One of the things I most enjoy about my work as an instructional coach is that I get to work with teachers to translate research into practice on an almost daily basis. Teachers want their students to succeed, to grow, to think, to thrive, and they are always looking for new strategies for making this happen.
But often, teachers’ pedagogical questions can’t be answered by a quick strategy shared by a colleague or found online. Often, the teachers’ questions are both quotidien and complex: “How can I get my students to talk to each other?” or “How can I help my students elaborate on their thinking?” or “How can I convince my students what what we’re learning is relevant?” are common questions that teachers raise every day. If the answers to these questions were simple, all the strategies available online and in teacher practitioner books would have put those questions to rest long ago.
This fall, I’ve started working with a teacher inquiry team focused broadly on that last question about relevance. Some teachers are particularly interested in building interpersonal relationships with students, some are want to draw on students’ identities, cultures, and personal interests, and some are passionate about how they can help students see the future relevance for the learning, beyond school.
These are thoughtful, passionate, committed teachers who have each set individual goals in this area, and part of my job has been to help them find strategies or research to their pursue of more connected, relevent learning. For some of our other inquiry teams, it has been easier to find a strategy or technique for teachers to consider (for example, discussion strategies or elaboration) but “relevance” and “making connections” are some those elusive educational topics that are a little bit like love, faith, or any other big, abstract conecpt: we know it’s important, but we’re not quite sure how to write the playbook for how to achieve it—or if a playbook even exists.
How can theories be practical?
Kurt Lewin, pioneer in social science and action research, is often quoted as saying, “There is nothing so practical as a good theory,” and though I’ll never get a tattoo, I’m tempted to reconsider for a statement like this. I’ve always found strategy-based professional development and the “toolbox” approach to curriculum and instruction to be unsatisfying, partial, and superficial. Yes, a professional development session or program should offer practical strategies to apply to the classroom, but it should also engage teachers in asking big questions and exploring new theories. And yes, your district may have addopted a scripted curriculum that suggests a robust set of instructional routines to serve all students, but they will never answer all teachers’ pedagogical questions or eliminate their need to seek new ways of conceptualizing their work with students.
So, when the teachers I work with started asking complex questions about relevance, true to my librarian-researcher-curator impulses, I promptly spent several hours over the course of a couple weeks trying to find some theories and practical strategies to share with my colleagues that would help them move beyond platitudes like “make connections to their lives” and “build strong relationships.”
In this post I chronicle my winding research path, including the two useful research areas I found to share with teachers who want to make learning relevant. In this research, I did not find specific strategies, but I did find the seeds to inspire new thinking about the kinds of strategies my colleagues might need. So my answer to Lewin’s implicit question, “Can theories be practical?” is yes—but only if the person engaging with the theory also has or is willing to seek or create practical strategies. Luckily, as I said at the beginning of this post, translating theory into practice is some of my favorite kind of work. (Yes, I am a geek with no tattoos.)
In my next post, I’ll share the actual strategies I shared with teachers to address their questions about connections and relevance, and eventually I hope to update with a Part 3 that reflects on progress in their inquiry group and classrooms.
Step 1: Sift through online resources filled with generalities
I started with a Google search because I wanted to find practitioner-friendly articles or blog posts to share, hopefully with some references to reseach articles that I could mine for more detailed theories and pedagogies. But initial searches on the web yielded mostly pretty obvious pointers and platitudes: exactly what I trying to surpass.
Here is a list of generalities that I gleaned from two more promising online sources that did mention research: a slightly-sketchily-cited-and-authored blog post from Open Colleges, a for-profit education company in Australia and an article on Edutopia that isn’t sketchy but is still pretty general:
- Everyone agrees relevance is important for learning—but hard to define and put into practice.
- Superficial strategies like games, humor, and flashy technology can get students’ attention, but they won’t remember content unless students also ultimately find it to be worth remembering—that’s relevance.
- Some pointers for how to make things relevant:
- Use suspense to build intrigue to engage their emotions and build curiosity
- Give students ways to be self-directed and make choices about topics, formats, resources, and more etc. so they can follow and build intrinsic motivation
- Create opportunities for students to make connections to their prior knowledge, to cross-curricular learning, and to their own identities and interests.
