Eric Hardie - The Relevant Classroom: Six Steps to Foster Real-World Learning

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"Eric Hardie's The Relevant Classroom is a timely book. As educators grapple with the evolution of education in a digital age, Eric offers sound and practical approaches to engage students in deep and meaningful learning. While some books set out broad claims regarding the need for educational change and fail to offer a road map forward, The Relevant Classroom presents a vision for learning that is grounded in sound research and backed up with myriad ideas that support implementation. This book should appeal to both educational leaders and classroom practitioners as it offers much to ruminate and act on in pursuit of not only a relevant classroom but also a powerful classroom."

Garfield Gini-Newman

Associate Professor, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Senior Consultant, The Critical Thinking Consortium

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To Krista, Alexa, Rachel, and Bryn, for walking softly in the morning

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A recent conversation with a colleague reminded me why I wrote this book. We were talking about the school experiences of our own kids, when the conversation turned to her 13-year-old son. "He absolutely hates school," she lamented, "and I mean hate. Every morning is a huge fight. He finds the days long and says he's bored out of his mind. He's a smart enough kid and has interests outside of schoolbut sitting passively for hours of the day has killed any interest he had in school."

As a high school principal, I saw this issue manifest itself in the uptick in office referrals for behavior in the afternoon. A typical scenario goes something like this: Teacher calls the office to send a student down for misbehaving; the student slumps in an office chair; when asked what happened the student says, "Yes, I did that, but you have no idea how bored I was! Getting sent to the office is better than spending another minute there. You have no idea how long the days are here!"; teacher comes down at the end of the day to express her own frustration and is unsure how to improve the situation with the student despite her best efforts.

The unfortunate reality is that many students report finding school boring. It's one of the common threads between both those who perform well academically and those who don't. I have had many conversations with students who get good grades but say something like, "School's pretty boring, but I have my heart set on getting into a program, so I just keep at it."

This creates problems on multiple levels, for both students and teachers, and is one of the main reasons I wrote this book. The way that we do schoolthe structure, process, and expectationsmeans that school often does not work well for both students and teachers. There are myriad reasons why this is the case, and we will explore several of them in the chapters that follow, but suffice it to say the current system of teaching and learning is not working. Students are frequently disengaged, are not learning as much as they could, and too frequently drop out. Teachers are working too hard and are professionally frustrated, and too frequently they drop out as well, either literally or emotionally. It doesn't have to be this way.

This book doesn't provide all the answers, but it does provide strategies that will help move us in the right direction by bridging the gap between the artificiality of the world of school and the real world that surrounds it. This is a major cause of disengagement: Students don't see the connection between what they are being asked to learn and do in school and the world around them. The strategies are purposefully broad so that, whether you teach kindergarten or grade 12, you will find them useful. While subjects and students change with age, the fundamentals remain the same. Really deep learning requires that certain criteria be met for magic to take place in the classroom.

First, students are engaged through meaningful work. "Why are we doing this?" is a time-honored and entirely legitimate question. When our answer is "Because it's in the curriculum," we are in trouble right out of the gate. By making meaning central to student work, we can provide real answers to this most important of questions; in fact, if done right, students won't even feel the need to ask it. provides a number of strategies, guiding questions, and examples we can use to ensure that students are engaged in work that they see as purposeful.

One of the most common questions from teachers is "How do I do interesting things in my classroom and still cover the curriculum?" It's an important question, and part of the answer lies in putting the curriculum into context. If we start with the curriculum as a checklist of things that need to be covered, then, again, we are in trouble right out of the gate. If, however, we treat it as a list of skills and knowledge that students can use to support the meaningful work they are doing, then suddenly it makes more sense to students and they will understand why they are learning it. unpacks how to do this successfully and provides some examples.

In , we'll explore the need to create space for students to learn. One common cause of disengagement in a traditional classroom is that there isn't space for the students and their interests, ideas, creativity, and skills. When a classroom is too focused on the teacher, it doesn't respect the individuality of the students and forces the teacher to work even harder. In this chapter, we'll talk about how to frame real-world challenges for students while leaving space for them to find themselves in the work.

Another important way to build engagement and relevance is to actively connect student work to the real world (we'll know our work to improve education is done when we don't have to use this designation anymore). School is a lot different for students when their actions and learning are being purposed to positively affect the world around them than when they are being used to complete a test. In , we'll talk about the importance of community connections and audience to communicate to students the value of the work they are engaged in.

With the groundwork laid, we can allow students to lead in our classrooms. By creating meaningful work and building leadership capacity in students, teachers can achieve that enviable goal of moving from being the sage on the stage to the guide on the side, while simultaneously expanding student learning. If we want students to become leaders, then they need to learn to lead in our classrooms. Leadership takes practice and requires opportunity and feedback to flourish. talks about how we can best do this.

Finally, we can see deep learning and great success when providing feedback on and evaluating student work that is purposeful and meaningful. Making one of the more challenging parts of the job more enjoyable, while also deepening student understanding, is the subject of .

In the end, this is not about teachingit's about learning. We can't learn for students, but we can create experiences where deep learning will take place. This is also not about teachers burning themselves out trying to make magic in the classroom every day. This is about recognizing that students are our greatest untapped source of creativity, collaboration, and innovation, and that tapping into these resources is the key to a new kind of classroom and deeper learning.