Engagement Rule 1: Make Activities Authentic

Make activities authentic by teaching students, not curriculum. People think that authentic assessment and authentic learning experiences need to be linked to the real world, or real companies, or grandparents, or something else equally vague and hard to manage without a well-developed internship program and hours of work and email. I’m not a huge fan of work or email. I prefer trail running and hanging out with my beautiful wife and baby to either work or emails.

Authenticity is a lot easier than all that. In What's Engagement without Fun, math problems became authentic because students were allowed to struggle with them first. By then teaching the students not to make the mistakes they made the first time, the teacher was authentically telling students what they need to know to succeed. Plus, try frontloading a list of ‘how to make your life easier’ to students before their life gets hard. All the information is useless because they’ve never needed it. Try frontloading information and see how much they remember. Let them struggle for even seven minutes with a seemingly impossible problem, and then give them the key to success, and it becomes valuable information that they want to learn. Your information goes from the useless process that they’re supposed to listen to, to the information that makes the impossible hours of homework take seventeen minutes so they can go to the homecoming game and watch that cute quarterback lead his team to victory (or defeat.) The outcome does not affect his cuteness.
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This is the type of data I publish in my classroom every day. It's done with a simple tally chart (usually on a post-it note, or the back of some outdated flier that no one took home.) You'll see that this day's data had three columns, separated by period: "read-ish," "consistent," and "fluent w/ voice."

Authentic teaching has to be valuable to students and they need to want to learn it, but let’s be honest, a lot of the skills we learn in school are useful in very limited ways in the real world. I’ve never used a derivative function or an imaginary number in my real life. When I learned to use those mathy conundrums, I realistically knew I would never use them in my real life. Most students learn pretty fast what they will and will not use in their real lives. If any subject you teach will fall into the ‘probably not going to be used’ category, it’s important to use this struggle-mistakes-salvation method to infuse authenticity.

I get why it's easier to teach curriculum than students. Student responses occur on Wednesday, and to make Thursday authentically based on those responses, they need to be graded, the data needs to be examined, and then Thursday morning is awash in logging on and setting up stations with student exemplars. It's worth it. I promise.

Accurate data helps to create authenticity as well. If you start a lesson with “today we’re learning about” everyone already turn their brains off. If you start your lesson with “64% of you answered this incorrectly yesterday” or “your class outperformed the rest of the team by 15%, here is how you can use your skills!” it swings the lesson back to the students. Again, authentic instruction teaches students, not curriculum.  When students start to realize that tomorrow’s lesson is based on their successes and failures today, activities are accepted as authentic, whether or not they are entertaining.
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I'm proud to announce that Dunkirk students always outscore Harvard's average on the Implicit Association Test. Our kids are measurably less racist than the rest of America.

By teaching to students, they will be more engaged in academic activities during lessons, because the lessons (even if they never use the information or skills after the end-of-year test) become authentic for them. Using these few tips for making any lesson authentic also helps to cure students of the age-old question “why are we learning this?” It’s a great experience the first time you can say “because 86% of the responses to yesterday’s survey stated that this was the best topic to discuss.” ​