The Relevant Classroom

Six Steps to Foster Real-World Learning

Eric Hardie

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781416627708
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

Students need to connect to the real world, be engaged, and learn deeply. But how are teachers supposed to ensure that students meet these objectives in the current school system? In The Relevant Classroom, Eric Hardie presents six strategies derived from his two decades of experience as an elementary and secondary teacher and principal to show teachers ways to foster real-world connections, genuine engagement, and deeper learning: 1. Make meaning central to student work.
2. Contextualize the curriculum.
3. Create space to learn.
4. Connect student work to the community.
5. Follow the (student) leaders.
6. Reenvision feedback and evaluation.

This practical volume includes advice on how to get started, vivid examples, reflection questions, and tips on how to overcome common obstacles. The Relevant Classroom is about recognizing that teachers who tap into students' capacities for creativity, collaboration, and innovation can create learning experiences that are truly meaningful for students.

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Chapter 1

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The Case for Change

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At an education conference I recently attended that attracted educators from across North America and around the world, there were many ideas presented and debated about how to best improve education. There was one belief that seemed universal to all the participants: School needs to change. Suddenly, educators are being told to prepare students for jobs that "don't yet exist" in a world of exponential change. How are you supposed to prepare students for a life that has so much uncertainty? Our traditional paradigm of education was not made for this.

Harvard professor Tony Wagner provocatively describes the problem in his insightful book The Global Achievement Gap:

In today's highly competitive global "knowledge economy," all students need new skills for college, careers, and citizenship. The failure to give all students these new skills leaves today's youth—and our country—at an alarming competitive disadvantage. Schools haven't changed; the world has. And so our schools are not failing. Rather, they are obsolete—even the ones that score the best on standardized tests. This is a very different problem requiring an altogether different solution. (2008, p. xxi)

So why do we persist in maintaining an increasingly obsolete system? The first step to finding that answer requires that we dig deeper into the nature of this obsolescence so that we can move toward a remedy. There is a nearly endless list of reasons for realigning schools around a deeper learning agenda, but here are some of the most pressing.

Current research from Gallup of nearly a million U.S. students indicates that while, on average, students in elementary school are generally interested in school, starting in grade 5, this number drops every year until grade 11, where it bottoms out at 44 percent before rebounding slightly (Brenneman, 2016). Unfortunately, numbers from Canada look equally glum. These statistics should serve as a wake-up call to educators in many parts of North America. It's clear from this survey that we face a crisis of disinterest, which is antithetical to our desire to leave students with a lifelong, abiding passion for learning. In practical terms, these numbers raise important questions about what students should be learning, how they can be engaged in their learning, and what input they should have into their learning and schools in order to turn this alarming trend around.

The World Has Changed Fundamentally. Has School?

It's hard to overstate the importance of the dramatic changes that have taken place in the world in the last 30 years that should have radically changed what takes place in the classroom. However, education has been slow to move (for reasons that we will discuss later), and the fundamental process and organization have changed very little since formal schooling's inception. The net result is that our students are not being adequately prepared for life after school today and are even less prepared for what life will look like in the future.

One thing that is striking about looking at photographs of classrooms of the past is that they, by and large, look the same as classrooms today. Yes, there may be some differences in fashion or the technology being used, but the stereotype of the teacher standing at the front of the classroom often holds today. A time traveler would still be able to identify a classroom.

School is based on an industry-inspired production line system where children enter at the age of 4 and emerge finished at the age of 18. In between, they learn to follow directions from their supervisor and sit quietly for hours on end doing what they are told, even when it's not particularly interesting to them, developing strategies to make the time go by. In other words, they are well suited to a production-line job. This, of course, is not an accident. The education system was designed by industrialists with these explicit goals in mind.

Curiously, if you look at historical versus modern photographs of other workplaces, they look very different. Picture a photo of workers in a woolen mill juxtaposed with workers at a social media or biotech company. The same time traveler would be less likely to process what was going on. How can the process for educating the citizens of the future be so firmly rooted in the past?

The Sources of Misalignment

How exactly is education so misaligned? Why is it no longer pointing students in the direction they need to go? Here are a few elements of the system that need rethinking.

The economics of grading. The use of grades as a classroom currency is a problem because (1) it's artificial and (2) it tends to prioritize skills that are unique to the classroom. It is difficult to find parallels between grades and the world outside education. In the workplace, we are more likely to have a performance review with some commendations and next steps for improvement, not a graded percentage. Because grades are largely a matter of judgment, they are not necessarily equal from one class to the next and thus difficult to discriminate between.

Getting good grades can be as much about attendance, short-term memory, compliance, and understanding what some students see as the game of education as it is about actual learning. How many times have you heard an underperforming student comment, "A 62 percent is good enough. As long as I'm passing"? It's far too common and always frustrating for educators. It makes clear two things about the student's thinking: (1) they've learned that school is about grades and not learning, and (2) they don't see grades as motivating, so there's not much reason to try. It's very difficult to get buy-in from students who have simply opted out of the system.

Daniel Pink (2009) argues in his book Drive that beyond basic biology, we are driven by the need for three things: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Because many school systems put grades and learning on the same plane, and because it is much more driven by the adults than the students, it can be challenging to keep students motivated if they decide that they don't care how they do because autonomy, mastery, and purpose are in short supply. When their recognition of the artificiality of the school system is combined with a lack of intrinsic motivation and frustration over school's seeming irrelevance, the result is too often a dispiriting formula for dropping out.

