we have all seen countless units that purport to build understanding of world cultures or equity and amount to little more than celebrations of local foods and costumes or units on dinosaurs or recycling that are engaging but not deep. Quite often things that look “cool” are not deep with respect to learning. The crucial discriminator of deep learning is the depth of acquisition of the new competencies. The discriminator of meaningful co-design is when students are establishing goals for development that move them to increasingly complex levels of growth on the competencies.
