Authenticity

I’ve been thinking about the relevance of student work outside of the classroom: The more it has, the more motivated students may be.

Here are some times from my own education when I felt my work was important.

In elementary school — I think it was fourth grade — my teacher allowed a small group of students to skip out of the classroom here and there over a period of weeks to help younger students (Kindergartners?) learn about counting and using money by setting up and running a pretend store for them. My family’s Monopoly game was never the same. I stole the $1’s for the store — to this day, I still prefer to round up in increments of five. Anyway, this was a standout elementary experience. Why? For one, the teacher showed she trusted us to work outside of the classroom structure & routine, more or less unsupervised (likely, there was more adult facilitation of this project than I remember, but that would be another hallmark of successful teaching — when the role of the adult is in the background). Upon this foundation, the experience had immediate and visible impact: we, the older students, could see the “little” kids’ excitement.

Fast forward to high school, in an Econ class. The teacher required every student to write a consumer complaint letter. I think I wrote mine to a cosmetics company and ended up getting a refund. The particulars aren’t as important as what I learned about the role of the consumer in a capitalist system — particularly, that I mattered. I also learned something that’s proven helpful in all kinds of contexts: that in making a complaint (or in negotiating) it’s important to have a clear understanding of what you want from a situation. That was an important part of the lesson. We had to come up with and include in our letters a proposed resolution to our issue — and ask for it. In addition to the writing skills involved, these were life lessons, and they were real outside of the classroom.

In college (my second time around), I had an English class where the professor, bless him, recognized that paradox of grading students on the quality of their writing (vis-a-vis the traditional essay) even though writing was not being taught; thus, he offered a “creative” track, where students could keep something more akin to a journal. Don’t get me wrong. The writing still had to demonstrate that we were learning. In some ways, it may have been more work. But because we had some freedom as to how and what we wrote, we could make it meaningful. I, for example, knew I was heading toward teaching, so much of my journal included writing on teaching the content we were reading.

These are times that came to mind rather readily. For sure, the premise — that the more relevance student work has beyond the classroom, the better — is one I will come back to as I embark on my own teaching.

For now, it’s very clear from these short snapshots that creating authentic experiences for students involves allowing students some autonomy and connecting their learning to who they are as individuals in their communities outside the classroom, whether those roles are as near as who they are as leaders within the school or as far-reaching as who they are as members of society.