Leaving to Learn: How Out-of-School Learning Increases Student Engagement and Reduces Dropout

In this provocative book, authors Washor and Mojkowski observe that beneath the worrisome levels of dropouts from our nation’s high school lurks a more insidious problem: student disengagement from school and from deep and productive learning. To keep students in school and engaged as productive learners through to graduation, schools must provide experiences in which all students do some of their learning outside school as a formal part of their programs of study. All students need to leave school—frequently, regularly, and, of course, temporarily—to stay in school and persist in their learning. To accomplish this, schools must combine academic learning with experiential learning, allowing students to bring real-world learning back into the school, where it should be recognized, assessed, and awarded academic credit. Learning outside of school, as a complement to in-school learning, provides opportunities for deep engagement in rigorous learning.


What others are saying about L2L


“School isn’t something that kids are trying to do. Rather, they want to succeed at important things. Elliot Washor and Charles Mojkowski show the remarkable transformations in schools and their students when this becomes their focus.”


—Clayton Christensen, Harvard business professor and author of Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns and How Will You Measure Your Life?


“Leaving to Learn puts forth a provocative and powerful argument: A significant number of capable young learners are dropping out of high school not because they can’t meet their schools’ expectations, but because schools don’t meet theirs. The authors have worked with these young people and have some exciting insights to share about student engagement and intrinsic motivation. If you’re concerned about the dropout problem, you owe it to the young people in your life to pick up this book.”


—Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive and A Whole New Mind


“Elliot Washor and Charles Mojkowski rightly identify student disengagement as the central cause of our nation’s dropout crisis. Their solution—‘leaving to learn’—connects education to the real world of life and work, creating highly engaged learners in the process. Their strategy—redesigning schools in fundamental ways—is made understandable by this vivid and compelling account.”


—Linda Darling-Hammond, Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education, Stanford University


“The authors get inside young people's heads and hearts in order to understand why and how they disengage from learning and often drop out. It's deeper than you think, the authors say, and they are right. Their solution is spot on—start with students’ interests to break the cycle of failure. Here’s hoping schools will listen.”


—Pedro Noguera, Peter L. Agnew Professor of Education, New York University