Make Mine Relevant
 |
| Relevant - bearing upon or connected to the matter at hand |
"But why do we need to know this?"
"When we will we ever use this?"
As a student I heard these and similar questions. I even asked them from time-to-time, particularly in some of the upper level math classes that I found myself in as a high schooler.
The fact that the questions were asked all those years ago and are still asked by students today illustrates how much learners seek relevance in any opportunity to learn. If a student is going to expend the energy to learn something new, they seem to need to justify the expenditure of the effort to learn by knowing that the new learning is relevant and will be useful in the future.
 |
| Warm-up Activity from Mr. Marks' Classroom |
Our school system is in the midst of a canned food drive for the local food pantry. Each of the schools is in competition with each other to collect the most cans and monetary donations for the food pantry. Some of the schools also have competitions between the classrooms as well. The students are motivated by wanting to help the hungry as well as by the desire to win the competitions. Mr. Jared Marks is a Fourth Grade Teacher at D.F. Walker Elementary School. (He is also the school's current Teacher of the Year.)
The picture above is the warm-up activity that greeted his students recently. This multi-step word problem requires problem-solving, an understanding of order of operations, computation skills, and the grit and perseverance to work through all of the steps to arrive at the solution. The relevance of this problem was immediately felt by the students as they wanted to know how they were doing relative to other classrooms.
It is clear to me that this teacher understands the power of ensuring that students see their work as relevant. I asked Mr. Marks why it is important to consider relevance when planning instructional activities.
Mr. Marks responded, "Achieving 100% student attention 100% of the time is far from realistic. Given the multitude of factors at play influencing student motivation and attention, teachers have the unique challenge of trying to increase the number of students interested in any particular task or problem." Mr. Marks went on to say, "The more teachers are able to make learning come to life for students the more likely students will be willing and excited to engage with a specific task or problem. When learning is embedded within situations related to students' lives, especially when it appears to have an authentic and personal impact, student motivation and attention meaningfully increases."
I love his phrase, "an authentic and personal impact." This resonates with the dictionary.com definition of relevant, "bearing upon or connected to the matter at hand." "Personal impact" is obviously "connected to the matter at hand." When the learning is relevant, learners are more likely to fully engage in an instructional activity.
Not too long ago, the "Three R's" of Reading, 'Riting, and 'Rithmetic gave way to the new "Three R's of Rigor, Relevance, and Relationships." Although these new three R's have been shared to the point of becoming an educational cliche', it seems that most of our attention as a profession as been on the Rigor and Relationships. We must not lose sight of the power of ensuring that we show students how the learning is relevant, or like Yoda, we will find ourselves with disinterested students who disengage from the learning activity too early and only much, much later realize that they really did need to learn what was being taught.
It must be relevant to really matter to learners. Motivated students and compliant students might engage even when something does not appear to be relevant, but I am guessing that any take-away knowledge they leave the lesson with evaporates at the end of the unit assessment.
Daniel Pink, the author of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, says that in general, "when people know why they're doing something they do it better." As intuitive as this sounds, I don't know that teachers or leaders always remember the power of this truth. A leader who simply tells subordinates what to do without explaining why the task is important won't last long. Neither will the teacher who tries to use only the positional power of being the teacher to compel students to learn. "Why?" is a powerful question. I agree with Pink, "Why?" is also a powerful motivator.
As a learner, I know that I want the professional development that I engage in to be relevant. As a classroom observer, I know that students appear to be more authentically engaged when the activity is relevant. My friends, make mine relevant.
As a learner, I know that I want the professional development that I engage in to be relevant. As a classroom observer, I know that students appear to be more authentically engaged when the activity is relevant. My friends, make mine relevant.
How do you ensure that your work is relevant?
Recently, I worked to revise a learning target rubric from the Expeditionary Learning model that was shared with me by a colleague. Since writing clear, meaningful learning targets was a focus of all of our schools, the principals asked that I revise the rubric to align with NC's evaluation language so that teachers could make the connection and understand the expectation for writing a clear learning target for their students.
ReplyDeleteWhen reading your blog about relevance, I immediately connected to the criteria on the rubric that specified the need for learning targets to be specific and contextualized. Contextualized instruction is defined by Herod as, “Material is taught in a context context in which it would be used in ‘real life.’ The underlying assumption is that the context provides meaningfulness to abstract information, making it more concrete concrete and therefore therefore, easier to learn.” (Herod, 2002) It's common sense really. If we want students to connect with our content and motivated to engage in it, they have to know why they are learning it and how it will benefit them beyond the classroom. Contextualizing our instruction and therefore the students' learning seamlessly integrates 21st century skills into our classroom as students collaborate to solve problems that are directly related to the real world and reflect on their own learning.
"It's common sense really. If we want students to connect with our content and motivated to engage in it, they have to know why they are learning it and how it will benefit them beyond the classroom."
ReplyDeleteI absolutely agree! The importance of Learning Targets is worthy of a whole blog post in and of themselves. Relevance is a key factor in ensuring our Learning Targets are on target. Thank you for the comment.