What Changes When Students Need to Know

Few questions are more familiar to teachers than this one: Why do I have to learn this?

I taught high school math, so I heard some version of it plenty of times. And like most teachers, I had answers:

You’ll need this next year. It will help you understand something later. You might need it in college. There are careers where people use this every day.

Sometimes those answers worked. Often, I suspect, they didn’t. Lately I've been wondering whether we've been thinking about the question the wrong way.

Maybe “Why do I have to learn this?” isn't always a question teachers need a better answer for. Maybe sometimes it's a design problem.

In a recent Education Talk Radio conversation Superintendent Birks and Principal Bodnar of Allentown Public Schools, I learned about STREAM Academy, elementary school where students regularly move between classroom learning and hands-on application at a nearby science center. One example involved students studying renewable energy, examining geography, making arguments about which energy sources fit particular locations, and then building and testing models themselves.

What stayed with me wasn't the water wheels or the science center. It was the timing.

Students learned something and then very quickly had a reason to use it. That seems simple. But it changes the relationship between the student and the knowledge.

A student who knows they're going to build something needs to understand enough to build it. A student preparing to defend a recommendation needs evidence. A student trying to solve a problem eventually discovers the things they don't know.

Knowledge stops being something we're asking students to store for an unspecified future. It becomes useful now. And that made me wonder whether one of the variables we overlook in learning design is simply distance to application.

A lot of schooling follows a familiar sequence:

Learn → Practice → Learn More → Test → Someday Use

But what happens when the sequence becomes:

Learn → Use → Learn → Build → Encounter a Problem → Learn More

The content hasn't necessarily changed. The standards haven't necessarily changed. What's changed is the distance between knowing something and having a reason to know it.

Maybe relevance isn't in the content

We talk constantly about making learning relevant. Usually we try to do that by modifying the content around the learning. We use a real-world example. We connect a lesson to a career. We choose a topic students might care about.

All of those can help. But perhaps relevance isn't exclusively a characteristic of content. Relevance may also be a characteristic of the learning experience.

Consider two students learning exactly the same concept. One is told that the concept will matter someday. The other needs it Thursday. Those students may experience the exact same knowledge very differently. And that distinction matters because “Why do I have to learn this?” may actually contain two questions: Will this ever matter? And Why does it matter to me right now?

Teachers can answer the first one verbally. Learning design can answer the second experientially.

Give the knowledge a job

That leads to a different way of thinking about engagement. We often ask: How do I make this lesson engaging? But that can accidentally make engagement feel like something we add after deciding what students need to learn.

Perhaps a better question is: What could students be trying to do that would make this knowledge necessary?

That's different. If students need to make a recommendation, suddenly research has a job. If they need to build something, measurement has a job. If they need to persuade someone, writing has a job. If they need to decide between two possibilities, mathematics has a job.

The academic content hasn't become less important. Quite the opposite. We've created circumstances in which students discover its importance for themselves. That's a much stronger form of relevance than telling them that they'll appreciate it someday.

Purpose may come before engagement

There's a common assumption hidden in the way we talk about engagement: students become interested, and then they learn. I'm not sure the order is always that clean.

Sometimes interest may emerge because students are doing something consequential enough that they need to learn. Purpose creates a reason to engage. Engagement creates opportunities to develop competence. And competence can change something even more powerful: identity.

That progression might look something like this:

Purpose → Engagement → Competence → Identity

That's where this idea gets especially interesting. Because students don't just decide whether individual lessons are worthwhile. They begin making judgments about themselves.

I'm a math person.

I'm not good at writing.

Science isn't really my thing.

I'm creative.

I'm just not technical.

Those identities can form remarkably early. But what exactly are students basing them on?

Maybe students meet subjects too narrowly

Imagine a child whose primary experience with science is reading a chapter, learning vocabulary, and answering questions.

That child may reasonably conclude: I don't like science. But perhaps what they've actually discovered is: I don't enjoy this particular way of experiencing science.

Those aren't the same thing.

Science can involve building, observing, arguing, measuring, experimenting, designing, explaining, recording, drawing, predicting, questioning and revising.

When students encounter a discipline through only a narrow slice of what practitioners actually do, we may inadvertently invite them to reject an entire domain before they've really met it.

That's why application isn't just about making learning more fun. Application creates more ways into a discipline. A student who doesn't connect with one entry point may find another. And eventually that student may have an experience that says: Wait. I can do this.

That moment matters.

Before asking students to decide whether they are “science people,” “math people,” or “writers,” perhaps we owe them enough varied experiences to discover what participating in those disciplines can actually feel like.

The problem isn't that students ask why

There's a temptation to hear Why do I have to learn this? as resistance. Sometimes it probably is. But it's also a perfectly rational question.

We are asking young people to invest enormous amounts of attention and effort in developing knowledge and abilities. They want to understand what those things allow them to do. Maybe we should design around it.

That doesn't mean every lesson needs a field trip, every equation needs a career connection, or every unit needs an elaborate project. It means paying closer attention to the relationship between knowledge and purpose.

How long are students being asked to learn before they get to use what they're learning? How often do they encounter a problem that makes them reach back for knowledge? How often does the learning environment allow them to discover, rather than simply be told, why something matters?

And perhaps most importantly:

What are students able to do because they know this that they couldn't do before?

That may be one of the most useful questions we can ask when designing learning. Because sometimes the best answer to Why do I have to learn this? isn't an explanation.

It's what happens next.

Continue the conversation

If this article sparked a new way of thinking, you'll find more original perspectives, conversations, and insights at InflectionED.com.

Listen to my full conversation with Dr. Birks and Rebecca Bodnar on Education Talk Radio.