Make Meaning and Purpose Key Elements of Teaching and Learning
Based on Elliott Seif, Teaching for Lifelong Learning: How to Prepare Students for a Changing World. (2021: Solution Tree Press)
Do you ever wonder why history facts that students have learned are not remembered after they are taught? Why many recent graduates can’t make change when they work at McDonalds? Why so many students remember so little from their previous grade level and courses?
Powerful learning is purposeful, meaningful, and contextual to the learner! We are more likely to remember the times tables when we use it to find an area, or quickly figure out how much six of any one item will cost us. Addition and subtraction skills are more likely remembered when they frequently help us make and get change at the local supermarket. Historical facts stay with us when they help us explain an historical era and understand present day issues. Writing skills are less likely to atrophy if they help us communicate a powerful story or communicate a coherent and well thought out point of view.
Unfortunately, much of the time math and writing skills and historical facts are learned without enough application, without context, or without personal meaning. Math skills are often learned as repetitious algorithms, sometimes with 25 similar problems at a time. Writing is often boiled down to a five-paragraph essay formula. Historical facts are memorized in order to do well on the multiple-choice test. So why would our students remember facts and be able to apply skills? Why would they become good writers and use their voice to create meaningful communication?
Standardized tests only compound the problem. Almost all standardized test questions are “decontextualized” through isolated multiple choice, matching, or fill-in-the-blank questions, short, artificial reading passages, decontextualized problems, and short essays that are mostly designed to see if students remember isolated facts or explain one concept. Even tests of writing skills now use artificial, formulaic rubrics to rate students on how well they did in their writing, sometimes scored by computers!
While there are some people who are good at remembering isolated facts and figures, for most of us information and data fade away unless we integrate and connect them to previous learning or figure out how to use them in meaningful ways. Only when learning helps us to understanding the world better, when we find some use for our learning, some purpose, and use what we learn frequently in different contexts do we store it in a place for ready recall. When this doesn’t happen, students are more likely to do poorly on tests that measure knowledge or apply skills that have been taught and supposedly learned over time.
What makes learning purposeful and contextual? My next door neighbor’s daughter used to constantly come into our house with math mysteries -- giving us math problems to solve on the calculator. She loved to do that. She’s practicing her math skills on us! When my daughter was younger, she and her cousin would go around the house measuring the area of everything. The well-known math teacher, Kay Toliver, has created a series of materials and DVD’s that demonstrate her engaging teaching strategies, and in one of them she takes walks around the local school community with her students to discover how the math that she is teaching can be used to figure out the price of an item in a store, or to measure the area of a playground[1].
Unfortunately, much of today’s textbooks and curriculum standards are focused on covering too much knowledge and teaching too many skills learned in too short a period of time. For example, frequently State or local social studies curriculum standards are chock full of so much content, taught is such short periods of time that it is virtually impossible to teach social studies with any meaning and purpose. Over the years, I’ve examined too many curriculum guides and standards, observed too many teachers, and read too many traditional tests that emphasize the learning of too many inconsequential facts, trivial skills, and/or vague generalities. For some reason, in a world of search engines that enable us to find large amounts of knowledge instantaneously, many still think that the more knowledge students are taught and remember, that are drilled into their brains, the more educated they are. We’ve got to come around to the idea that meaningful learning puts greater emphasis on giving students something important to think about, asking and answering meaningful questions, learning how to “find things out”, focusing on powerful learning to learn skills, applying learning to new and novel situations, communicating well. We've got to figure out how to focus, slow down and deepen the learning process.
We as educators need to make learning more purposeful and meaningful for our students. Purpose and meaning can come in many different forms. Poetry or art education classes might include a discussion of the meaning of a poem or artwork, a comparison of poems or artwork from the same author or artist, and an opportunity for students to write their own poems or create their own artwork in the style of the author or artist. A history teacher might discuss what it was like to live in a different time and place and then explore the question: which time period would you rather live in? A statistics teacher might ask a group of students to create and conduct a survey, and then to tabulate reliable and valid survey data. Sometimes meaning and purpose is created simply by emphasizing the fun of solving mysteries and puzzles, of conducting a research project on something of interest, or of being hooked by a good story.
There are ways to do this, and some are already available. The curriculum development model Understanding by Design (UbD) has at its core a planning process that promotes the development of unit based understandings, essential questions, big ideas, performance tasks, and interactive, engaging instruction. Project and problem-based design models, such as the project design approach developed by Buck Institute (www.bie.org) also promote meaningful, purposeful learning.
In addition to a focus on the use of Understanding by Design and Project Based Learning, my book Teaching for Lifelong Learning: How to Prepare Students for a Changing World, (Solution Tree Press, 2021) examines a number of ways to increase meaning and purpose – for example, to focus on a few key understandings, use a four phase instructional model to build a foundation of understandings and skills and deepen learning, use a core set of instructional strategies and assessments that promote research, writing and thinking, and analyze the curriculum to increase meaning and purpose.
Until teachers, schools and districts spend more time finding ways to make learning more purposeful, to engage students in more meaningful learning, to do less transmission of knowledge and more processing of knowledge and ideas, we will be teaching too much decontextualized information, ideas and skills that are hard to remember and limited in their usefulness. Without a long-term focus on creating a more meaningful curriculum, too many educational experiences will be built around a traditional learning model that doesn’t provide enough children with purposeful, context driven, and motivating learning experiences.
Let’s hope that we can learn to make meaning and purpose a much larger focus of educational planning and practical implementation in this fast paced, changing, uncertain world that we live in.
EndNote
[1] For further information on Kay Tolliver’s mathematics materials, search Kay Toliver or go to: http://www.fasenet.org/store/kay_toliver/#
