Strategy One: Real-World Context
Many teachers have faced questions like these:
- ‘What’s the point of this?
- ‘Why will I ever need to know this?’
- ‘How’s this ever going to help me in my life?’
They usually indicate a growing disengagement, or sense of pointlessness, from learners.
Successfully countering them isn’t easy.
But doing so helps us to engage learners in their learning by providing meaning where they previously perceived none.
An excellent way to do this is by outlining the real-world context of the learning on which your lesson centres.
This serves to connect the information and ideas to the wider world, giving it meaning.
It doesn’t mean we can always prove that learners will need what we are teaching them about in later life.
However, we will be able to demonstrate the value of the lesson content as it relates to the world in which we live.
Through doing this we also make links beyond the walls of the classroom, which many learners find engaging.
This is because it gives them a sense of life outside school, of the relationship between what is happening in the classroom and the adult world, and because it implicitly acknowledges that what learners are doing in school is intended to prepare them for adult life (playing on the desire most children and young adults have to be older, more mature, and more independent).
There are many ways you can contextualise learning in relation to the real-world.
These include:
- Verbal explanations
- Demonstrations
- Videos
- Newspaper articles
- By analysing or explaining real-world problems
- By using contemporary examples
- Case studies (of which more below)
Strategy Two: Case Studies
We will examine this technique in more detail because it is such a useful, widely applicable tool through which to create engagement.
Case studies are narrative-based examples that provide concrete exemplification of abstract ideas and complex information.
They do this by situating one or both within real-world settings.
For example, a case study looking at the story of a migrant worker travelling from Nigeria to the United Kingdom gives concrete exemplification of abstract concepts such as push and pull factors, economic impetus, and the role of human rights within the wider debate around migration.
This helps engage learners because it provides a route through which they can access learning, assimilate new information, and be successful.
In addition, learners are often able to compare case studies to their own experiences or to the experiences of other people they know or have heard about.
This helps them to make further connections between their learning and their own lives, again creating engagement.
You can use case studies at any point during a lesson.
Useful tips to consider are:
- A clear narrative is helpful as this gives learners a story they can latch onto, analyse, and remember.
- Supplementary pictures or videos provide further purchase, giving learners a different route through which to understand the story.
- You can use case studies before or after introducing the complex information and abstract ideas you want learners to learn. In the first case, they will be able to contextualise these using the case study. In the second case, they will be able to apply what they have learned to the case study.
There is also the possibility of developing this technique by asking learners to identify relevant case studies themselves.
For example, a teacher delivering a unit of work on the local community might invite learners to create their own case studies for homework by interviewing members of their family or people they know who live nearby.
