#404 – The Impact of Authentic Learning

In this episode, Winston, Rena, and Paul discuss the importance of authentic learning. They break down what authentic learning is while providing specific examples of it in action from their experiences as students, teachers, and professional learning facilitators. Through this conversation, you’ll discover common attributes that make authentic learning powerful and actionable in any context.

What will you do on day one that will have your kids running back to your classroom on day two?

Thomas C. Murray, from his book, Personal and Authentic: Designing Learning Experiences That Impact a Lifetime

Resources

The following resources are available from AVID and on AVID Open Access to explore related topics in more depth:

• Wrap Authentic Project-Based Learning in Inquiry (article)
• Authentic Demonstration of Student Knowledge: Helping Students Share Their Stories Authentically to Validate Their Voices (podcast episode)
• Make Project-Based Learning Truly Authentic With Public Products (article)
• Personal and Authentic Learning, with Thomas C. Murray (podcast episode)
• Engage Students Through Project-Based Learning (article)

Common Themes

The Unpacking Education podcast team reflects on authentic learning throughout all levels of their educational experiences: as students, teachers, and professional learning facilitators. Throughout the conversation, common themes emerge that make learning engaging, effective, and authentic in any context.

These similar threads are helpful guideposts to consider as we plan experiences for our learners. How can we make the learning authentic? How can we bring in an authentic audience? How can we connect to learner interests? How can we make the feedback real and meaningful? Tune in to this episode for insights into questions like these and how you might begin to make learning even more authentic. Here are a few highlights from the episode:

