Here’s your Friday moment of Eduzen to think about over the weekend. As always, your thoughts welcomed.
Harvard’s David Perkins in Future Wise: Educating Our Children for a Changing World:
We might consider another gap alongside the achievement gap. Let’s call it the relevance gap. The achievement gap asks, “Are students achieving X?” whereas the relevance gap asks, “Is X going to matter to the lives learners are likely to live?”
If X is good mastery of reading and writing, both questions earn a big yes! Skilled, fluent, and engaged reading and writing marks both a challenging gap and a high-payoff attainment. That knowledge goes somewhere! However, if X is quadratic equations, the answers don’t match. Mastering quadratic equations is challenging, but these equations are not so lifeworthy. Now fill in X with any of the thousands of topics that make up the typical content curriculum. Very often, these topics present significant challenges of achievement but with little return on investment in learners’ lives.
Here’s the problem: the achievement gap is much more concerned with mastering content than with providing lifeworthy content.
So why don’t we see more attention to the relevance gap alongside the achievement gap? Well, attention to the relevance gap upsets the apple cart of conventional practice much more than attention to the achievement gap. The achievement gap is all about doing the same thing better. With the achievement gap as our target, we want to do a better job imparting skills and understandings we already try to teach. But embracing the challenge of the relevance gap asks us to reconsider deeply what schools teach in the first place. Topics and themes that have been part of typical curricula for centuries might get displaced, reduced, or reframed. Textbooks might need rewriting. Teachers would find honored parts of their disciplines under siege and new and tricky content knocking at the door— barbarians at the gate! To borrow from Al Gore, the problem of lifeworthy learning that so pervades typical curricula is an inconvenient truth. As with our planet’s precarious situation, ignoring an inconvenient truth is a dangerous way to deal with it (30-31)!
Right here with you here again Will,
You captured what was exactly my takeaway from “Future Wise…”. We can limit our propensity for trying to get the wrong things right by focusing on the relevancy inherently linked to lifeworthy learning. Big questions (inquiry) -> big understandings (relevance).
Bob
Perkins captures one of the fundamental flaws of our current educational model. We educators worry deeply about how to “teach better” that which we have always done, but we fear even considering the merit of the content itself. If we are truly in the business of doing what is best for our learners, we must challenge the very core of what we do, no matter how uncomfortable that makes us. And, I highly doubt that any teacher who takes up such a daunting task and successful modifies her or his curriculum will ever have to worry about becoming “obsolete,” or being out of work. Thank you for putting forth Perkins’ ideas for discussion, Will.
The points you bring up through this quote are crucial to the education revolution. The world is changing so rapidly that we as educators need to be reflective of the future implications of our work. I can’t even tell you how many college graduates I know who look back on their education and wonder how anybody thought it would prepare them for the world outside of school. Challenging the standards we are required to teach is a constant battle, but teachers have so much more power in how to teach to mastery than they realize. The real world application of these skills is not only extremely important, but learning becomes more fun for students when they can experience the power of knowledge in a way that applies to their daily life and future. Thank you for spreading the relevance gap to educators through this quote!
This article greatly summarizes the problems we are facing with today’s education. As a 4th grade teacher, there is a lot of pressure to teach the standards, that we lose focus on teaching to the needs of the whole student. Students who academically struggle are pulled from extracurricular activities in order to “catch them up” in their areas of academic deficits. I am not saying that intervention programs are bad, but I believe that the way our education system is run has lost focus on what is most important–the student. We as educators are so concerned about closing that achievement gap that we forget about the relevance of the content in relation to the student. Transforming our teaching to meet the relevance gap requires a lot of reform in our education system and will take time. However, I believe that the first step is to consider the needs of the students.
This is definitely something I can relate to!
I have spent 4 years teaching math and I feel that every year, my experience in the classroom should be more feasible than the year before. However, I know my students gain the most when they see how concepts are relevant in their lives. In order to do this, I must take the time to get to know my students’ interests from the beginning of the year and tie current events that can potentially cement students’ learning.
I’m curious to know how teachers who have taught for more than 5 years have dealt with staying current in their content, while improving their efficiency at the same time.
This is definitely a topic that relates to me as a teacher. There is so much push for closing the achievement gap and implementing interventions for those students who struggle on a daily basis. I think what we fail to realize is that if students are not understanding concepts, continuous interventions may not be the most effective tool for those students. We need to think of other ways to involve students and capture their interest in learning. I think part of the problem is that curriculum may not be up to date or teachers may need more professional development to build on their existing knowledge. I think that students can eventually blossom if we change our thinking about how we can close the achievement gap. The knowledge may be there, but we haven’t discovered how to allow students to make personal connections with their learning to their own lives.