My recent posts have featured topics that I consider to be pathways for improving the experience of teachers and students at school. These include a proposal for a new model of the school experience, designed to support the launch of students' lives, focusing on a balance between the things that schools do well and increased student agency. In a related post, I’ve also argued that “college and career readiness” is a narrow and outdated goal for 2025 and beyond, urging schools to move beyond preparing students solely for the workforce. In this post, I tackle another concept that appears in nearly every mission statement: lifelong learning.
In full disclosure, I’m a big fan of lifelong learning. All educators should be. Lifelong learning is best described as a trajectory spanning a person's lifetime, comprising both formal and informal learning experiences. The formal component begins with the first experience of school and may go through graduate school and other formal courses a person may take throughout their lives.
But I wonder how often this concept, and the intentional interpretation and application of it, truly becomes a guiding driver of the daily lived experience of students. Many schools have taken an initial step by establishing core values, a healthy way to declare what matters in the school experience and how it might guide students toward lifelong learning. More recently, many districts have joined the Portrait of a Graduate (POG) movement, which essentially outlines what schools will do for students—or, perhaps more accurately, what they expect a student to embody by age 18. But the very name frames it with a built-in expiration date, defined by the day of graduation. My assumption is that schools genuinely believe the aspirations of their POG extend well beyond that moment. If that’s the case, then perhaps it should be called a Portrait of a Lifelong Learner. Words matter, and how schools frame their intent matters even more.
I believe that the two most significant things schools can do to improve are to become more experiential and support more student choice in their experience. An interesting way to begin and encourage this is to expand the traditional vision of lifelong learning to include two additional dimensions: life-wide learning and life-deep learning. My thinking here is influenced by the work of the Life Center and its descriptions of the three concepts, which I have adapted for an educational context.
Life-wide learning develops through lived experiences; it is inherently experiential. For example, you know how to navigate an unfamiliar airport because past experiences in airports have taught you what to do. You know how to respond if you lose a wallet or purse because you’ve faced that situation before. You know when to call the doctor when you’re sick because earlier experiences have shown you when that step is necessary.
Schools can support life-wide learning by greatly expanding the experiences they offer students. This means more than the occasional 6-hour field trip to the nearest city’s museum and scurrying back to the safety of school, or participating in some after-school club. It does mean providing a rich and diverse breadth of experiences that complement and extend the traditional school experience, while giving students a choice in how and when they participate. It means putting students in unfamiliar settings, and expecting them to rely on the learner skills and dispositions they have developed (and are currently developing) in school and in other experiences to navigate these settings. It means that learning must occur beyond the siloed walls of schools, and that new, life-wide, authentic settings for learning are community-based, and that additional experiences can and should be created through virtual connections, potentially worldwide.
Life deep learning represents learning that supports the development of attributes associated with being human, and “guide what people believe, how they act, and how they judge themselves and others.”(1) My interpretation and application of life deep learning here means developing behaviors such as resilience, empathy, courage, compassion, humility, and integrity, among others. While these can certainly grow through traditional in-school experiences, there is a unique opportunity to nurture life-deep learning through the broader, authentic contexts of life-wide learning. A wider range of experiences potentially creates the opportunity to develop a broader range of skills and behaviors.
Several moments from my teaching illustrate these ideas. When I taught ecology, I took students on a four-day immersion trip to northern Wisconsin. For suburban Chicago students, the north woods were unlike anything in their daily lives at a 3,000-student high school. Over those days, they worked as biologists, studying forest, stream, and wetland ecology. Each session began with a “sense survey,” where students sat silently for twenty minutes, writing about whatever they noticed in their immediate surroundings. The exercise encouraged them to heighten their awareness, be fully present, engage all their senses, and reflect on what mattered to them. There is nothing like writing in the stillness of a red pine plantation while the wind stirs the canopy, something no classroom can ever replicate.
On one walk to identify native plants, the group unexpectedly encountered a porcupine crossing the trail. Startled, it scrambled up a dead tree, while several boys rushed after it. Within moments, the entire class had gathered around, watching as the animal trembled in fear. One student asked why it was shaking; another wondered if they had frightened it. When I confirmed that they had, twenty-five heads dropped in unison, the students visibly saddened by the harm they had caused. What followed was a brief yet powerful conversation about empathy for living things, an unplanned yet unforgettable lesson. That moment, I am certain, stayed with them long after the trip: life-wide because of the unique experiential nature of the trip, and life-deep because it touched something essential about what it means to be human.
Placing students in a new, authentic context for learning ecology likely enabled them to learn more in four days than weeks of classroom instruction ever could. Experiences like this embody both life-wide learning, as they promote authentic learning in settings that extend beyond the formal classroom and school, and life-deep learning, as they cultivate human qualities such as empathy, awareness, and reflection. While schools have long relied on field trips, these isolated events are not enough. What’s needed now is a more intentional and systematic commitment to designing and supporting a much wider range of experiential opportunities - both school-led and student-driven - that immerse learners in meaningful contexts and foster the attributes essential to the human condition.
Schools can advance their thinking about learning by developing a more robust model of learning based on life-long, wide and deep learning. Importantly, and not to be lost here, is that the inclusion of life-wide and deep elements encourages the development of the learning skills and dispositions that are required to support the development of the desire in students to be life-long learners. Thinking more broadly about how educators conceptualize learning should be part of a strategic imperative that requires schools to redesign the educational experience, with the broader goal of equipping every student with the capacity and desire to continue learning throughout their lives.
1. Banks, J. A., et al. Learning – LIFE Center. LIFE Center, 2007. Life‑SLC, life‑slc.org/docs/Banks_etal‑LIFE‑Diversity‑Report.pdf. Accessed 26 Aug. 2025.