While I played my share of “The Clock Game” during high school, I also took many classes that captivated me. Classes alive with the joy of learning, where students cracked jokes about Henry Clay’s penchant for unsuccessful presidential runs (he had five), and debated the philosophical implications of Camus’s absurdism. Classes where the time flew by, and I didn’t glance at the clock once.
These high school memories left me with a couple of unanswered questions: What made these classes so engaging? What was the difference between a “clock game” and a captivating class?
Now an NAIS researcher armed with data from our 2016 High School Survey of Student Engagement (HSSSE) about students’ perceived levels of academic engagement, I set out to find some answers.
Motivations, Outcomes, and the Relevance Disconnect
Culling the 2016 HSSSE data, I noticed a common trait among students at NAIS member schools: They are highly motivated to succeed beyond the classroom. Eighty-nine percent of students at NAIS member schools go to school to learn skills to get a good job, and 92 percent are motivated to succeed in the world outside of school. Students at NAIS member schools seemed particularly interested in developing the habits and capacities for success after graduation.The data also showed that NAIS member schools were doing a great job of teaching students those exact habits and capacities. The National Association of Colleges and Employers suggests that employers value three skills over all others:
- the ability to work in a team structure,
- the ability to solve problems, and
- the ability to communicate verbally with people inside and outside an organization.
I dug back into the HSSSE data and went through the list:88 percent of NAIS students believe their experience at school has contributed to their ability to work well with others to complete a task,
88 percent of NAIS students believe their experience at school has contributed to their capacity to treat others with respect, a crucial capacity for any sort of teamwork,
92 percent of NAIS students believe their experience at school has contributed to their ability to think critically,
90 percent believe their experience at school has contributed to their ability to develop creative ideas and solutions, and
88 percent of NAIS students believe their experience at school has contributed to their ability to speak effectively.
What students weren’t doing, however, was connecting their development in school to their success outside the classroom.
Only 24 percent of students at NAIS schools believe that their schooling has contributed very much to understanding why what they learn in school will be important for life after high school.
In addition, only 22 percent of students strongly agree that they see how the work they are doing now will help them after high school. I couldn’t help but smirk at the irony here: Students did not see the relevance of their classwork outside of school, while that same classwork advanced the exact skills that would lead to postgraduate success.
Why Relevance Matters
Relevance is the perception that something is interesting and worth knowing, according to Robin Roberson, a veteran public-school teacher and current educational researcher at the University of Oklahoma. Drawing from her vast experience in K-12 schools, Roberson wrote that “relevance is one of the most important aspects of teaching and learning.”
Others agree with her assessment. Edutopia reported that "relevant, meaningful (classroom) activities help build neural connections and long-term memory storage” in students’ brains. IDEA, an academic nonprofit dedicated to teaching and learning, wrote that teachers must demonstrate the “relevance and significance” of their classes to stimulate student interest. A research piece in Active Learning in Higher Education found that “establishing relevance” was one of the most important means of motivating student learning.
The more I read about the importance of relevance in the classroom, the more I came to understand that it is key to student success and engagement. But all the research still wasn’t clicking for me. I had fought sleep in statistics, while knowing that I wanted to be a data analyst after graduating. Yet I reread Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis seven times during my senior year of high school, despite demonstrating no particular affinity for literature before that class. And that’s when I remembered Bryan Abadrabo.*
Mr. Abadrabo: An Exemplar
Bryan Abadrabo was my 12th-grade world literature teacher, a scraggly man whose olive skin suggested an Italian heritage. On the second day of school, Mr. Abadrabo cursed at a student for coming to class without having read the first chapter of The Stranger. On the fourth day of class, Mr. Abadrabo flipped his desk over in response to a student misidentifying Albert Camus as the protagonist of the same story. Mr. Abadrabo frequently meandered between world literature and stories about his life, almost cried in class more than once, and punished lack of effort with a severity that I was certain broke with school policy.Yet there was a wait-list to take every single class he taught. Students I had watched brag about passing 11th grade via SparkNotes discussed in detail the religious symbolism in Billy Budd. A linebacker who had shown no interest in academics brought in a poem he wrote for fun, based on reaction to excerpts of The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky that he read in class. Even now, I am currently rereading Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, which I first discovered in this class.
The key to engagement in this case was not showing students that the course content was relevant to their careers, but relevant to their lives. Mr. Abadrabo demonstrated this relevance through what Roberson refers to as relatedness, one of two basic ways to provide relevance for students. Relatedness helps students answer the question “What does this have to do with me?” with regard to course content, and is built from academic and nonacademic components.
Relatedness as a Bridge to Relevance
My experience with relatedness began from the nonacademic side, which relies on feelings of connection between the student and the teacher. I resonated with the life stories Mr. Abadrabo told from day one, tales of high school misadventures and youthful hijinks. He routinely checked in with me before class: We talked about music, politics, and our experiences in the high school.The more I discovered we had in common, the more I felt that he really “got” me as a student. I wasn’t alone. Mr. Abadrabo checked in with every one of his students often, before or after class, or during a chance encounter in the hallway. Whether he did this consciously or not, Mr. Abadrabo created feelings of closeness between himself and his students. This, as it turns out, is the primary ingredient in creating relatedness.
If closeness is primary, then expressing genuine passion for a subject is not far behind. When students feel close to their teachers, they are likely to value what the instructor says, “seeing it as something worth learning because the instructor sees it as something worth knowing,” as Roberson wrote in her article.
Mr. Abadrabo’s passion for his subject was genuine: He was personally offended when a student did not read for class, and often came close to weeping during in-class readings. Whether this was theatrics or not, he spoke with the tone and expressed the demeanor of someone who held his subject in the highest regard. When we saw how seriously someone we looked up to took world literature, we began to take it seriously, too. We bought in because he bought in. We cared because he cared.
And Mr. Abadrabo took that buy-in and ran with it: Each week, he asked students to complete a short writing assignment relating lessons from our readings to events occurring in our lives. These stories were always personal in nature, and did not need to be shared with the class.
Looking back, I see the results of these exercises were nothing short of extraordinary. Literature went from an abstract and unrelatable subject to a lens through which we could examine the triumphs and struggles of our lives. The story of Gregor Samsa’s transformation into an insect became the story of how one student felt isolated from his classmates. The story of Siddhartha’s adventures in Nepal became the story of our own journey of self-discovery. Students fed off this: They read ahead of class requirements, debated the meaning of plot events outside of school, and even wrote reflections on the readings unprompted by homework assignments.
By making world literature relatable, Mr. Abadrabo had made world literature relevant. We saw the point of reading stories about giant insects and sailors because they were really stories about us. We no longer cared solely because our teacher cared: We cared because we knew the content was worth knowing.
* Name has been changed