Dr. Deborah Kenny on Deeper Learning and Student Agency

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In this episode of the Getting Smart Podcast, Tom Vander Ark speaks with Dr. Deborah Kenny, founder of Harlem Village Academies and author of The Well-Educated Child, about what it means to educate for depth, agency, and purpose in the age of AI. Their conversation explores deeper learning, Montessori, International Baccalaureate, Socratic dialogue, and the kind of rigorous, student-centered experiences that help young people become thoughtful, capable contributors to the world.

Outline

• (00:00) Introduction
• (03:17) Redefining Achievement & Key Influences
• (09:22) Free Inquiry, Humility & Education’s Purpose
• (12:07) Deeper Learning: Montessori, IB & Low-Tech Schools
• (28:09) Socratic Dialogue, Agency & Hopes for the Book

Introduction

Mason Pashia: Hey, it’s Mason. One thing that I love about podcasts is that they’re one of the last content forms that are largely promoted and discovered without an algorithm. Because of that, they’re shared through ratings and word of mouth or word of hyperlink. Please consider sharing or reviewing the Getting Smart Podcast wherever you listen.

It really helps scale and spread these stories of what’s possible. Let’s jump in.

Tom Vander Ark: In her new book, The Well-Educated Child, Dr. Deborah Kenny asserts that in this age dominated by AI and digital distractions, the well-educated child is not the one with the most tech skills, but the one that is most developed in character, intellect and sense of agency. You’re listening to the Getting Smart Podcast.

I’m Tom Vander Ark, and we are joined by Dr. Deborah Kenny, author of The Well-Educated Child. Deborah, it’s so good to see you again.

Deborah Kenny: Nice to see you.

Tom Vander Ark: It has been a while. When did I visit HVA?

Deborah Kenny: It was a couple of years ago, although I think we didn’t get into the Montessori classrooms.

Tom Vander Ark: I want to dive into that. Deborah came up with this idea of Harlem Village Academies back in 2000. I think we had dinner and talked about the idea back then. You were authorized in 2002, opened in 2003, high school in 2007. Is that right?

Deborah Kenny: Yeah.

Tom Vander Ark: And I would say Harlem Village Academies is one of the most famous school networks in America today for a lot of good reasons.

Twenty-five years you’ve been at this, Deborah.

Deborah Kenny: Well, don’t tell everybody how old I am, Tom.

Tom Vander Ark: It has been an amazing journey. This is your second book that sort of describes the journey. The first book I was just rereading. It was called Born to Rise. When was that, 10 years ago?

Deborah Kenny: Yeah, that was more sort of the story of a startup, whereas The Well-Educated Child is, I guess, the culmination and synthesis and summary of everything I’ve learned all these decades in education about what I think comprises exquisite education, how children can thrive and excel, and how to accomplish that.

Tom Vander Ark: Studying the difference between the two texts, and here’s what Gemini said. It said that your philosophy has transitioned from a focus on academic achievement to a focus on intellectual agency. Do you buy that?

Deborah Kenny: No, that’s not true.

Tom Vander Ark: Well, the first book was more on building a world-class organization. It certainly had academic achievement as a central goal. Is that fair?

Redefining Achievement & Key Influences

Deborah Kenny: It’s really about how do we define achievement. I’ll tell you the difference between the early years and now. The essential idea and vision has remained the same. However, I didn’t know most of the things then that I know now. And so it just was a struggle, an uphill battle. It was a lot of work and exploration and climbing uphill to try to figure out the answers to these questions that I had about how we can provide the kind of exquisite education that I think kids deserve. And I didn’t have the tools, the vocabulary or the systems, but I had the vision, and it took years of learning to find out that these ideas that I now understand well have actually been around for half a century. And that’s part of why I wrote The Well-Educated Child. I don’t want other people to have to struggle as much as I did just to access the wisdom that should be the birthright of every teacher for sure, let alone every parent. So I hope it’ll be helpful in that way.