- Provide utility value: how/why it’s useful in their futures—near and far.
- Build relatedness: both academic (through the teacher’s energy, enthusiasm, and ability to make connections with the topic) and non-academic (building relationships with the student because learning happens more when students care about their teachers and believe their teachers care about them).
Step 2: Follow references & dig into research about the role of emotions and narratives in creating relevance
Both the blog posts referenced neuroscience research by Mary Helen Immordino-Yang of USC and her colleagues in other institutions. I ended up searching for more of her research through my university’s databases (reason #1 why I will never stop teaching as an adjunct even while working full-time in public schools), and I found centered on two useful pieces of that Immordino-Yang co-authored.
The first, a chapter titled “The role of emotion and skilled intuition in learning” (Immordino-Yang & Faeth, 2010) in the 2010 book Mind, Brain, and Education, analyzes the Iowa Gambling Task to argue for the role that emotions plan in learning. Their implications remained pretty general (as most education articles do when the authors are not themselves educators), but they pointed me in a couple concrete directions for my own strategy-brainstorming. Immordino-Yang & Faeth suggest three “guiding strategies” for educators. Taken alone, the three guiding strategies (quoted below) are more like “guiding platitudes” that would frustrate further teachers at my school. But they did get me thinking.
- “Foster emotional connection to the material”: Immordino-Yang & Faeth (2010) suggest offering choice, letting students pursue their interests, and keeping projects open-ended.
- I wondered: Beyond the larger-scale curriculum and assessment changes they recommend, how might teachers begin making emotional connections on a daily basis?
- “Encourage students to develop smart academic intuitions”: This one was a little more concrete in the articulation of what “skilled intuition” looks like in relation to how emotions, anticipation, and pattern-identifcation played out in the Iowa Gambling Task. Still, Immordino-Yang and Faeth provide little in the way of how to help learners develop these intuitions.
- But their discussion pointed me toward two concrete ideas: teaching students how to ask relevant questions and inquiry-focused opportunities for students to learn from experience.
- “Actively mangage the social and emotional climate of the classroom”: Again, pretty general. They suggest cultivating a classroom environment that is positive and built on straong relationships, and making sure that students activate emotions about the learning itself, and not just about ephemeral gimmicks like jokes, fun technology, prizes, or superficial games.
- Again, I wondered: How can teachers make content-related emotional connections on a daily basis?
Step 3: Keep digging for her more recent work
The 2010 article and book were interesting, but I wanted to know what else Immordino-Yang and friends had been doing in the past decade and whether it could help my colleagues as well. Lo and behold, I found a more recent article in Educational Leadership that built on her previous research about emotions. In “Building meaning means building teens’ brains” (Immordino-Yang & Knecht, 2020), the authors describe their research that includes longitudinal tracking of young people over several years to see how their ability to tell stories about their learning predicted future achievement. They found that students who could blend emotional and cognitive responses and incorporate both abstract (big ideas) and concrete (facts) learning did better in the long-term. (This is some pretty mind-blowing stuff that I have barely scratched the surface of, so I apologize for giving the neuroscience part short shrift here—I encourage you to read her work, including even more recent work in the Journal of Adolescent Research and Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.
