Context is King

I have vivid memories of my high school chemistry class. I can almost feel the splintered wood chair beneath my legs and smell the sourish, sweet scent that filled the room (the origin of which, I never dared to ask). I was a fairly successful student, but chemistry left me flummoxed. After memorizing the elements on the periodic table and units of measurement (some of which may have been completely fabricated by our quirky teacher, as “Googling it” was at least 5 years in the future), it felt we spent the remainder of the year balancing equations and performing experiments completely disconnected from the work we completed at our seats. At the time, I assumed I was just not destined for advanced sciences, and plugged along in order to pass the class.

The following year, I moved to the room directly across the hall (surprisingly void of the mystery smell) and prepared myself to take on physics. We spent the first day of class throwing rubber balls around the room and shooting rubber bands at each other. Through the subsequent month we experimented further and performed calculations to determine the most efficient weapon in our rubber war. I aced physics.

As a high school freshman and sophomore, I asserted that chemistry was lame and physics was awesome. Now, I recognize that my physics teacher was a master of providing context for our learning. That’s what made it stick!

While there is a substantial amount of research to support this concept regarding context, my favorite is probably the work curated by Dan and Chip Heath. (The Heaths are brothers, so it is adorable that they write books together and their endearing bios add to their charm). In their first book, Made To Stick, the Heaths outline a framework for making ideas sticky using six essential components: simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions and stories. The brothers have recently released a new book, The Power of Moments, where they examine how we can orchestrate moments that matter. The research and approaches outlined in these two texts offer powerful lessons for educators. Ultimately, as educators we have the opportunity to develop context for new learning experiences, and it is our obligation to create a relevant context for our learners. I highly suggest you read (at least one of the) books, and in the meantime here are three possibilities for developing greater context in your classroom:

Identify An Authentic Problem

There is probably no greater context than solving a real world problem. Is there an issue in your organization that your students could help solve? Perhaps a local business needs new curtains, menus, or business cards? If you’re having a hard time thinking of an authentic problem, ask your students. When information acquired in school is woven into a real world application, it provides a sense of urgency and relevance for their work.

Tap Into Student Curiosities

Present a new topic to your students and, either as a class or individually, allow them to brainstorm questions. Once the brainstorm is complete, invite your students to identify questions they feel are high priority. My favorite protocol for generating high level student questions comes from Right Question and is outlined in Make Just One Change: Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions.

Throughout your unit, tie new learning back to the student questions. Some teachers create class anchor charts/posters with a question per page and the class adds notes connected to the question. Notebooks or online journals are another option; students record their questions and then add notes and ideas as they are uncovered.

Shift The Order Of Instruction

When a gamer wants to start a new video game, they connect to the game interface and start playing. After a while, this gamer could probably tell you a great deal about the rules and practices of the game, but to learn this information they simply started playing. The same can be true in our classrooms. When students play and explore first, they have a frame in which to apply their new learning.

Realistically, you could create combinations of these approaches to further differentiate your units and ideally you could tie the approaches together into a PBL unit. If you’re interested in learning more about PBL, be sure to check out our book, Hacking Project Based Learning: 10 Easy Steps to PBL and Inquiry in the Classroom.