By Jennifer Ciok
What does the word meaningful mean to you? What did it mean in middle school? How did that change in high school? Or college? Or even now? What makes something meaningful to you but not to someone else?
Every day educators are working incredibly hard to make school meaningful for their students, and every day those efforts work better for some than others.
Teachers spend hours working on lesson plans, putting together new projects, and coming up with new strategies to engage their students. And yet stories and statistics abound about disengagement in school, especially during the middle years. The causes of disengagement are hard to quantify and solutions can range from small tweaks to systems level change.
As a former middle school teacher, I know what it’s like to stand in front of thirty 7th graders and have a lesson crash and burn. It happens to all of us. Yet I remained steadfast in my desire to help students find their spark, their passion, for learning. Above my board in large script I had the sentence Find your passion and ACT on it as a reminder to my students (and to myself) that it’s important to find something that you care deeply about and to share that with the world. I also wanted them to know that I was there to help them find their spark.
The Search Institute defines this kind of spark as “the interests and passions young people have that light a fire in their lives and express the essence of who they are and what they offer to the world.” To find out what that spark was for my students, I often went straight to the source using student surveys, focus groups, or empathy interviews to find the answers.
Sometimes these were formal conferences and sometimes they were informal conversations in class or in the hallway or even during lunch duty while they were cleaning up their trays. The most important thing about those conversations was to let students know that their voice was heard and that their ideas were being taken seriously.
Strategies that work
Though relevancy doesn’t look the same for every student, there are some strategies that cross from generation to generation and seem to stick long after the student has left the classroom. In my conversations, both during my time in the classroom and in researching for my book The Meaningful Middle School Classroom, I heard many of the same themes echoed by current students and those who graduated many years before about what makes learning meaningful regardless of content area.
1. Storytelling: Throughout history, humans have loved to create and pass along stories. Storytelling engages parts of our brain that make ideas and insights stick in memory and create empathy. For young people, stories also strengthen synaptic connections at a time when brains are developing at a rapid pace, helping them connect learning to real people and experiences.
With that in mind, it’s important to give students the opportunity to share stories with one another. This could be an opening question in class to build community, a student interview with family members about a topic you are studying in class, or a project where students share an aspect of their own life story to illustrate a concept.
2. Infusion of the Arts: Students need landmarks to connect their learning to. In a time when students are constantly immersed in different forms of art through music, photos, images, and creation apps and games, harnessing these forms can help to engage students and make the curriculum come alive in ways that words on a page cannot.
Art, in all its variety, can serve as an learning anchor for students. It’s an easy way to create additional meaningful experiences in your classroom. Examples include bringing in art or music from the time period you are studying for students to listen to and analyze – or having students create three-dimensional artworks using mathematical concepts and explaining why their concept worked… or didn’t!
3. Real-World Learning: Helping students connect learning to life outside the classroom can also help build relevancy and meaning. Every student wants to know the why behind what they are learning and how what they are learning might make a difference in their own lives.
This type of real-world learning can take many different forms, from learning how to make a spreadsheet to help them calculate their own grades, to analyzing the chemistry behind cooking, to researching and producing PSAs about a cause they want to advocate for on a larger stage. When students know that they can connect something they learn in school to something they care about in the real world, they build meaning and experience the sparks of engagement we all long for in our classrooms.
A week of strategies
In my book The Meaningful Middle School Classroom, I share ideas for how to infuse strategies of engagement into your classroom using daily or monthly themes. Below are some ideas for a weekly calendar where you will see strategies for gathering additional information from students about what they are learning and how they’ve made meaning from that learning – along with quick ways to incorporate storytelling, art, and real-world experiences in short bursts throughout the week.
• Meaningful Monday: Have students share one thing they learned the week before (or in the unit you are currently studying) that they used outside of school.
• Talented Tuesday: Have students connect a form of art to the content you are learning. This could be a piece of art that they find or something that you have them react to or create.
• Why? Wednesday: Give students the opportunity to ask questions about what they are learning. This could be content they are confused about, places where they need additional information, or the ever present “why are we learning this” question. Some students can be apprehensive about asking for help, so giving them the opportunity to do this on a weekly basis can make this more routine and help all students to advocate for what they need.
• Talkative Thursday: Have students share a story about themselves related to the content they are learning or something that is happening in the school.
• Facts + Figures Friday: Share data from the week with your students to gather additional feedback from them on one or more aspects of your class. This data could come from a more formal survey regarding classroom culture. But it also could be looking at one question that many students missed on an assessment, or an assignment that many students didn’t turn in to find out why not.
These activities could be done as a bell-ringer or in 5-10 minutes at the beginning or end of class. They could be done in pairs, small groups, in written form, or as part of a whole class discussion. Make sure this is information that you are ready to hear and that you do this in such a way that the students feel that their voice will be valued and that their thoughts and opinions will be heard and acted upon.
A journey full of surprises
Remember that no one strategy is going to work for every student, just like no one strategy works to engage every adult. Gathering information, asking for insights from students, and then asking for additional feedback on what worked and didn’t will transform your classroom in so many ways.
This journey of an educator is not an easy one, but it is often full of surprises and incredible outcomes as you learn the stories and passions of your students and community.
As the Manager of Coaching & Improvement for the University of Chicago’s To&Through Middle Grades Network, Jennifer Ciok works closely with schools, partners, and the To&Through team to create more equitable and supportive educational environments where middle grades students thrive. In this role she supports middle schools across multiple cohorts in CPS to help build these systems using both qualitative and quantitative data and research to define problems of practice and to implement change ideas to better support students.
In Jennifer’s book, The Meaningful Middle School Classroom, she shares stories, ideas and research to help support educators in creating the sparks for engagement that lead to deeper learning.
Jennifer has delivered professional development to hundreds of educators and serves on multiple boards including her community’s local school board as the Vice President. She is also the co-chair for the AMLE Advocacy Committee and a member of the AMLE Equity Committee. She has been invited to write articles for various publications and speak on panels, on podcasts, and at national conferences.
Prior to her work at To&Through, Jennifer was a middle school social studies and English teacher for 15 years and a Social Emotional Learning Manager at the high school level for five. Jennifer went to Ohio University where she earned her Bachelor’s Degree in Education and her Masters in Reading Education. She also has her credentials in College and Career Advising and Gifted Education.