Anyway, here is an excerpt from the 2020 Educational Leadership article that features one student’s narrative about his learning in a math class:
| Consider the following student’s explanation of a performance-based math task about Zeno’s Paradox that he completed for graduation: I want to be the first person in my family to graduate from college . . . [but] I never even imagined I could reach that level of math. . . . Math at [my school] has helped me learn math- ematically, learn how to think outside the box, in different strategies. When I was given a problem, I had to think in a new way, research ideas I don’t [sic] know before. I have spent two months working on a problem called “walking to the door.” . . . It led me to think about limits and the idea of asymptotes. I had to study fractions to be able to think about the problem I had. Through doing the problem I got fascinated by finite and infinite. I was able to connect it to my life. This student’s narrative cycles in self-directed ways between concrete meaning-making (“I had to study fractions”) and abstract meaning-making (“I got fascinated by finite and infinite”). Through exploring a big problem, but with support for specific skills as needed, this student felt compelled (rather than forced) to learn the necessary math skills, felt empowered (rather than threatened) to make choices, and felt as though the work “connect[ed] to my life.” He had redefined math as relevant, exciting, and worth spending effort on. |
This student’s narrative about his learning serves as a springboard for Immordino-Yang and Knecht’s three recommendations for “the best education for adolescents,” again quoted from the same EL article. They say that great education for adolescents does these three things:
| 1) Facilitates students building, sharing, debating, and defending strong, self-generated, and abstract narratives, while integrating core, challenging concrete content and skills. […] 2) Enables students to expand the range of topics, skills, and ideas that they are capable of recruiting in the service of enriching and continually re-envisioning these narratives. […] 3) Provides targeted, situated, differentiated support and instruction for acquiring the building-block skills necessary for accessing information, solving problems, and communicating with others. […] |
Once again, their conclusions are not, in themselves, specific enough to satisfy a teacher’s desire for concrete strategies to apply tomorrow in the classroom. Yes, there are concrete suggestions here: support students in creating their own narratives that combine abstract and concrete knowlege and skills, make learning an interative, process-driven experience, and offer differentiated support for skill-building in authentic (“situated”) contexts.
Step 4: Resurface, reflect, and connect to my theoretical and strategy toolboxes
At this point, I had spent a handful of hours in the searching and reading cycle, pivoting back and forth between the internet and scholarly databases. I felt like I was getting somewhere with this thread about the centrality of emotions and narratives in education. As a former English teacher and school librarians, no one needs to sell me on the idea that storytelling is essential for human life and learning.
I also noticed that Immordino-Yang and I have a common theoretical ancestor in Damasio’s seminal work on emotions. Admittedly, I haven’t read the entirety of his book Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, but it’s sitting on my bookshelf, and many of the education and social science scholars who I have drawn on for their theories of emotion (Sara Ahmed, Megan Boler, and Michalinos Zembylas) were heavily influenced by his work. Seeing Immordino-Yang and friends’ neuroscience research also resonated with Zaretta Hammond’s work in Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, which many of my colleagues have been reading this year as our administrators lead professional learning around her book.
So what began with an internet search for “how to make learning relevant” and broad database searchers around the idea of relevance brought me to a more robust theoretical position from which to look for resources and strategies to support my colleagues in theory in their collective inquiry.
In my next post, I’ll share how I shifted from my theory and research-inspired wonderings to the strategies I ended up sharing with my colleagues after going down a relevance-emotions-narrative rabbit hole (as well as another rabbbit hole I went down as well).
Epilogue: Frustrations with education journalists and researchers
I don’t regret my hours of rabbit hole research because I genuinely enjoy reading the primary reserach and drawing my own conclusions. However, I suspect I’m in the minority on this question among educators working in public schools. As an instructional coach, I do see it as my job to read research and translate it into practice, but most teachers and administrators don’t have time for or interest in this level of digging.
If education journalists had been educators themselves, would they be better at writing “research-based” posts like those in Edutopia, Education Week, and general publications that effectively make the connections between research and practice? Or perhaps that’s not the journalist’s job either. Perhaps it’s the job of the researcher to follow-up their peer-reviewed research (aimed at fellow researchers and higher education professors) with practitioner articles that get to the “what do I do tomorrow?” level.
I’m guilty of this in my own research as well. I still haven’t drafted or submitted articles based on my dissertation research (since I’m not in a tenure-track job that requires it), and I have a juicy peer-reviewed article in Journal of Curriculum Studies that is ripe for a practitioner-follow up as well. This is all to say that I respect Immordio-Yang and friends’ rigorous neuroscience research, and I hope that my efforts to translate it into practice even more concretely then they did in their “implications” sections will be helpful for my colleagues and others.
Without this hard theory-to-practice work, Kurt Lewin’s claim that “there is nothing so practical as a good theory” becomes just another slogan that can’t deliver on its potential. (And a tattoo I’m really glad I didn’t get.)
Onward to Part 2: Strategies at last!
Kate Lechtenberg, PhD 
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