Welcome to Upper Canada District School Board Portal - Deepen the Learning by Making Lessons Relevant, Renowned Educator Tells 6th Annual Small High School Summit

(Ottawa) - In order for students to really learn, teachers must ensure the lessons they offer are relevant to students’ daily lives, noted educational consultant Dr. Bill Daggett told 250 delegates Thursday to the 6^th annual Upper Canada District School Board Small High School Summit.

Daggett told educators gathered for the event at the Hampton Inn in Ottawa that the old style of lecturing at the blackboard and hoping students learn will no longer suffice. While they may learn the lessons well enough to pass an exam the knowledge teaching hopes to impart will not stay with them, he said.

“When the teacher is up at the front of the room teaching all day, that shouldn’t be confused with students learning,” said Daggett. “Learning is an active process.”

The author and creator of the Rigor/Relevance Framework, said the key to successful teaching that generates deep understanding is for teachers to develop close relationships with their students, to learn what interests them, and then to design lesson plans that engage them by playing to those interests.

“How do you engage them?” he asked. “You do it by teaching them on the basis of something they like.”

Daggett, president of the International Center for Leadership in Education, has studied more than 1,500 of the top-performing schools in North America over the past 15 years and discovered that the best ones teach to students’ interests.

One way he encourages teachers to adopt this approach is by using sports-based lessons to reach young boys, he said. Teachers can use baseball questions to teach physics – studying problems around the flight and acceleration of a fastball – or use football problems to teach math, he said.

To demonstrate the approach, he used the example of a visit he once made to North Carolina to see his grandson, who was in grade 1 at the time. His grandson is fanatical about football and wanted “grandpa” to play a game of pickup with a group of neighbourhood children.

His grandson was playing quarterback and Daggett was his centre. The consultant was surprised when he heard his grandson reveal the play to his friend.

“When grandpa hikes the ball, go 20 feet down the line, cut hard to the left 25 degrees and I will hit you on four,” he recalled his grandson shouting.

He was impressed. The concepts of angles and distance the children were putting to practical use were usually taught in grade 5 mathematics – and the grade 1 children understood them.

Daggett discovered that the kids’ grade 1 teacher knew that her students loved football, so she brought in the local varsity football coach to talk about a few plays while increasing their mathematical understanding. Since every play in football is, in essence, a math problem – running measured distances and cutting at specific angles to outwit defenders – the concepts of angles and distance became real for his grandson and his friends.

“They were out at recess practicing them,” he said with a smile.

By allowing students to adapt and apply the lessons to their daily lives the learning became deeper for them, he explained.

The approach allows teachers to get kids to understand the concepts they wish to impart and, more importantly, to remember them by using them in their lives, he said.

Daggett was the keynote speaker on the first day of the conference, which runs today and tomorrow. The summit is offering a variety of helpful seminars to encourage teachers to transform their schools through relevant teaching practices. These include: SMART Inclusion , a seminar on how to use SMART board technology to include all students in class lessons; Shakespeare for All Kids?, a seminar on using Shakespeare to engage students through the Arts to enhance student engagement and yield academic gains; and Web Tools in a Collaborative Classroom, a seminar on using tools such as Wikipedia, blogging, Twitter, RSS feeds and Google docs to allow students to demonstrate their understanding, fine-tune their skills, and share knowledge in the modern classroom.