Education versus certification. If the classroom economic system is based on grades, then the school economic system (at the high school level) is based on credit acquisition and diplomas. The standardization of courses means that students are expected to get a similarly well-rounded educational experience (particularly for the first couple of years of high school). However, it sometimes means that students drop out before they get to courses that might be of interest to them.

As a high school principal, I have clear recollections of trying to get a student named Alex through the system. Alex showed up to school every day looking ready for a day in construction, complete with steel-toed work boots and plaid jacket. He didn't like school very much because it wasn't relevant to him, and coaxing him through mandatory courses in science and math was a trial for all of us: Alex, his teachers, his parents, and the administration. It also meant that he would frequently get kicked out of class. However, if you invited Alex to help with side projects, like doing some landscaping at the front of the school, he worked harder than anyone and would never complain. We all knew that Alex would be happy once he reached the older grades and could do work placements and take classes in wood working and metal work, but getting him there was going to be a struggle. Despite our best efforts, he eventually dropped out of school a few credits short of graduation and is happily working construction, but it has always seemed unfortunate to me that we don't have a system that's flexible enough to support the countless students like Alex.

One of the gravest dangers to the current school system is the gap between education and certification. Schools rely on the educational economic system to extrinsically motivate students by granting high school diplomas that demonstrate the school's value. However, thanks to the proliferation of online schools, it has become easier and more flexible than ever to earn high school credits. In fact, we are entering a time when you could earn a high school diploma, earn an undergraduate degree, and do graduate work without ever entering a building. While this is terrific news for the educational consumer, it should also be providing a wake-up call to all school educators. If what you are offering in class is no more engaging, no more interactive, and no more motivating than an online class, then why will students go to the trouble of getting out of bed, traveling to your school, and learning at the time and location of your choosing, when they can learn on their own time wherever they can access WiFi? If your only real value is certification, then you are in trouble when certification can be achieved more easily from other sources.

One of the reasons that change is necessary in schools is that the survival of schools is not guaranteed. One need only look at countless other industries to see how quickly technology has revolutionized, and in some cases destroyed, what appeared to be solid institutions and industries. Educators who think that it's impossible that it could happen to us need to talk to someone who used to be a travel agent or repaired transistor radios and TVs.

Quality versus accountability. One of the unfortunate trends that has emerged in North American education, and particularly in the United States, is an extreme focus on accountability, which implies that if teachers and administrators just do their job properly, then students will do well on standardized tests, which will somehow translate into future success. Unfortunately, this hasn't really worked out as planned. The accountability line of reasoning posits that if you simply do more of what you are currently doing with a narrower focus, and add additional pressure, then you will get what you want: better quality. Instead, more accountability has led to the standardization of the student experience, with little room to honor student individuality and build on their unique strengths; cheating; a narrowing of the curriculum; the elimination of recess in some districts; extreme pressure on students, teachers, and administrators; and a test-taking gamesmanship that values standardized test performance over meaningful learning, student engagement, and the maximization of student potential.

Such an intense focus on testing does not offer students the opportunity to explore complexity and the inherent messiness of learning and overlooks the critical skills—collaboration, problem solving, cultural sensitivity, tenacity, and more—that today's workplaces flag as essential to the continually evolving global workplace. It has negatively affected the quality of the system, producing high school graduates who are ill-equipped to handle the challenges that follow high school. In fact, many graduates have a shockingly high chance of dropping out of college in their first year. A recent study showed that not only is the college completion rate currently an abysmal 52.9 percent in the United States, it's also dropping (Shapiro et al., 2015).

The industry-inspired production line model underlies many of the current trends in accountability. Business's intense focus on metrics has been transferred into the educational sphere, with problematic results: The overly simplistic application of these metrics has punished students, schools, and administrators in neighborhoods with low socioeconomic status for not measuring up. It has also resulted in minimal meaningful change. Metrics themselves are not a bad idea, but what we measure and how we measure is crucial. Using multiple-choice tests, bringing negative attention to communities that are already struggling, and embarrassing rather than supporting them is bound to fail our students. A school is not a branch plant that is having difficulty maintaining profitability. It's an incubator for the future.

It's not an accident that some of the best education systems in the world have placed far less focus on superficial accountability and far more focus on delivering high-quality learning experiences (by contrast, e.g., Norwegian students take a single, standardized test at the age of 16). The central issue is what is best for students and how to build the learning around them rather than building them into the learning.

Testing-focused education often creates schools where success is as much about gaming the system as it is about authentic, meaningful learning. To win the game, students have developed superficial strategie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Endorsement for The Relevant Classroom
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The Case for Change
• Chapter 2. Make Meaning Central to Student Work
• Chapter 3. Contextualize the Curriculum
• Chapter 4. Create Space to Learn
• Chapter 5. Connect Student Work to the Community
• Chapter 6. Follow the (Student) Leaders
• Chapter 7. Reenvision Feedback and Evaluation
• Chapter 8. Final Reflections
• Appendix. A Real-World Learning Planner
• References
• Study Guide
• Related ASCD Resources
• About the Author
• Copyright