Tom Vander Ark: One of the many things I appreciate about you is that we were on this parallel journey in 1999, 2000 and 2001 talking to the most respected educators of our time, and you reference them in The Well-Educated Child. You mention Larry Rosenstock, Howard Fuller, Dennis Littky, Don Shelby, Geoff Canada, Ron Berger, and you’re really the goddaughter of Ted Sizer and Debbie Meier, right? Is it fair that those have been the most influential educators in your life?

Deborah Kenny: I think the two of them, along with Geoff Canada, I mean, he’s been doing the hard work in Harlem for so long before all of us. And what’s funny is that years later, it turns out Debbie raised her kids in a brownstone just a couple blocks from me. So we ended up spending a lot of time together during the course of the eight years that I wrote the book. And yeah, I’m still learning a lot from her. She’s sharp as ever.

Tom Vander Ark: She is challenging. I’ve always found her intellectually challenging. I remember vividly that several times I visited her, I guess mostly in Boston at Mission Hill. And I found her a challenging personality. I think she’d be difficult to work with because she has strongly held convictions, but she might be the best example.

You talk in your book of civil discourse, not just civil discourse, but the way she would sort of recreate the school around the faculty table every day through challenging dialogue. Is that fair?

Deborah Kenny: I mean, I never worked with her, but what you describe would be thrilling for me, you know?

Tom Vander Ark: I visited Ted Sizer when he was head of school at Francis Parker, and that was my first introduction to the idea of teaching children to use their minds well, right? The intellectual rigor and what it really meant. Is that what you appreciate about Ted, or what do you remember?

Deborah Kenny: Yeah, and I didn’t know him personally. But his ideas, for people who don’t know, essentially created the vocabulary of American schooling for half a century. And you know what I found both entertaining and inspiring? There’s this quote of his where he says, “We’re trying to cover too much material. If a kid drops his pencil, he’ll miss 200 years of European history,” or something like that. And in talking about depth versus breadth, I think what I appreciated about him is he wasn’t saying that you should not be well-read and knowledgeable and know a lot. He was saying that it can’t be the only thing, so he wasn’t saying depth instead of breadth. He understood that it’s both, you know? And I think that’s so obvious that it’s like you wouldn’t say, “You only need to exercise, but you can eat pizza all day,” or “You only need to eat healthy, but you never need to exercise.” You need both. And he had somewhat of a classical background on the one hand, and then progressive on the other.

And I appreciate his leaving the privileged boarding school life, when he could have had it easy, to do something that’s much harder. I really admire that.

Tom Vander Ark: You’ve been one of America’s best examples of that for 25 years with Harlem Village Academies. Part two of your book talks about what it means to be well-educated and why the foundation of free inquiry, humility and a passion for knowledge and appreciation for beauty, why those are important ideas. And I think largely not part of the modern dialogue of American education. Pick one or two of those and talk about why they matter: free inquiry, humility, passion for knowledge, appreciation for beauty.

Free Inquiry, Humility & Education’s Purpose

Deborah Kenny: Over the last couple of years, I’ve become more concerned than ever about both our society and the kind of education that’s producing young people who tend to be very quick to form opinions without actually studying an issue enough to understand it very well, let alone the issue at all, and getting caught up in what’s popular and not having either the confidence or the wisdom or the maturity to engage in an argument about ideas, do the hard work to back up their ideas, or study a little bit more about what the other person is saying. But they just jump to conclusions, jump to opinions, and not only jump to opinions, but yell and scream about their opinions in a self-righteous way. It’s very disconcerting, and I know a lot of parents are disconcerted about the direction of schools and what that’s producing. So I’ve come to realize that this goes far beyond the education reform dialogue. I mean, this is really about the future of society.

