How much is there left to learn about paper after you study it for seven years? What about skin? Coffee? Buttons?
An awful lot, as students at Burnaby’s University Highlands Elementary are finding out.
Some students at that school have studied a single topic – randomly assigned to them via a marked Popsicle stick pulled out of a bag – for years, and they’re still finding out interesting new things about it.
“The point is not the topic,” principal Lori Driussi told the NOW. “The point is learning. The point is that there’s wonder in everything, and you can become knowledgeable, fascinated and expert on absolutely anything.”
It’s all part of the school’s Learning in Depth (LiD) program, showcased at an open house this spring.
Learning in Depth is the brainchild of SFU education professor Kieran Egan, who devised it in about 2008 and outlined it in his 2011 book, Learning in Depth: A Simple Innovation That Can Transform Schooling.
The idea is that each student be given a particular topic to learn about for an hour a week through her or his whole school career – kindergarten to Grade 12.
“If you don’t know something in depth, you really never get an understanding of the nature of knowledge,” Egan told the NOW. “So what I was trying to do was invent a little program that would ensure that every child became an expert. What they actually learn is how little they know, so it generates a kind of humility about knowledge, but it also gives them a sense of how the other things they’re studying in school are all very superficial, and it gives them a desire to want to know more.”
It’s a simple add-on that doesn’t cost extra money and has dramatic educational potential, according to Egan, but a meeting with Burnaby principals and vice-principals about a month ago didn’t spark a lot of interest.
Egan wasn’t surprised.
“The schools are under a lot of pressure,” he said. “One more bloody program is all they need. A lot of administrators, they hear about a new program and their eyes roll back because they don’t know how they’re staying afloat as it is.”
Driussi, however, piloted the program herself with a group of 10 students when she came on as the principal of the new University Highlands in 2010.
Today, hers is the only Burnaby school, to take on the program school-wide.
Besides students who are more engaged and eager to learn, Driussi said Learning in Depth has brought her school community closer together.
“Because everybody has a LiD topic, everyone talks about LiD,” she said.
Students put their accumulated knowledge on display at the school’s first Learning in Depth open house May 22.
“The layers are deep and endless,” she said.