• Winston: When Winston thinks of engagement, he sees teachers “having the ability to design something that is interesting to students, where they want to come and find out more about it.” Although academic standards are generally prescribed, he believes that a skillful teacher can present those standards in a way that draws students in.
• Rena: Rather than simply learning names and reviewing rules with her students on the first day of class, Rena decided, “They’re gonna walk in and be engaged.” She engaged them with a problem-solving scenario on the first day of class and then watched as they worked together to solve it. Through her observations, she was able to get a sense of each student’s personality. She saw who “took leadership roles right away [and] who are the kids that weren’t going to talk or maybe were going to need some more support.” She adds, “They were excited to come back for more.”
• Rena: Authentic engagement means “connected to students’ lives, so it has to be authentic to the kids in the room. . . . It needs to be connected to them, to the community you teach in. It has to be applicable. . . . It could also just mean that the students have ownership over it, so it’s authentic to them because it’s something they care about, and they feel a sense of purpose around it and value it. . . . And then, to me, it can always be applied outside of school.”
• Winston: Students need to be prompted to ask questions like, “Why do I care about the American Revolution? How does that impact me on a day-to-day basis?” Winston adds, “Unless the information is presented to me in a way that matters, it doesn’t make sense.”
• Paul: “I always think about ‘authentic’ being students applying information and skills in a way that’s realistic . . . outside of the classroom walls. . . . How would somebody actually use it?”
• Winston: He recalls how Miss Unger took his class to Washington D.C. to sit in on a congressional hearing about placing metal detectors in schools to help curb gun violence. He reflects on how that experience “made the process of law real.”
• Rena: Rena recalls her experiences in Mrs. Parrish’s science class. Her class took a field trip to Seattle to visit the waterfront, and she recalls, “We actually did science experiments on the boat, like we dropped [containers in] the water. We pulled water samples up and, right there, looked at the different plankton.”
• Rena: She recalls another experience when her teacher let her students turn the classroom into a rainforest. She says, “We literally used paper, and brought in steamers and humidifiers, and turned our classroom into a rainforest.”
• Paul: He recalls his seventh grade history class with Mr. Timmons, who brought history to life through simulations and role-playing. He describes one of these events, explaining, “When we studied the constitutional convention, we were representatives at the convention. In the classroom, we had role-play cards, so we knew who our constituents were, and we had to argue, and we had to pass bills, and we had to decide if we were going to join together into a new nation.”
• Paul: In another role-playing activity, Paul’s history class studied the Boston Tea Party. He shares that a character was “put on trial, and we had to defend him or prosecute him. Was he guilty of treason against the Crown? Was he not?” Paul adds, “Even though they were simulations, we got to be those people.”
• Rena: Rena points out the value of collaboration in making learning authentic. She says, “In all of those examples, none of them were done in isolation or alone; everything was collaborative with others.”
• Rena: As a teacher, Rena provided authentic learning experiences to her students, and she recalls setting up reading buddies who wrote books and then read them to kindergarten students. She explains, “They interviewed the kindergarteners to ask them about what kind of superhero they like? What are they interested in? And they wrote a story for that child. They created a book for the student. And I had kids that really, honestly had not completed any writing all year. They got that book done because there was an authentic audience for them. And I’m telling you, those kids lit up. And my kids, when they wrote those stories, they were so proud of them.”
• Rena: She recalls another unit she taught about flight. During that unit of study, her class visited the Museum of Flight and then engaged in authentic ways to process the forces of flight, like “lift, weight, gravity, thrust, [and] drag.” She says, “They actually built airplanes, electric airplanes, and we had a competition about carrying weight that these airplanes flew. And we had real people come in, and we had a community night. Then, we had judges come in, and they had to do a presentation about their airplane and talk about the forces of flight, and they showed their airplanes flying, and they got feedback.”
• Winston: Winston recalls a unit focusing on economic opportunities, with students writing land development proposals for their local communities. He explains, “It was also their dreams of what their neighborhood could look like. ‘What could I build? How can I make my place better?’ And that was just a wonderful part of the work.”
• Rena: Rena sums up part of this conversation very concisely, saying, “Firm standards, flexible means.” Teachers have creative opportunities within the structure of the required standards.
• Paul: Paul recalls extending the audience for his students beyond his classroom walls. Students from his speech class went out into the community for job interviews, his creative writing students published a creative arts book for the entire school, and his DCTV class planned, wrote, and produced TV newscasts weekly for the student body. He says, “Not everybody has a chance to do all of those things in their classrooms, but if you can find a way to make that learning go a little bit out the door to another classroom, to your whole school, or even the local community, that turbocharges learning.”
• Paul: Paul says, “The best, most authentic learning experience I’ve had with educators is we had some cohorts of teachers that came together in an ongoing, regular, collaborative basis.” He explains, “It can’t just be a one-and-done. Teachers need ownership. There has to be some actionable output.” During his blended learning cohort, teachers “collaborated with each other to create blended learning experiences for their students that they could actually take back to their classroom, apply, see how it went, come back to the cohort, share, get feedback, iterate, go back into the classroom, try again, ask the kids how it’s going, get feedback, iterate, [and] try it again. That is real. It was collaborative. It was ongoing.”
• Rena: Rena agrees, saying, “If you can do ongoing, collaborative, meaningful professional learning, just like with our students, it’s ongoing—and you reiterate. That is the highest level of growth I’ve ever seen in professional learning.”
• Paul: “When you are facilitating professional learning, that is one of the greatest opportunities we have as educators to model and show how it can be done. We have to be at the highest level of excellence, I think, when we’re leading our fellow educators in those kinds of things.”
• Winston: “I think, sometimes, teachers forget that there is a community outside of the building.” He recalls a powerful professional learning project where teachers focused on the oral history of the local community. He says, “The best part was that the community members saw the teachers walking around their neighborhood, and they could have a conversation, and they could reach them, and it wasn’t just, ‘Come to the building.’”
• Rena: Rena’s toolkit item is a community asset map. She explains the value of “finding out what kind of resources are in the community.”
• Winston: Winston’s toolkit item is the academic standards. Take those standards and then ask, “How can I do this differently?”
• Paul: Paul adds the question, “How would somebody apply that standard and those skills outside the walls of the classroom? What’s the real, authentic application of that? And then, how can I best bring that into my classroom?”
• Rena: “I think of all the examples we talked about today—our own experiences—there was deep learning happening connected to standards, and it was fun. They shouldn’t be separate. You can have fun, and have deep learning and connection to standards, and get excited.”