One thing I deeply believe is that humility means that you know how much you don’t know. It’s a sign of an intelligent person. And in this sort of social media-driven world, where the idea about looking good and following the mob is a way to protect yourself emotionally, I get that, and it’s hard to be a kid these days. As the adults, we’ve got to step in and set a new direction. So not only does the academic education need to embrace the idea of teaching students to argue both sides of an issue on a regular basis and to want to understand things deeply, also, it has to be made emotionally safe. It has to be cool. It has to be all the things that adolescents need in order to be on board. So I think we have a lot of work to do ahead of us to right the ship.

Shorts Content

Deeper Learning: Montessori, IB & Low-Tech Schools

Tom Vander Ark: I want to talk about deeper learning. Deborah, you, I think 12 years ago, 13 years ago, started and instituted at HVA to both develop your staff, but invite others from around the country and the world to learn about this approach. I think in the early days it was called the Progressive Education Institute, and a few years later you changed the name to the Deeper Learning Institute.

And I want to dive into that notion of deeper learning because it was around that same time the Hewlett Foundation grabbed a bunch of my early grantees from the Gates Foundation, except HVA. They included High Tech High, New Tech Network, Asia Society and New Visions, and they bundled them into something called the Deeper Learning Initiative.

And that was mostly project-based schools. But your institute and your schools have really advanced a different kind of deeper learning agenda. So I want to spend a couple minutes unpacking that and have you describe what you mean by deeper learning. And then maybe we can do a little compare and contrast with the High Tech High approach.

But is that history of your institute about right? Tell us why you changed the name to Deeper Learning and what deeper learning means to you.

Deborah Kenny: Yeah. Well, first of all, you know that I think you and I have in common that we’re both very enamored of High Tech High, and I think the work they’re doing is incredible. And the story about starting the Deeper Learning Institute is that we were 10 years into doing our schools. We had started with fifth grade, then high school. We then went back and started elementary. Ten years in, after every year being called a high-performing school that closed the achievement gap over and over, people were saying this, and I was getting dissatisfied. And there was a real cognitive dissonance for me because I didn’t think that we were at all yet the kind of school that I wanted us to be, but by the measures and the definitions that were common in the country, we were declared one of the highest-performing. And what I asked, and I asked our teachers and had external conversations, was, well, doesn’t closing the achievement gap depend on your definition of achievement? Right? So what do people mean when they say that? They mean that on a standardized test of two subjects, your kids scored better than other kids. That’s it. And obviously, there’s a lot that’s important there. In school districts where kids can’t read in fourth grade, and as Howard Fuller taught us, that’s how the people who design and build the prisons determine the next zip code, by the fourth-grade reading failure rate, let’s not look down on a measure that tells us, and in some cases compels people to see, how the kids are doing with reading. So not anti-testing, I’m anti-poor-quality testing.

And so in creating this institute, we brought together all sorts of people who shared this vision and from whom I learned a lot. And over a number of years came to define deeper learning. And in fact, as you said, this is the core of part two of the book, where I explain these three pillars: quality thinking, student agency and ethical purpose. If you want your child or the children in your care to be exceptionally well-educated, these are the three things that you need to be looking at.

And we designed, at the suggestion of Grant Wiggins, the late great, this graduate profile.

So, I mean, I’ll just give you a couple of examples. For quality thinking, we’re talking about the ability to discern the validity and accuracy of information, to evaluate multiple strategies to solve a problem, to craft a compelling argument, to be an innovative thinker, intellectual curiosity. These are the kinds of higher-order thinking skills. So it’s not just independent thinking, right? For student agency, that’s the ability to have drive, to have intrinsic motivation, that they take initiative and are resourceful and are persistent and care about the quality of their work, as our friend Ron Berger says. And so the third domain is ethical purpose. And while ethics is understood, when I say purpose, I’m not talking about picking a major or a career. I’m talking about the purpose of one’s life and the idea that you would begin to explore and pursue the discernment of your calling. Why was I put on this earth? What is my purpose in life? Not that you’re going to figure it out by the end of 12th grade, but that you understand that purpose is a thing. So these are the three domains, if you will, that we’ve come to describe as our definition of deeper learning. And then in the book, I describe the principles and practices by which schools can instill these in students and teach them. And interestingly, a number of people who read it also said, “This is interesting for parents also,” because there are ways to apply some of the ideas at home.

