The Study of Deeper Learning: Opportunities and Outcomes—funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation—found that students attending network high schools with a mature (i.e., in existence for at least four years) and at least moderately well-implemented approach to promoting deeper learning experienced different instructional strategies, greater opportunities, and better results on a range of outcomes than did their matched counterparts in comparison sites.

The next step was to determine whether there were certain school features that facilitated a school’s ability to provide deeper learning opportunities. Using data from the original study, this brief (based on the report, School Features and Student Opportunities for Deeper Learning: What Makes a Difference?) examines how teachers’ own beliefs about teaching, their assessment of their peers’ professional culture, and their assessment of the success of the principal in providing instructional leadership and program coherence are related to students’ reports of deeper learning opportunities in their classes.

Key findings:

• Across the network schools, student-centered beliefs about teaching and teachers’ self-efficacy for teaching were the features most strongly and consistently related to student deeper learning opportunities. By contrast, teacher-centered beliefs about teaching were negatively related to student opportunities.
• Other school features were inconsistently related to student opportunities based on the survey data. However, case study data suggested that these features (teachers’ professional culture and school leadership) might indirectly affect opportunities.

School Features and Student Opportunities for Deeper Learning: What Makes a Difference? by Mette Huberman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.