Deeper Learning for ALL Students

A Research-Based Model for Engaging Every Student in Rigorous, Team-Based Learning

What Is Deeper Learning?

Deeper learning is a highly desirable outcome for students, yet there is little guidance on how to effectively implement and measure it at scale—particularly to benefit all students, especially those that have the most need.

Researchers at our Applied Research Center spent decades analyzing pedagogy in thousands of classrooms. Our findings show that deeper learning is best achieved through a research-based pedagogy model that helps teachers and students transition from heavily teacher-directed instruction and ritualistic compliance to team-based learning with higher rigor tasks. This allows the teacher to release more of the learning process to students.

Our Definition of Deeper Learning

Instructional Empowerment defines deeper learning as ALL students developing into leaders of their own learning. They collaborate in teams, engage in rich discourse, and tackle rigorous tasks that prepare them for both academic and real-world success.

Shifting Classrooms to Deeper Learning

Deeper learning requires a shift in pedagogy and classroom routines to focus on developing independent critical thinking and reasoning skills in all students. This includes new structures for powerful student discourse on the content. In these highly engaging classrooms:

A team-based learning process engages every student with equal participation and accountability, unlike traditional grouping.

The students’ voice becomes more dominant than the teacher’s voice during the team-based learning process.

Students visibly work harder than their teachers during the team-based learning process, and all students are authentically engaged in rich and rigorous content discussions.

A Scalable Model for Deeper Learning

Our research-based Model of Instruction for Deeper Learning specializes in transitioning traditional classrooms to deeper learning environments in a step-by-step process. This process scales successfully to all teachers, classrooms, and students regardless of the affluence or poverty of the communities the school serves.

Years of longitudinal research studies show that as classrooms transition to our model of deeper learning, learning gains accelerate for all students including all reporting categories:

Our unique pilot-to-scale implementation process starts with volunteer principals and teachers who rapidly transform their classrooms. This pilot group’s success provides demonstrable proof to the rest of the school that all students are capable of engaging in deeper learning. Principal and teacher advocacy is our key to success.

Four high school students have a team discussion, developing their critical thinking and reasoning skills as they experience deeper learning.

Two elementary school students work on a rigorous math problem together using their role cards and summarizing mat from the Model of Instruction for Deeper Learning.

Why Isn’t Traditional Instruction Engaging Today’s Students?

Traditional instruction tends to focus on covering content at surface levels, requiring students to memorize information and complete lower rigor tasks—for example, worksheets or repetitive practice problems. In these classrooms, the teacher’s voice dominates, and students participate in ritualistic compliance with little voice or choice in their learning process.

This traditional approach often leads to:

Overreliance on teacher support: The teacher visibly works too hard, with students dependent upon the teacher to prompt them throughout the lesson.

Low student ownership: There is little release of the learning process to students.

Superficial discourse: If there is a discussion about the content, it is usually brief, or the teacher is heavily facilitating and prompting the discussion.

Today’s students, especially post-pandemic, are easily bored and may exhibit greater disruptive behaviors in traditional classroom learning environments that simply no longer engage them. When students submit to ritualistic compliance (or disruptive behavior), learning gaps form and widen, especially for students without strong academic support from home.

These daily lesson-level learning gaps grow over time into achievement gaps on state tests and national assessments. The National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) recently revealed historic achievement gaps that are widening in today’s classrooms.

A diagram shows a teacher-directed classroom, represented by dots for students either sitting in rows or groups with arrows pointing to the teacher because the teacher is doing all the support and communication. This is contrasted with a diagram showing a student-led deeper learning classroom, represented by dots of students in teams, with communication and support flowing from student to student and between the teams and teacher.

How Do You Implement Deeper Learning for ALL Students?

The legacy of traditional teacher-directed, low rigor, and low engagement instruction is still too prevalent in today’s classrooms. At its core, this is a pedagogy issue that new curriculums or additional programs will not solve.