Tom Vander Ark: Your approach to deeper learning, I guess if you look at your schools, looks like it runs from Montessori to International Baccalaureate. Would you say those historical models best fit this framework, and do you still find those aligned with the principles you’ve laid out?

Deborah Kenny: Yes. So, I mean, the International Baccalaureate, for example, the founders were inspired by John Dewey and Bruner and Piaget, and essentially I was searching for tested structures that aligned with our vision. And because Montessori aligns with our vision and the IB aligns with our vision, therefore, by the transitive property, they align with each other, right? And so instead of just designing everything from scratch, which in theory we could have done, I thought it would be really helpful to have this infrastructure and community internationally and certainly nationally. And it’s working out really well. And if you visit the Montessori classrooms or if you step into one of the IB classes, you see a lot of things in common. You see students concentrating for long periods of time on complex tasks. You see students taking agency, taking ownership of their work. There are structures that foster intellectual curiosity. So agency is at the center of both of them, and deeper learning is definitely at the center of both of them.

Just as an example, these little 5-year-olds, I mean, they have two hours or more of open work time every single day where they will walk around the classroom and decide what they’re going to work on. For each potential learning experience in a Montessori classroom, there has been earlier in the year a whole lesson where the teacher teaches the kids, “If you’re going over here to study math, this is how you use this tool and this is why you use it.” And so they know what they’re doing. And boy, I’ll tell you, the spunk and the joie de vivre of those little kids, it is such a delight to see. And the ability to focus and concentrate — one of the things that so many teachers and parents are concerned about is the short attention span of kids. They can’t read a whole book, or the whole scrolling. Well, if you’re in IB, you’re writing a research paper for six months. If you’re in Montessori, you have two hours of work time. They foster concentration and a deeper attention span. That’s just some of the initial ideas.

Tom Vander Ark: I guess it remains interesting to me that there’s this group of deeper learning schools that are going at this mostly through a project-based learning approach. And I would say your approach, including IB, is much more curriculum-centric, much more dialogic, much more focused on curriculum and instruction to get to deeper learning.

Is that fair?

Deborah Kenny: Yes. And there are research projects in the IB. There are projects in the IB. I have a lot of respect for project-based learning. When it’s executed well, it is exquisite, right? It also doesn’t have enough guardrails or infrastructure to be executed well because when deeper learning of any kind, including project-based learning, is not done well, then it’s a lot of fluff and nonsense, and then the kids aren’t getting anything. So there’s the idea of it, and there’s the execution. And that’s, you know, if you’re on the ground running schools. Here’s the other reason I picked the IB. I’m a very big believer in the importance of reading and writing a lot of the day. And I think students need to be reading many hours of the day and writing, let alone being in discourse and Socratic seminar. But that’s not to say they shouldn’t also be doing science experiments and solving math problems, of course. But the IB is very steeped in a lot of reading and writing, and I find that to be, for me, a core value. And so that’s another reason that I went in that direction. But again, IB is a framework and an assessment structure, which includes research papers and oral exams, and some exams. It’s not dictating it. It is compatible with project-based learning.

Tom Vander Ark: Your schools are decidedly low-tech. I mean, you would see high school students walking around with a big three-ring binder, right? What’s that about? You really didn’t get on the edtech bandwagon. You really think it’s important for kids to read books and to talk to each other and to have teachers, very skilled teachers, that they respect, love and work closely with.

