My recent posts have featured topics that consider 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 In a related post, I’ve written about college and career readiness as an outdated outcome of the school experience, and the need to move beyond the seemingly traditional mission of most high schools in America, which is to prepare students for the workforce. In this post, I tackle another concept that appears in nearly every mission statement as an apparent given: 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 development of it, truly becomes part 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. 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 reframe learning as more than a lifelong pursuit. Schools should consider expanding the traditional vision of lifelong learning to include 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 experiences; it’s experiential in nature. For example, you understand how to negotiate an unfamiliar airport because you have learned how to do that through previous experiences in airports. You know what to do if you lose a wallet or purse because you have had that experience before. You know when to call the doctor when you are sick because previous experiences have informed you about when to make that call.
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 breadth of experiences that complement the traditional experiences of schools, while giving students choice in how and when they participate. It means putting them in unfamiliar settings, and expecting them to rely on the skills and learning dispositions that they have developed 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 they can also be created through virtual opportunities.
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. These can undoubtedly be developed during in-school traditional experiences, but I believe there is a richer opportunity to support life-deep learning through the experiences designed to support life-wide learning.
Several examples from my teaching experience will illustrate these concepts. When I taught high school ecology, I took students on a four-day ecology immersion experience in northern Wisconsin. For suburban Chicago students, being in the north woods of Wisconsin was a significant experience - a landscape so different from their daily lives in a 3,000-student school. During this time, students engaged as biologists in three experiences: the study of forest, stream, and wetland ecology. Part of this experience involved beginning each session with a sense survey, where students sat silently and wrote for twenty minutes about whatever they perceived in their immediate environment. The opportunity was designed to heighten their awareness of their surroundings, be present in the moment, engage all their senses, and allow them to reflect on and write about what mattered to them. There is nothing like writing sitting in a red pine plantation as the wind moves through the upper canopy, an experience that a school classroom cannot replicate.
On one walk to identify native plants, our group came upon a porcupine crossing our trail. Unfortunately, several of the boys chased the animal up a dead tree. Soon, the entire class surrounded the tree, watching as the porcupine trembled. One student asked why it was shaking, and another asked me if they had frightened it. I confirmed they had, and immediately, twenty-five heads dropped, each student visibility saddened by the realization of the harm they had caused the animal. What followed was a brief, unplanned conversation about empathy for living things, a moment of genuine learning. I have no doubt that conversation stayed with them long after the trip ended - life-wide because of the experience, life-deep because of the opportunity to learn about becoming a more empathetic human being.
The challenge in all of this is to create a wider range of unique, authentic experiences for students that help them develop new ways of thinking, doing, and behaving. Allow them to have a choice in how they participate and enable them to shape the experience, making it their own. Add all of this to the linear trajectory of life-long learning to enrich what kids experience as the result of a school education. Life long, wide and deep learning.
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 we approach learning is 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.