At the end of last week, I posted a Tweet that I thought shared a relatively benign message:
My point was a simple one: If our students don’t understand the relevance in what they are learning — if they don’t see any real connection between our content and their interests/needs — they aren’t going to retain any of the information that we are teaching them.
That thinking is a follow-up to a message that I shared way back in October:
Interesting analogy, right?
We talk often about “learning loss” in terms of things that kids forget over the course of the summer or during the school years interrupted by the pandemic — but kids forget things that we teach them all the time.
My argument is that if teachers spent more time showing students how the content that they are learning is essential — to their continued learning, to the health and welfare of their friends and families, to a stable and successful community or society — kids would forget less of what we teach them.
I thought that was an analogy that most teachers would get behind.
What I learned in the replies to my Tweet, however, is that there are a ton of teachers who don’t value the notion of relevance as much as I do.
I won’t embed their Tweets here simply because I’m not trying to call anyone out, but the messages sounded a lot like these kinds of statements:
- Students don’t have the cognitive capacity to understand the importance of the things they are learning.
- There were lots of things that I learned in school that I didn’t realize were important until later in life.
- School isn’t always going to be fun. You just have to suck it up and learn.
- Relevance comes later. You don’t always know what you don’t know.
- Some skills and knowledge are important because they help with other material down the line.
- During childhood, who knows where our knowledge will take us.
- Learning things we don’t see the relevance in is about teaching perseverance.
- They may not see the relevance in the topic, but the topic isn’t the point. The point is teaching thinking skills like assimilating and drawing conclusions.
I’ve got a mix of reactions to these kinds of statements.
Some of them reflect really shortsighted views of students.
For example, the notion that kids don’t have the cognitive capacity to understand the relevance of what they are learning is bunk. All kids, regardless of age, want to understand why things are important to learn.
How do I know?
Because all kids, regardless of age, ask questions in class like, “Why are we learning this?”
That’s not a characteristic of an adult or a child. That’s a characteristic of a learner.
Learning is about making connections between ideas. Spotting patterns. Finding applications. When we build relevance into our lessons, we facilitate learning because our students can more readily make connections between the ideas that we are presenting.
Others reflect really shortsighted views of teaching.
For example, the notion that kids will better understand the relevance of the content that they are learning years later — after moving on to other subjects or grade levels — suggests that there IS relevance in the content that we are teaching, but that it is up to the students to discover the relevance instead of up to teachers to build relevance into instruction.
That’s nuts, y’all.
If there is a point to your lesson — if you really believe that the content that you are teaching to your students will be essential to them in some way further down the road — then why wouldn’t you take the time to show kids how the information matters to them while they are learning it?
To me, that argument applies just as strongly to the topics that we teach that may not seem important now, but will make a huge difference to a student’s success later as it does to the lessons that we teach about thinking skills (drawing conclusions, making connections, applying information) and about work habits (persevering when the going gets tough, recognizing that not all learning is easy or fun, making a commitment to following through on responsibilities.)
The kids that depend on our efforts to build relevance the most are the struggling learners in our classrooms.
You are more likely to go along with learning that you don’t see any immediate relevance in if you have been successful in school. After all, the relevance for students who have always succeeded becomes making yet another A or earning yet another Honor Roll certificate or getting the praise from teachers or parents for high marks yet another time.
But if you struggle in school, you are constantly trying to determine where to invest your energies. Persisting is a constant lesson, regardless of class. Heck, surviving is probably a more accurate term for describing what school feels like on a day-to-day basis for kids who struggle in our classrooms.
Leaning in, then, is a heck of a lot easier when your teacher has taken the time to let you know exactly why this learning matters to you. Struggling learners will give you their best effort even when the going gets tough as long as they are convinced that the effort is going to lead to some kind of tangible payoff in the end.
I think Brady came as close to articulating my thinking about the importance of relevance in instruction when he wrote:
I bet if you surveyed kids in traditional classrooms, they would tell you that learning oftentimes feels like something that is done TO them instead of something that is done WITH them.
And learners don’t invest in things that they feel like are being done TO them.
Need proof?
Consider your own actions as a learner the last time that you didn’t see value in the professional development session being delivered to teachers in your school. You checked out too, didn’t you?
The best news is that building relevance doesn’t have to be a complicated process.
Want to see what it can look like in action?
Check out this relevance statement, developed by a group of middle school teachers in Casper, Wyoming. You can learn more about their work with relevance statements in You Can Learn — the book about student efficacy and motivation that I just wrote with Tim Brown.
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