Deborah Kenny: Yeah, you just said it. So you’ll see in our schools notebooks. You’ll see chart paper. There are a number of reasons for this. I find that when a person, whether it’s a teacher or a student, uses a computer to create something instead of writing it, their thinking is more surface-level. And I don’t know why this happens, but I’ve seen it for years. I remember when the smart boards came along and I set up — I called them stupid boards and I said, “I want to throw them out the window.” I’m very against PowerPoints. I think it has the teacher doing all the higher-order thinking to create, so then the students just sit there passively. I am huge on notebooks instead of worksheets. To me, PowerPoint and a worksheet and a Chromebook are all the same thing. They don’t necessarily have to be this way, but in practice, 99% of the time that I’ve seen it in my school or other schools, it absolutely undermines the quality of thinking and it takes the onus off the student, and the teacher does all the interesting work. I mean, we could talk for hours just about this, but you are right that I have championed notebooks, chart paper, reading, writing and discourse, all in service of the quality of student thinking and in service of the student being the one to do the thinking and the creating rather than the teacher. The teacher should be fostering that, facilitating that.

Tom Vander Ark: We’re in an age where there are a lot of people that talk about student-centered learning and have some pedagogical ideas about what that entails. HVA is really a teacher-centered model in some respects. I would say High Tech High is too because teachers play a really important role of creating projects.

But at HVA, they are important intellectual leaders in the classroom. Talk about teaching at HVA.

There’s a distinction between a teacher-centric environment. Most classical academies tend to be both curriculum-centric and teacher-centric and don’t worry much about developing a sense of agency. And you seem to have paradoxically created a curriculum- and teacher-centered environment that also fosters a sense of agency. So talk about teaching at HVA.

Deborah Kenny: I think that if we look at these things in a careful and detailed way, then it’s not either-or. And I don’t always know what people mean when they use jargon. So one of my favorite questions is, “What do you mean?” If by student-centered, someone means that the student is the one doing most of the work and most of the thinking, we are 100% student-centered. If by teacher-centered, someone means that teachers are revered as intellectuals and invested in and respected, then we are teacher-centered. And I think the two can live together.

Socratic Dialogue, Agency & Hopes for the Book

Tom Vander Ark: We haven’t talked about Socratic dialogue, but the one thing you’ll note in an HVA secondary school is students engaged in dialogue. That’s an important part of the model, right?

Deborah Kenny: Yeah. One of the things I did before building our high school is I visited a lot of private schools and was very inspired by the Harkness seminar tables in a number of private schools. And the idea is that, well, you can’t have a class of 12 because we can’t afford that in a normal school, but you can take a class of 26 and divide it in half. So we created this physical design where half the kids could be sitting around a seminar table, and they deserve that too. Our kids deserve that same experience. And the other half, right outside that room, is a little seating area where kids could be reading their books or working on their work.

And then right across the hall is a teacher office or a staff office with a glass window so they can be keeping an eye on the kids while the teacher’s in the room. So we purposefully designed it that way. Lauren Resnick talked about the concept of accountable talk and the idea that you’re accountable to the facts or the knowledge, that you’re accountable to one another as a community, having an argument but doing it in a respectful way. And she has a whole structure without going into all the details. In a Socratic seminar, some of the effectiveness is in the preparation that comes before it. You did all the readings, you annotated the text, you prepared. There are questions that you’ve reflected on, and so you come to the table ready to talk about, let’s say, four or five different fiction and nonfiction readings and how they relate to the question at hand, and being self-managing in your discussion. And some people say that discourse should be student-led, but what Lauren clarified is, no, it should be student-owned but teacher-led, and that the way a teacher would lead in an optimal example would be asking the right questions, making sure the kids are holding each other accountable, stepping in at the right time. And it’s extraordinary to see when it’s done well. It’s another example of something that could devolve into fluff and nonsense if it’s not done well. I mean, everything is about executing, isn’t it? About quality implementation. Which is why I think people sometimes shy away from things like research papers or project-based learning or Socratic seminar because they can be — if you compare it to just studying the basics, right? — when done well, it’s just light-years ahead. But when done poorly, it’s a whole lot of nothing, which isn’t as good as memorizing some information. So if we’re aiming for the stars, we have to really do our homework.

Tom Vander Ark: Village Academy is, some would say, an updated version of classical education or maybe classical education updated for a modern context. Tell me if that’s fair.

