the end of the lever opposite from the car while the fulcrum is placed much closer to the car end than to your end. Here are two videos that illustrate the principle. One uses the example of lifting the Empire State Building with a notebook. The other is just a high physics class using 2x4's and deck screws to build a lever.

Compare that example of mechanical advantage with the Mousetrap Game. The fact is that the game can become a real mousetrap with a little augmentation: here's video proof (5 min). Shawn Woods, the guy who made the video, points out at the end that it is totally impractical as a real mousetrap. My point here is that you CAN accomplish real world outcomes using Rube Goldberg machines, but it is NOT a desirable method, except for people with time and resources to burn. Using the Mousetrap Game as the basis for a real mousetrap is entertaining, but it would be ultimately wasteful to mass produce them as a solution to an infestation of real-life vermin.

How can the idea of mechanical advantage be applied to the situation of school policies? First, how will we know which policies are Rube Goldberg contraptions? Do we really know effective ways to manipulate the motivation of students, or teachers, or any other humans?

The causal chain for deeper learning that is supported by the SDT research tradition is as follows: a need supportive environment leads to needs being satisfied which leads to more internal motivations which leads to being more fully engaged which leads to deeper learning which finally leads to better outcomes. You will notice that rigidity and flexibility are not involved. They can have an impact on this process when the student's primary psychological needs are affected by the policy and how it is implemented in each classroom. Some teachers may be able to build strong relationships and provide enough supports in other ways to make whichever policy they encounter work for their students. Other teachers may not have that level of skill and may require other forms of support themselves before they will get good results.

The leverage for human motivation is providing primary need support. If you have a motivation problem, primary need support is the most direct causal pathway to affecting change. The reason that flexible retest policies can sometimes be effective is because they can accidentally result in teachers providing support for their students' primary psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and/or relatedness which enables those students to internalize the requirements of the situation. The reason that some strict policies (the opposite) can also sometimes be effective is because they too can be internalized by teachers and students who would have already internalized other means to getting their needs met in their classroom or school.

The problem arises when we assume that some policies could have causal effects on the motivation of students and teachers without having any idea what the psychological conditions in the schools are. We do not currently have any gauges of those conditions in regular use in most schools. The closest we have are measures of school or classroom climate, but most of those do not include measures of primary psychological need supports, patterns of motivation, nor depth of engagement. (The Hope Survey is one climate measure that does include items about need supports and engagement.)

In conclusion, Mr. Palma was right that misunderstandings about motivation are causing problems in schools. Unfortunately, he misunderstands motivation, too, and is perpetuating the use of Rube Goldberg Motivation Machines. The truth is that the strictness or flexibility of the policies are not going to have direct effects on motivation, they are only going to have indirect effects that are dependent on the psychological conditions in which those policies are used. In order to remedy the situation efficiently and effectively schools need to assess their climate using measures that indicate how well primary psychological needs are being supported, what the patterns of motivation are, and the depth of engagement. If these factors of the psychological climate are lacking then they need to take action to better support the psychological needs of the students and teachers before making adjustments to their retest policies.

Relevant Links:
Mr. Palma's Article:
https://www.edutopia.org/article/case-not-allowing-test-retakes
The Article Mr. Palma was responding to:
https://www.edutopia.org/article/tips-allowing-test-retakes
Lifting the Empire State Building with a Notebook:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IE6hUjjQVSc (2 min)
high physics class using 2x4's and deck screws to build a lever:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX3doG_z9l4 (5 min)
Mousetrap Game Trap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ogOkocvldw (5 min)

The Why Video Series on Educational Norms

Here's a video series that breaks down a number educational norms from Education Reimagined.

The series digs into why we narrowly group children by age, promote memorization over deeper learning, use grade levels as indicators of “moving up,” and confine learning to four-walled classrooms.

After a successful launch, Education Reimagined and 180 Studio partnered up one year later to continue the series by asking why we assess learning based on seat-time and why young people attend school 180 days each year.

The Long Game for Deeper Learning

Grounding Educational Practice in Learning Science

The term “deeper learning” is associated with several laundry lists of educational positives (see bottom of this post). These and other similar lists were developed from a combination of a) surveying leaders in the modern workplace about what is actually important for success, b) observations about what kinds of experiences appear to be well-suited to developing those qualities and characteristics through schooling, and c) mixing and matching what was found by other researchers. The Hewlett Foundation has awarded over $27 million in grants to further study what constitutes deeper learning in the schools that claim to be achieving it and to get the word out about how to make it happen in schools more broadly. This was all good work to bring attention to key issues in education but those laundry lists are only going to be productive in the short-term. Over the long-term a more consistent and scientifically grounded way of understanding deeper learning will enable us to achieve the kind of system transformation that is needed. 

