Mari Jones is the Director of Collective Learning and Movement Building, leading the Deeper Learning conference and the Deeper Learning Global teams, as well as the planning team for the National Summit on Improvement in Education. Her work is focused on building collective identity as deeper learning educators and improvers and spreading practices that work to support deeper learning and other educational outcomes. As the Director of the Deeper Learning Hub, she co-led a large-scale change movement that reached 5 million students publicly sharing their learning with an authentic audience. She has also worked as an Improvement Facilitator and Coach for various Networked Improvement Communities on literacy, social emotional learning, and 8th grade on-track to graduate. She teaches Foundations of Student Centered Teaching for the San Diego Teacher Residency Program.
Mari has always felt that education is a form of activism, and she is passionate about promoting social change and equity by empowering youth. As an elementary educator for 14 years, she spent half of her teaching career in National City, working primarily with multilingual learners and the other half working at High Tech Elementary Explorer, which nurtured her passion for social-emotional learning and crafting opportunities for meaningful learning experiences. She holds a B.A. in Communication, a Multiple-Subject Bilingual, Crosscultural, Language and Academic Development Credential, and an M.Ed. in Research, Equity, and Technology from UCSD as well as an M.Ed. in Educational Leadership from HTH Graduate School of Education where her work largely focused on the intersection of project-based learning and social-emotional learning as important pathways that lead to the development of deeper learning competencies, and on professional development to support new teachers.
