I have been poking around among in-school school counselors, whose lives these days are consumed by supporting colleagues and students in acute personal distress, much of it related to the uncertainties, constraints, and ongoing sorrows of the pandemic. I’ve been interested in their overall relationship to academic planning and leadership in independent schools, but that doesn’t feel like the most relevant issue in their working lives right about now. (My One Schoolhouse colleague Sarah Hanawald had a great discussion about some of these issues with a school counselor a while back.)
And relevance, as my long-time readers know, matters. In a conversation with a former independent school counselor (now a therapist, a teacher of therapists, and a specialist in grief counseling, itself all too relevant), we got onto the topic of the kids and learning. I asked her about her thoughts on the mental health crisis in schools right now, and she mentioned her concern that students just aren’t finding much of what they learn to be relevant to their lives and their concerns. This is a disincentive to engagement, setting up cognitive dissonance that plays out in anxiety and negative behaviors.
When I was a kid in the 1960s, “relevant” was a buzz word that set educators’ teeth on edge. It was inferred by the teachers I knew back then—and in later decades would be working alongside—that “relevant” was code for “entertaining” and “cool.” “Relevant” learning experiences, if any respectable educator should succumb to the temptation of offering them, would be straight-up pandering, exchanging rigorous (emphasis on rigor, as in mortis) learning for meaningless classroom fun.
Just. Spare. Me. I vividly recollect a veteran colleague’s lengthy tirade using this very language. You can make this stuff up, but, alas, I don’t have to.
A few years ago I was in conversation with a family member, a bright soul who has had a happy and successful career as what we would call an expert tradesman and as a manager of tradespeople. In school there was a diagnosis of a language-based learning difficulty, more or less unaddressed. Fortunately he found his way to a training program after high school that set him up—aided by a quick mind and a genial and generous way with people—for his career. But in discussing school, he made the point that not one aspect of his high school experience, other than shop class and his one sports team, felt relevant or meaningful to his life at that time—a situation that remains so in retrospect.
His experience is not unusual, I fear, and is probably far too common. In independent schools the “relevance” of learning is too often perceived not in any intrinsic worth but rather as its instrumental value in achieving material goals. Subtract from the culture of learning all the high-pressure concerns over next-school and college admission, and one might well be left looking at diploma requirements in general and asking, Why?
The science of learning tells us that effective learning is deeply connected to emotional commitment and engagement. Great learning takes root not just between the ears but in the heart and soul. Effective learning offers the learner a glimpse into and even a hook on some element of life that the learner finds at least a little bit important—and effective teaching embodies sufficient connections of importance, of relevance, to fortify that learning as it happens.
Teachers have long known of a zillion ways to imbue curricula with relevance, whether by asking learners to note explicit life, family, community, or “current event” connections or by contextualizing a bit of learning in some manner. The math teachers at one school I know ask pre-calculus students to analyze refugee movement data to develop functions. Modern language courses beyond the introductory there are themed—and named—around aspects of history and culture in speaker societies. At another place (a day school, yes), faculty try to create opportunities for students to check in with household or community members relative to how and when topics being taught have emerged in or impacted their “real” lives.
More schools are realizing that preparing and encouraging teachers to address “teachable moments”—when the real world intrudes, sometimes painfully and personally, into the classroom—can powerfully increase students’ sense of safety and belonging while connecting learning to ideals of justice, equity, and efficacy. Well-ordered collaborative projects (HERE is a resource, FWIW) can foster not just cooperation skills but communitarian impulses. Early childhood and elementary educators have known forever that adding psychomotor and sensory engagement works—experiential education!—and of course those disciplines we call “the arts” are all about creativity, self-discovery, and iteration. A place-based approach can be taken to many or most topics in any discipline. And haven’t we known for decades that “authentic” assessment promotes deeper learning?
Will making learning more “relevant” resolve the current challenges to student and teacher emotional wellness and mental health? At the moment, to quote a Bon Iver song (am I being relevant, or just tragically hip?), this order’s tall. Sadly and urgently, Covid statistics present a distraction that makes it hard for anything else to matter much right now.
But kids not finding much meaning in the academic parts of their school experience is a crisis, too, and it didn’t begin in March of 2020. We don’t have a vaccine for it. But we do have the creativity, the educational passion, and the caring power of our teachers and the values of our institutions to energize and fuel a revolution not just in what students learn and how they learn it but in how we frame and contextualize this learning to make it stick.