The missing piece to implementing a rigorous curriculum is the research-based Model of Instruction for Deeper Learning that provides the step-by-step process, classroom resources, and strategies to rapidly raise rigor, engagement, and learning gains for all students.

Why Student Discourse Is Critical

The key to the Model of Instruction for Deeper Learning is providing team-based structures for all students to successfully engage in rigorous tasks and vibrant discourse on the content. The level of learning is directly proportionate to the level of student discourse.

Our model focuses on rigorous interdependent tasks and a student-led team learning process. All students engage in critical thinking and reasoning as the team process supports discourse on the content while they are completing the rigorous tasks.

Developing Students’ Skills for Deeper Learning

Our model does not assume students already have self-regulation, impulse control, and other skills to work in student-led teams. Instead, the model focuses on:

Establishing classroom routines with research-based resources and practices that students (and teachers) quickly master for deeper learning.

Building on the foundation of self-managed learning teams and respectful discourse, so students can then advance up to greater development of critical thinking and reasoning skills.

As students master deeper learning skills in their team, they gain more confidence, persistence, self-efficacy, sense of belonging, and empathy for each other. The teams soon form a student-owned learning culture that ensures all members are giving their full effort and reaching their maximum potential.

What Does Deeper Learning Look Like?

When visitors walk into a classroom implementing the Model of Instruction for Deeper Learning, the first thing they notice is the engagement of the students in their teams, discussing and working on rigorous interdependent tasks.

Engagement Through Social Learning

Deeper learning is a social process of students engaging in respectful, vibrant evidence-based reasoning and discourse on the content. Most often, the teams are so engaged in their learning task that they only glance up when visitors first enter the classroom. Although the classroom is noisy with all the team discussions, visitors notice how the teams are in perfect control and the students are self-managing their own learning and exercising self-regulation and team regulation during rigorous tasks.

The Teacher’s Role Shifts

In deeper learning classrooms, the role of the teacher transforms greatly—from a director of the learning to a coach of the learning. After explicit instruction, the teacher releases the teams to their rigorous learning task. The teacher circulates the room to ensure that all the teams are on task, students are using precise academic vocabulary, and everyone is fully participating. If these actions are not evident, the teacher gives feedback to the team leaders to resolve the issues.

As the teams step up to responsibly manage their own learning process, the teacher’s role is to ensure every student is producing evidence of the learning target in every lesson.

Students Are Empowered Through Resources

A hallmark of deeper learning is that resources are placed directly in the hands of all students, enabling them to take ownership of their learning. The Model of Instruction for Deeper Learning provides classroom resources and step-by-step guides and videos for implementing the teaming structures. Key resources include:

Student role cards to clearly define responsibilites
Agree/disagree cards with discussion starter stems
Team norms to ensure every student fully participates in discussions
Protocols for teams to self-manage their own learning

These resources empower students to engage fully in discussions, support each other’s learning, and collaborate on solving complex problems. Teachers also learn how to design interdependent tasks that support students in richer thinking and conversations about the content they are learning.

Two elementary students engage in rigorous academic discourse about an ELA task using an Agree/Disagree card from the Model of Instruction for Deeper Learning.

What Is the Deeper Learning Framework?

Instructional Empowerment’s Deeper Learning Framework is represented by five rings that are part of one big circle, one ring for each deeper learning competency, which are defined in more detail below.

Instructional Empowerment’s Deeper Learning Framework shows the relationships between key competencies necessary to achieve deeper learning and raise academic achievement for ALL students.

The two outer circles represent teachers’ skills that support the development of students’ skills in the three inner circles.

1. Deeper Learning for All Students:

At the center of the Deeper Learning Framework, ALL students are successfully engaging in deeper learning and gaining academic proficiency.

2. Cognitive, Interpersonal, and Intrapersonal Skills:

The second ring includes three interlocking skill sets:

Cognitive: Skills that support critical thinking, problem-solving, and knowledge acquisition.

Interpersonal: Skills that enable effective interaction, collaboration, and communication.

