Fitzhugh's "The Concord Review"-- Connecting Classroom Content

Will Fitzhugh's "Concord Review" is by far one of my favorite blogs to read--he has provided me this semester with many alternative viewpoints and perspectives on aspects of education that I once felt that I possessed a strong understanding of. Last Friday, he published a rather insightful post. Fitzhugh discusses an article written in 1990 by William Shanker for 'The New York Times". In the excerpt, Shanker likens the current educational system in the United States to a partitioned factory. He states, "Factory workers who never [see] the completed product and work only on small part of it soon become bored and demoralized. But when they were allowed to see the whole process—or better yet become involved in it—productivity and morale improved. Students are no different. When we chop up the work they do into little bits—history facts and vocabulary and grammar rules to be learned—it’s no wonder that they are bored and disengaged". This is an aspect of effective classroom instruction that we are currently discussing and debating in several of my education courses--we, as educators, must find a way to not only connect classroom content to the lives of our students outside of the classroom, but also find ways to connect and identify patterns across multiple disciplines and subject areas through which students can become engaged in the school environment. In my senior level education course, we often discuss one, simple question when developing and designing lesson plans--"Why should students care?" We must ask ourselves this question as effective educators for each and every lesson that we plan to teach, and find ways in which we can take a seemingly irrelevant subject or topic and make students truly want to learn.