Highly Relevant Learning

I had the good fortune to be included in the JW North Senior Exhibitions yesterday.  What a great job by the principal and staff in connecting the learning in their school with relevance to students.  As you probably know, North has been engaging in this project for 15 years now – and it shows.  Each senior works on a “project” throughout the course of the year with the assistance of the North staff – and then in a “stand and deliver” session the student presents their learning to an impartial (largely community) panel of evaluators.  This is about as “real world” as it gets.  Students have standards to meet in their presentation – including their appearance, oral language skills, visuals, clarity, and content.  As you might imagine – as in life there is always the “unforeseen” that happens (e.g., the PowerPoint doesn’t work, forgot to bring something, etc.).  I am sure that this experience will serve these students well in their life beyond graduation and JW North High School.

This is also a great opportunity as it provides the community with a clear sense of what kind of quality instruction is occurring at the school and how students are assimilating the learning.  Good job, North!!

On a related note, though certainly not as extensive is something called “Challenge based learning” that offers similar engagement of students.  The basic idea is that while students are engaged in “standards based” instruction there is a clarity of purpose and engagement in their learning.  The focus is that students determine a challenge they wish to meet and achieve and as such apply their learning in the accomplishment of that challenge.  One example of that learning occurred at O’Neill High School in Nebraska – where the challenge was to reduce and eliminate APATHY (not that unusual).  The uniqueness occurs when the specific challenge is to eliminate apathy at their school and engender engagement from their peers (a somewhat different class project).   This provides a whole new notion of what engaged learning might look like.

Many of our teachers and schools are in pursuit of this type of student engagement and learning.