Deborah Kenny: That’s interesting.

Tom Vander Ark: And I think you’ve described this as, instead of the jargon of whole child education, whole agency education.

You’ve come up with this beautiful, fulsome definition of agency as intellectual agency, character agency and social agency. Is that an accurate description of what you’re after?

Deborah Kenny: Oh, that’s interesting. Yeah, it took a while for me to fully appreciate why agency is so important. I mean, it is absolutely central to the IB and Montessori for a reason. And because when a student gets deeply engaged and is intrinsically motivated, then it changes the nature of their learning and it goes from, “OK, what’s going to be on the test? OK, I’ll make sure to know that because it’s on the test,” to, “Oh, this is really interesting. I want to study more about this. Now I’m going to take it home, not because somebody told me to, but because it’s my work.” And the insights they gain and how hard they work and the kind of driven person they become — it’s the kind of person anyone would want to hire. Someone who cares so much about their work being excellent. Cares. And in the case of students who will become future leaders of society, isn’t that what we want? Someone who’s going to care and just persist through obstacles and do the work really well.

Tom Vander Ark: We’re talking to Dr. Deborah Kenny. She’s the author of The Well-Educated Child. She’s the founder of Harlem Village Academies. Deborah, I think a lot of educators that read this book, or that visited or that visit Harlem Village Academies, would find the book and the visit challenging, that it is not the conventional wisdom of the day.

It’s a beautiful but challenging philosophy. So I guess as we wrap this, what are your hopes for the book? How would you like educators to encounter this? And what advice would you have for dealing with this challenging but elegant and coherent argument about what education ought to be?

Deborah Kenny: Yeah, well, in Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke said, “We must hold to that which is difficult.” I don’t really see the point of doing anything else. Not because it’s hard, but because it’s what the children deserve. I hope that educators will have a chance to sit with one another and talk about everything that we learn by talking about the ideas in the book with one another, get together and figure out what they want to do about it. Because each school and each group of teachers can iterate based on their own circumstances, and I trust them to figure out how they’re going to pursue this. We only get this one very short life, and each have our small piece, but it’s our piece. And if you’re out there and you have your piece that nobody else has, then why not do it as well as you possibly can, that we give the children the kind of education they deserve so that they can go on to create the kind of world we want our grandchildren to inherit.

Tom Vander Ark: Yeah, you say to move from compliance to contribution, and I really appreciate that, Deborah. It’s been a real treat. I thank you for a life well lived, for an extraordinary 25-year legacy at Harlem Village Academies. Thank you for another book, another extraordinary book, one of the best descriptions of the path forward, of a path forward, for people willing to do the hard work.

Thanks for being with us.

Deborah Kenny: Thank you. It was a pleasure.

Tom Vander Ark: Our producer, Mason Pashia, and the whole Getting Smart team that makes this possible every week — till next week, keep learning, keep leading, keep innovating, like Harlem Village Academies. See you next week.

Guest Bio

Dr. Deborah Kenny

Dr. Deborah Kenny is a highly influential educator, recognized with the Columbia University Teachers College Distinguished Alumni Award, and is the founder of Harlem Village Academies and the Deeper Learning Institute. Her experience stems from a lifetime in education, including many years as a teacher and camp counselor, a considered approach to parenting, and over two decades running PreK-12 schools. Her background in comparative international education and intellectual history, along with her passion for pedagogy, led her to assemble a brain trust of leading educational thinkers, culminating in the insights she shares about world-class education.

Her educational vision, as outlined in her book The Well-Educated Child, focuses on a K-12 experience that allows students to reason independently, understand ideas deeply, and evaluate information critically. She believes that well-educated students should be self-directed, confident, and civil in discourse, while also cultivating an appreciation for beauty in art, music, and mathematics. Ultimately, she is compelled to share her learning to ensure all children have access to an education that instills knowledge, humility, and kindness

Links

• Watch the full video here
• LinkedIn
• Book Site
• Harlem Village Academies