WHAT DO WE HAVE TO LEARN THIS FOR?
It is getting towards 3 pm, on a hot, breathless February afternoon. The ceiling fan in your classroom is flopping pointlessly on its endless arc, squeaking on every revolution and bathing your sweaty, expressionless Year 9 students in the same hot air their bodies exuded upwards moments before.
You are in full flight, nonetheless, your voice ascending as your exposition reaches its high point. But what’s this? ?A languid hand in the air gives you pause, and the question every kid in the room is wanting to ask drops into the mugginess of the room: What do we have to learn this for?
Plainly your glib answer doesn’t quite cut it. Murmurs scatter across the room. Mumbling. Grumbling. A chair-leg scrapes. A pen drops. A concealed cell-phone dings. The mood sags. Your mood sags.
You strive valiantly to reignite the momentum – but the kindling is soaked in sweat, and the moment is past. The end of the day is signalled by a distant bell. You set them free, wondering deep down what this has all been for.
Bringing modern-day secondary classroom learning alive is a challenge. In one sense it always was, but now, striving to make classroom learning relevant, for the majority of secondary-aged youngsters, is extremely difficult.
?Larry Ferlazzo is an English and social studies teacher at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, and is a regular contributor to Education Week. In a recent series of articles, he has been examining Teacher Strategies for Making Learning More Relevant to Students (see Edweek, 8 Jul 24). He spoke to teachers about ways they strive to make their teaching more relevant for their classes.
?Michael Hernandez has written about using storytelling as a framework for learning to ignite student curiosity. According to Hernandez, the pandemic shone a light on the flaws of traditional learning methods, both in terms of their effectiveness and the willingness of both students and teachers to play the game of direct instruction/memorization/regurgitation, which often only benefits privileged students. We struggled to give ourselves and our students a good reason why school (in person or remote) was important. Suddenly, everyone had new clarity on what was most important to them, their lives, and the good of the planet — and school often wasn’t, Hernandez affirms.
He continues: With AI now presenting an existential threat to our curriculum and how we assess students, it’s time to redefine what we mean by “learning” and the role teachers play in providing meaningful learning experiences that help our students become digitally and civically literate and productive citizens. The onus is on us as teachers, Hernandez told Verlazzo, to create assignments that have purpose and are relevant to students’ lives. Assignments like this are often the key to igniting passion and engagement.
Making Learning Authentic
1. Leverage student curiosity as the engine for learning?????????????????????????????????????????? Hernandez reminds us that Science, Maths, Literature, and the arts all start with observation and wonder — noticing something about our world, asking questions about it, and seeking the answers. He suggests we begin lessons with student questions about their community to reframe our curriculum as learning quests, which create a sense of ownership among the learners in our room, and help students to personalise their learning.
Hernandez urges you to start units with these activities to engage curiosity:
2. Plan Authentic Projects????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? If student work just ends up in the trash, says Hernandez, it sends a powerful message about what we value in our curriculum and the effort we ask our students to put into their learning. For Hernandez, authenticity often means creating something useful as the purpose and outcome of the learning experience. This might include:
The end product of these learning quests is a tangible, useful product, which provides a valid and reliable assessment of student knowledge. Everyone involved wins, Hernandez enthuses.
3. Publish publicly??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? We would all agree with Hernandez’s assertion that the best way to learn something is to teach it: when we ask students to present or perform for an audience beyond our classrooms, the experience increases student motivation, elevates quality, and provides purpose for their effort, he attests. In the examples above, posting infographics on a website or social media accounts helps people around the world see and use the student scientists’ findings and maybe even drives people to take action or change policy.
Then too, publishing the literary magazine as a digital book is an easy and low-cost way to distribute student work globally, while simultaneously providing context for student work when it’s placed side by side with work created by other students. A financial-literacy tutoring project similarly helps connect students to their community as well as with the Maths curriculum and builds bridges between generations and demographic groups that wouldn’t have been built if projects stayed in the classroom.
In each of these cases, Hernandez points out, the students can palpably sense the public’s need for accuracy. Their work can make a difference in peoples’ lives, so they need to get it right. And the relevance and purpose of what they are learning becomes real. Authentic. Worth doing. What is more, students demonstrate their understanding and internalising of their new knowledge through these real-world applications.
Sustainable Living
High School English Teacher Xochitl Bentley grounds the complex concept of sustainability for her students this way. Students increasingly encounter the word “sustainability” but rarely with any situating context, Bentley told Verlazzo. Taking the time to unpack this concept benefits students and teachers alike. In the U.N. Brundtland Commission report, “Our Common Future,”?sustainability is defined as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Bentley argues that this definition highlights the need for cultivating intergenerational awareness as we prepare students to mitigate the harmful human impacts associated with changing climates and global warming.
Bentley acknowledges that some teachers are hesitant to bring up climate change in their classrooms, feeling they lack the disciplinary knowledge to address it competently. Bentley suggests they remind themselves of a piece of advice often shared in teacher-preparation programs: “Remember your why,” remembering to think beyond ourselves with a sense of solution-oriented urgency and modelling this commitment for our students.
One way to help students become stewards of sustainability is to model how reading paired texts enhances our ability to both problem-spot and problem-solve, Bentley observes. While reading the novel?Dry, for example, my students and I pore over local newspaper headlines concerning water scarcity. As we zoom in on passages, I still guide students to consider foundational questions, such as, “What does the text say?” “What does the author mean?” “Why does this matter?” But I then layer on questions such as, “What are the stakes?” “Who gets a say?” “How do we repair and restore?” This means that we’re considering who will feel the most immediate impact of prolonged drought conditions, she explains.
