The Relevancy Problem: What can we do to make learning meaningful?
Imagine, for a moment, you are a student.
You just got home after a full day at school. You took the bus to an away game, played and watched another game, took the bus back. Your parent is out, so you are helping younger siblings get dinner and ready for bed.
It’s late, you are tired, and remember all the homework you still have to do.
Your phone is dinging with messages and Snapchat notifications.
Your friend reminds you that you don’t really need to do all 30 math questions for homework, you can just pop open Photomath and jot down the work and answers.
What do you do?
Or maybe you’ve been procrastinating on that writing assignment. You didn’t get to pick the topic, and now have so much research to do in order to finish it up.
Your friends are all done because they used a combination of Jenni.ai and Quillbot to help them write it in 30 minutes instead of hours. They ran it through AI Plagiarism detectors to make sure it came back clean.
What do you do?
Or you are part of a group project. A few of your group members have been slacking and you need this grade to keep your GPA headed in the right track. No one is responding about the slide presentation that needs to be turned in as part of a benchmark check tomorrow.
You can easily use Gamma or Google Vids or Canva Magic to finish the presentation in a matter or minutes.
What do you do?
Your teacher just posted 10 discussion questions on Google Classroom to answer, most of the peers in your class finished because they used Coursology.io — but you are interested in this subject and want to learn more about the topic.
What do you do?
While all of these scenarios are very real, and happening right now, they are still only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Artificial Intelligence tools in school.
This year, many of our students will no longer have to go to “another website like ChatGPT” to get access to AI. It is built right into Google Docs, Slides, Microsoft apps, etc.
They won’t even have to do the prompting. Many can now use an “AI Agent” to do all the work, and then submit the work for them.
A Hinge of History: How Do We Respond?
Hinges of History are powerful moments in time, not only for the changes wrought by their inciting events but also for the changemakers who follow in their wake. These pivotal moments represent paradigm shifts in which a central truth is no longer valid or a new discovery expands the frontier of human knowledge. These monumental shifts create periods of transition that enable pioneers to enact great change — for better or worse — that would otherwise not be possible.
— Mihir Pershad
Many of us have lived through hinges in history, specifically the “internet revolution” that powers much of our world today (and this blog post or email that you are reading would not have been possible without it).
Some hinges are undoubtedly bigger than others, and we may not know the full impact of Generative Artificial Intelligence for many years (or decades) to come.
But, here we are, faced with another challenge on our hands as educators.
What do we do? How should we respond?
As my friend and colleague George Couros often says, “Change is an opportunity to do something amazing.”
We could respond to these new Artificial Intelligence tools in the following ways:
AI Cheat detectors for every assignment (even though schools are being sued, they don’t really work, and have bias)
Paper and pencil for everything (just in school, not in the rest of work and life)
In-class tests where you can’t use any technology (not a bad idea to check for actual understanding)
And the list goes on.
We could lean into compliance and double down. After all, it is much easier to teach from PPT slides, textbooks, and tests/quizzes.
Or…and just hear me out for a second…we could do something amazing.
I’ve been blessed to work with educators all around the country (and world) this year. It doesn’t matter if it is a group of folks from Hawaii or Nova Scotia, from Alabama or NYC, from California or Ohio.
We already know what works and doesn’t work.
Kids are not normally engaged in lectures, textbooks, homework, and traditional assessments.
Our best learning experiences as adults didn’t happen when compliance was the focus either.
We know what happens when kids can tap into relevancy, and curiosity, and solve problems.
We know what happens when students get to work on challenges that are meaningful.
We know what happens when learners dive into an authentic curriculum and project-based learning experiences.
We know what happens when kids CARE about their learning. Because we know what happens when WE care about our learning.
A Simple Question
In reality, we are in the tough spot of having to work in systems that are not necessarily designed for kids to care about their learning, beyond getting grades and graduating (if, even that).
Much of our curriculum, content, and pre-existing resources were not created with meaning and relevance as a priority.
Yet, here we are.
If kids, or adults, are forced to solely be compliant in their learning and work—then guess who is going to be their biggest partner in doing that work? Yep, you guessed it, AI.
But, when we care things change.
If we don’t care about that email to a colleague or parent, then why not have ChatGPT or any other AI tool write it?
If we do care, we’ll write it ourselves from a place of meaning and value.
If we don’t care about that lesson or activity, then why not have an AI tool create it?
If we do care, then maybe we use AI to generate some ideas or to finetune our plan, but in the end, our thoughts and changes make it special.
If kids don’t care about all of these assignments they have to do then of course they are going to use AI to do the assignments for them.
But…if they do care, then there is an opportunity for real, deep learning to happen.
Worms vs Strawberries
In 1936 Dale Carnegie wrote a book called How to Win Friends and Influence People. It went on to sell over 30 million copies. It still sells today and is probably one of the best books on how to improve your social skills.
In the book, he shares a quote that resonated with me so much, it was an epiphany in the middle of my student-teaching experience:
“I am very fond of strawberries and cream, but I have found that for some strange reason, fish prefer worms. So when I went fishing, I didn’t think about what I wanted. I thought about what they wanted. I didn’t bait the hook with strawberries and cream. Rather, I dangled a worm or grasshopper in front of the fish.”
Do you bait your students with strawberries and cream? Do you focus on what interests you when you teach? Or do you understand that our learners want something else?
This simple mental exercise changed the way I taught forever.
I asked myself before every lesson, in every unit: What is the strawberries and cream vs the worms?
There were plenty of times I could connect the two, but leading the learning from a place of empathy always had more impact than what I had to cover.
Find out what engages your students (you can do this from conversations) and use it! Maybe it is something to do with the subject, their life, technology, or maybe it is a connection to something in pop culture—but whatever it is, use it to boost the learning experience. Great teachers find new ways every year of delivering content that would otherwise be stale.
It’s About the Learners
When we think of “engagement” I always go back to Schlechty’s work and research.
Engagement = High Attention and High Commitment
Hight attention without commitment is just strategic compliance. Compliance can only get you so far.
For me, that was my second year at college, wondering what I was supposed to do with my life, because all I had ever done was just go through the motions.
It took me a while to realize that as a teacher, I was spending most of the classroom time on strawberries and cream.
Then, when I led with a worm, like Genius Hour – the students lit up.
When I continued with a worm-like Project: Global Inform – the commitment was there (not only the attention).
What’s our goal? For me, it’s to engage learners so they not only acquire new knowledge and skills, but also transfer that learning to new situations.
If that is the goal, then let’s focus on making learning as meaningful and relevant as possible when we have the ability to do so.
This change, just like any other hinge in history, is an opportunity to do something amazing.
