Relevance at Aspen Community School
Academic excellence, relevance, relationships. These three words help us focus every activity we engage in at ACS. Most folks can recognize academic excellence and see the importance of positive learning relationships. But what is relevance and what does it have to do with school?
Relevance is the connection students make from what they are learning to their own lives. Relevance is the concept that the desires and interests of students need to be connected to what is being taught. It’s common sense, we learn the most about things that relate directly to our own lives and that we care about. At school, one of our jobs is to extend the student’s perception of what is relevant and what is not.
The challenge is how to get students engaged in a topic they might not think they are interested in. Let’s take the recent 5-8th grade unit on the electoral process and U.S. government.
First: Teachers decided what skills students needed to learn. The list included: comparing and contrasting, research, note taking, non-linguistic representation of information, writing, reading, critical thinking and public speaking.
Next: Students were assigned homework over the summer (shudder). Although this may sound like cruel and unusual punishment the intent was to have students arrive back at school with enough background information about the election to get a running start. It worked, despite the moans!
Then: Students read candidate biographies, discussed issues, created their own newspapers, analyzed political advertisements and cartoons, argued about taxes in the central area and studied each branch of government.
Meanwhile: Students were participating in their own student election. This is where the “relevance” kicks in. The student process mirrored the national process, complete with primaries, speeches, debates, electioneering ,misquotes and gaffs. Students were forced to “run on issues” and each candidate, there were 18, had a platform on how to move ACS forward. Older students presented to younger students. For a look at their primary speeches click here http://poster.4teachers.org/worksheet/view.php?id=124235
Finally: The school election coincided with the national election. Every student in the school participated. This modeled the entire process and added another cross aged component to the instruction. Students cast their votes on November 4th. Tears were shed, victory was declared and the dust settled.
In the end, students learned that, the more they understand about a subject the more interesting it became. The more students “engaged” in the learning process the more meaningful and relevant the learning became. This expanded each student’s academic comfort level and readied him or her for more complex and challenging tasks in the future. The learning became meaningful to them. It was relevant.