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For Bentley, this means we’re getting specific about who makes decisions concerning how water is allocated and shared. It means we’re identifying water-efficiency models that can be replicated in a wide-scale manner. Layering questions in this guided manner helps students to think about how the environmental problem appearing in a fictional story is emerging in recognisable real-world contexts. She makes the reading of the novel relevant to the students’ shared life experiences.
Moreover, Bentley sees part of her role as a classroom teacher as ensuring that through their reading, students become responsible stewards of sustainability practices. Bentley claims they become more capable of articulating the more nuanced adult capacity to make the distinction between the root causes of our ‘climate crisis’ on the one hand, and the symptoms that show up as signs of these root causes on the other.
One way educators can help students engage in root causes analysis is by modelling the “five whys” strategy, Bentley counsels, adding that by repeatedly asking the question “Why,” learners can peel away the layers of symptoms that can lead to the root cause of a problem. When pondering the question, “Why do many people feel disconnected from nature?” , for example, Bentley says, students generated these responses:
Bentley points out that not only did this strategy give students practice in generative responding and building on ideas, but also enabled the intersection between environmental and social issues to become more perceptible. Once students feel comfortable making these connections, teachers can help them navigate the policy landscape and mull which policymakers are in the best position to effect change. In this instance, my students initiated a postcard campaign about the need for urban-forestry funding (CA Assembly Bill 1530).
By intentionally shifting the focus from passively learning about sustainability to actively and responsibly advocating with future generations in mind, teachers can create learning conditions for helping students become climate stewards in any classroom, Bentley concludes.
Making ‘Connections’
As an educator, equitable education advocate and school Principal Dr Dennisha Murff has always striven to look for ways to create meaningful learning opportunities for students. Murff acknowledges that as educators go through the planning process, they desire to develop lessons students can connect with. Many times, however, she says she has heard staff members share how they taught a lesson, but students did not seem to retain the information.
During vertical articulation meetings, for instance, staff members would ask the previous grade-level team to share if a particular skill was taught, Murff recalls, adding that it literally felt like they were starting from scratch! As the school leader, I began to ask staff members to share how they were making relevant connections to students’ lives. In the quest to cover the curriculum, we discovered we were missing opportunities to develop relevance and true connectivity to the skills and strategies being taught.
In Murff’s view, all students need opportunities for differentiated and personalised learning, but there are particular techniques that need to be enhanced to ensure the relevance of learning activities. If we intend to create relevance in daily lessons, Murff avers, we must commit to these concepts during our lesson planning:
1. Develop clear connections to students’ lives
While it seems a fundamental that ought not need to be re-emphasised, building positive relationships with students is a vital first step in this process, Murff advises, continuing, in order to develop relevance, educators must get to know their students. They need to understand who their students are, and then teach them – as well as treat them - ?in a culturally and linguistically responsive manner.
Students need to be able to share their lived experiences in the classroom, Murff declares, ?and your classroom must be a physically and psychologically safe learning environment where students feel free to share. As you get to know your students, ask yourself if you are able to identify students’ strengths, challenges, hobbies, and interests. Find out what is important to them. Once teachers have a clear understanding of who their students are, they are better equipped to develop lessons that have meaning and relevance, Murff says.
2. Provide opportunities for hands-on, enquiry-based learning activities
Educators must create learning experiences that give students the opportunity to dive into projects that are hands-on, Murff indicates, noting that this approach helps to tap into the various learning styles of students through multisensory engagement. Students are able to develop collaboration, critical thinking, and communication skills. These hands-on options also allow students the chance to engage in learning tasks that have real-world applications. Both Hernandez and Bentley clearly subscribe to this view also.
Murff makes great sense when she affirms that when students have the chance to connect with community partners and industry experts, they can learn more about how the world works. Especially for older secondary young men and young women, creating learning opportunities in the real world to acquire real-world skills is exceedingly potent. Australian TVET courses especially create unparalleled opportunities for high-school-aged young people to experience at first hand why we have to learn about this and that and the other. We have to learn it because in the real world, it really matters that they have a grasp of Maths and English language usage and countless other things they learn in school. These types of learning tasks also allow students to solve issues impacting their lives (and the lives of others) in a meaningful way. It is important to note that the neural connections made during this process help increase opportunities for long-term-memory storage of skills and strategies, Murff attests.
3. Implement student agency in learning spaces
Especially for senior secondary students, but also for students of all ages, student agency is a vital part of this process, Murff advocates, noting that students want voice and choice in their learning tasks. They desire to make valuable contributions to the spaces around them. As teachers consciously and intentionally provide students with opportunities to ask questions, communicate what they’ve noticed, and express new ideas in a safe environment, the level of engagement and their sense of the actual relevance of what they are learning increases, Murff explains. The opportunity to embed student agency into lessons requires a shift in the power dynamics in the classroom, she warns: when student agency is embedded into lessons, the classroom becomes a learning space for all, including the teacher. And the best part? Students will find themselves in a powerful decision-making process that enhances their ability to make contributions to the community and, ultimately, the world they live in.
As Verlazzo reminds us, as adult learners, we want to engage in activities that stretch our thinking. We expect to see the meaning and relevance of these experiences.
But what we cannot overlook for a moment is that our student learners desire the same thing!
Learning tasks that are relevant and authentic; that teach our student learners enduring life skills as they learn to navigate their complex world; and that enable our student learners to embrace learning experiences that allow for deep connection, are the classroom experiences they will remember the most.
And they’re worth it!
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