Intrapersonal: Skills related to self-awareness, self-management, personal growth, and mindsets

For students to develop higher level cognitive skills, they must process and think about the content through dialogue with other students. Academic discourse and collaborative critical thinking require students to learn and cultivate interpersonal skills. Opportunities to hear, discuss, and debate about academic content with peers allow the brain to create and refine mental models. This greatly aids the development of cognitive skills and enhances storage of knowledge in long-term memory.

Intrapersonal skills allow students to self-regulate and co-regulate and flourish with an adaptive growth mindset and a strong sense of efficacy. These intrapersonal skills develop when students use team protocols to engage in deeper learning and rich conversations about the content.

As students develop the capacity to complete rigorous learning tasks (cognitive) with the encouragement of their teammates (interpersonal), they see themselves as more capable academically (intrapersonal), creating a virtuous cycle of increased self-efficacy.

3. Teaming Structures and Critical Thinking and Reasoning Discourse:

The third ring focuses on interdependent teaming skills and structures, where students:

Learn to take responsibility for their team roles, leadership, and protocols

Have rigorous yet respectful discourse about the content

Support one another in the completion of their learning tasks

Well-formed teams develop a sense of belonging among the team members, allowing the content conversations to elevate to higher levels of critical thinking and reasoning.

4. Rigorous, Interdependent Tasks and Resources:

The fourth ring focuses on teachers’ skills to create and plan rigorous interdependent tasks that:

Reflect the intent and rigor of the academic standards/curriculum

Foster academic discourse among the team members

Engage students in productive struggle, which means the task must be sufficiently challenging that students need to collaborate and think with one another in the learning process

Teachers also learn to design tasks to be open-ended and debate worthy. As students debate and engage in inquiry, they:

Compare perspectives to see which answer or reasoning is correct

Use curricular resources to extend and verify their learning or to revise their knowledge

When rigorous interdependent tasks are coupled with a teaming process, student engagement and intrinsic motivation increase significantly.

5. Autonomy Supportive Pedagogy:

The fifth and last ring is a critical skill teachers need when forming teams and releasing responsibility for students to lead the team-based learning process.

Teachers often have a fear of releasing control. It is important to remember that they are not releasing autonomy directly to students but rather to the teaming structure with well-defined roles, responsibilities, norms, and protocols. Teachers then coach students to exercise their responsibilities and support each other’s learning within the team.

This teacher competency is crucial because if the teacher holds onto control and does not provide the autonomy supportive structures for teams to flourish, students will not fully develop the high agency skills required for independent critical thinking and reasoning.

How Does the Model of Instruction Develop Deeper Learning Competencies?

The Model of Instruction for Deeper Learning is a comprehensive suite that provides the professional development, classroom resources, step-by-step guides, videos, implementation coaching, metrics, and digital tools and resources to successfully implement deeper learning in every school and every classroom.

Get Started with Deeper Learning

Our recommended method of implementation is to start with a pilot group of volunteer principals and teachers to demonstrate the power of deeper learning with your students. Talk to one of our expert educators today for a free, no obligation consultation, and consider attending our deeper learning conference, Building Expertise, where a thousand educators gather each year.

Schedule a Consultation with Subject Matter Experts Today

Meet with our expert career educators (not salespeople) who will explain the Model of Instruction for Deeper Learning in detail and share best practices for implementation, with no obligation.

Join a Thousand Educators at the Building Expertise for Deeper Learning Conference

Join a community of educators dedicated to every student thriving every day at the Building Expertise for Deeper Learning Educators’ Conference!

Plan to celebrate wrapping up another successful school year by connecting with colleagues from across the country for a VIP experience that includes expert speakers, premium content, and team building opportunities.

This year’s theme, Mapping the Future: Where Education Meets Innovation, will welcome leaders from the field of education, including Hamish Brewer, Liz Dozier, Michael Toth, and Robert Marzano.

Learn About BE2025

The Building Expertise for Deeper Learning Educators’ Conference takes place in Orlando, Florida, where a thousand educators gather to engage in sessions around deeper learning.