I am a psychologist whose specialty is deeper learning. In my writings on deeper learning I only rarely mention those laundry lists that have been assumed to define the term and the other work that has previously been associated with it. This is because my interest as a psychologist involves identifying the causal mechanisms behind those observations. If my work is worth the paper it is printed on then it will be entirely consistent with observations of the downstream results that leaders want to produce. However, work on causality is, by definition, based on looking upstream, in the opposite direction, in order to provide an explanation of how things come to be, regardless of how they turn out. A causal theory identifies relevant factors that influence how the outcome is determined. To put it simply, the most direct cause of deeper learning is engagement and engagement is driven by motivation.

Just this year Harvard Graduate School of Education's Jal Mehta, and High Tech High's Sarah Fine came out with a book called In Search of Deeper Learning. Their nationwide search led them to observe that in the schools that claim the mantle of deeper learning there are still islands of poor practice. They also found that in all the conventional schools they observed as points of comparison there were islands of deeper learning practices. But, what threw them for a loop was that in all the schools, the most consistently good practices were found, not in the core subjects where they expected to find them, but in electives and extracurricular activities. Ted Dintersmith made a similar observation in his book What School Could Bewhich was based on his visits to schools in all 50 of the United States. There are pockets of good and bad strewn about somewhat haphazardly throughout the system. 

Another relevant observation is that there are a variety of pedagogical models that may be achieving a significant degree of deeper learning, but do not identify themselves with the term. Based on my own research into the psychology of motivation and the research on engagement by a team in Israel, there is peer-reviewed empirical evidence that some schools that have no association with the term “deeper learning” are providing the enabling conditions for it. They maintain the intrinsic motivation or engagement of their students. I conclude from these observations that the school system-as-a-whole is effectively incoherent. It is in chaos.

Based on 50 years of research into the psychology of motivation and engagement the most relevant factors that have been identified as the causes of shallow, fake, and deeper learning are the support or neglect of primary human needs. (There are more well-known factors that may have little or no influence, except to the degree they also address primary needs: mindsets, grit, self-esteem, self-control, etc.) Those schools that have been shown to maintain intrinsic motivation and engagement have done a better job of supporting primary human needs than all the mainstream schools that have been studied to date.

Identifying the relevant factors that determine the depth of learning was a theoretical breakthrough. This breakthrough was accomplished primarily by the researchers associated with Self-Determination Theory, even though they did not know that that was what they were doing. They set out to study motivation and engagement and it turns out that they were studying the most basic science behind learning. Many education practitioners have not yet realized that this breakthrough happened and what it means. Education policy makers are even less likely to be aware of this important work in the field and most have not yet realized that they are responsible for eliminating policies that undermine the primary needs of learners and teachers.

This development gives us a unique opportunity to see the future, not in the sense of knowing precisely what will happen, but in having confidence that the current conceptual chaos in education will soon disappear. When the system self-organizes around this scientific development, we will see a powerful wave of coherence sweep the field. There is now a powerful scientifically validated causal model to explain the psychological conditions that make teaching more or less effective. Without widespread understanding of this model many teachers and students are currently being subjected to conditions that are guaranteed to produce less effective learning. That is a waste when we know that optimizing those conditions produces more effective learning. The fact is that poor psychologicalconditions can render even the best pedagogicalchoices ineffective. It is time to improve all pedagogical choices by embedding the psychology of learning in policy in order to stop policy from undermining learning in classrooms everywhere. The long game for deeper learning is about shaping policy to better support the primary needs of all the humans in schools. 

The mission of Deeper Learning Advocates is to serve as a catalyst for the powerful wave of coherence that is coming. We recognize that the most substantial barriers to good practice in schools are currently embedded in policy, so that is where we need to take action. You can help by getting in touch to discuss the opportunities you have to influence the schools in your community.

Deeper Learning Laundry Lists 

Hewlett Foundation

• Master core academic content
• Think critically and solve complex problems 
• Work collaboratively
• Communicate effectively
• Learn how to learn
• Develop academic mindsets

New Pedagogies for Deeper Learning

• Collaboration
• Creativity
• Critical Thinking
• Citizenship
• Character
• Communication

Partnership for 21^stCentury Skills 

• Critical thinking
• Creativity
• Collaboration
• Communication