Making Connections
Posted by dbarrie on May 18, 2010
I love my job. As a K-12 Reading/Title 1 Coordinator, I have to read, discuss, research, and learn. Of course, it’s not always easy to find time for this while also filing paperwork, preparing for, attending, and following-up meetings, observing, and all of the other items on my To Do List. This year has been filled with learning much about early literacy skills, assessment, brain research, technology, reading remediation, vocabulary, and more that I don’t have room to list. It seems to me that one word keeps surfacing, a concept that is becoming more and more the keystone of the 21st century learner. And I would argue that this concept is one that has always been a key component of learning, but perhaps in the past we made it the task of the learner to uncover. What I’m talking about is relevancy. Today’s learner needs to know how new knowledge or skills are important and how it affects them. Maybe it’s an even bigger deal today due to the democratization of knowledge. Students who want to find information only need an Internet connection. Of course, they don’t always know if the information is accurate or not, but that’s a topic for another day. Establishing relevance is answering the question, “So what?” for our students, or better yet, creating conditions in which students discover the answer on their own. Today’s students, like students of the past, want to know “When am I gonna use this stuff?” and “Why do I hafta learn this?” But I feel even more compelled to make relevancy an important part of teaching and my students’ learning because I know that when students have a reason to learn, if they can connect new knowledge to old, if they can see connections between ideas, subjects, and their world at home and school, powerful learning can happen. I also see relevancy as a natural extension of lesson and unit design that begins with big ideas and essential questions. Have you thought about relevancy lately? How do you create conditions for students to see and feel relevancy? What part of your curriculum or teaching is difficult to create relevancy for your students? Please join this conversation by sharing some of your thoughts!
