Educating the Whole Learner

We'll state the obvious: The last two decades of education reform, which resulted in a near single-minded fixation on test scores as the most dominant measure of student success, are over. A quick tour of education policy shows how we have arrived at a place where we now increasingly appreciate the importance of whole child learning approaches. In 1983, the federal report A Nation at Risk ushered in a new accountability movement that led to the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001 and the Common Core State Standards in 2010. Accountability reform efforts saw their final chapter in 2015 with the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act, as power shifted back to states and communities (Schoales, 2019).

At their core, the foundational elements of NCLB—national standards and accountability priorities—assumed that the solution to improving student performance and closing gaps was to focus on what children should learn. Thus, test scores were intended to measure the amount of information taught, minus the amount not learned or learned and forgotten. Even the Common Core initiative was fundamentally about what students should know and be able to do. As we come out of this reform era, however, we are seeing gathering momentum behind more holistic approaches to education that fundamentally shift the focus from measuring what is learned to better understanding the process of how students learn.