JMJ Ch.

Notre Dame of Kidapawan College

Teacher Education, Liberal Arts and Nursing Department

Name: Cathline M. Austria Activity no. 1

Course/Year Level/ Section: BSED-Mathematics 3 Prof Ed 312

Tips for Making Learning Engaging and Personally Relevant

1. Use suspense and keep it fresh.

“Drop hints about a new learning unit before you reveal what it might be, leave gaping
pauses in your speech, etc; all this can activate emotional signals and keep student
interest piqued.”

2. Make it student-directed.
“Give students a choice of assignments on a particular topic, or ask them to design one
of their own. “When students are involved in designing the lesson,” write Immordino-
Yang and Faeth, “they better understand the goal of the lesson and become more
emotionally invested in and attached to the learning outcomes.”

3. Connect it to their lives and what they already know.

“Taking the time to brainstorm about what students already know and would like to learn
about a topic helps them to create goals — and helps teachers see the best points of
departure for new ideas. Making cross-curricular connections also helps solidify those
neural loops.

With no reference point and no intrigue, say Willis, Immordino-Yang, and Faeth,
information is fairly likely to go in one ear and straight out the other.”

Two additional ways to provide relevance for students are with utility value and
relatedness:
 JMJ Ch.
Notre Dame of Kidapawan College
Teacher Education, Liberal Arts and Nursing Department

4. Provide utility value.

Utility value answers the question, “Yeah, but what am I gonna use this for?” Utility
value is purely academic and emphasises the importance that content has for the
students’ future goals–both short-term and long-term. For example, physics tends to be
less than fascinating to your average student, but for a student who wants to be an
engineer, physics is interesting and can also hold great utility value.

Utility value provides relevance first by piquing students telling them the content is
important to their future goals; it then continues by showing or explaining how the
content fits into their plans for the future.

This helps students realise the content is not just interesting but also worth knowing.

5. Build relatedness.
Relatedness, on the other hand, answers the question, “What this have to do with me?”
It is an inherent need students have to feel close to the significant people in their lives,
including teachers. Relatedness is seen by many as having non-academic and
academic sides.

The non-academic side of relatedness emphasises the relationship the instructor has
with students: students need to feel close to their teachers and are more likely to listen
to, learn from, and identify with the ones they like. Students come to value what a
likeable instructor says, seeing it as something worth learning because the instructor
sees it as something worth knowing. This is why genuine enthusiasm expressed during
instruction is important; it shows students how important the content is to the instructor.

Helping support this relationship is the academic side of relatedness that emphasises
helping students see how current learning relates to their own knowledge and
experience and their future learning. Students recognise how much effort it can take to
provide relevance, and they see the effort expended on them as care. Students often
respond to this perceived care by caring about the teacher and what he or she teaches.
 JMJ Ch.
Notre Dame of Kidapawan College
Teacher Education, Liberal Arts and Nursing Department

Relatedness provides relevance to students first via the developing relationship

between teacher and student. This piques students’ interest in what the teacher has to
say. Relevance then helps students see that the content is worth knowing by showing
how it fits into their current and future frame of reference.
As instructors, one of the most important things we do is provide relevance for students.
It gives them a context within which they can develop into engaged, motivated and self-
regulated learners. Relatedness is important to students of all ages, while utility value
tends to gain importance as students become older and choose courses that will help
them choose or achieve their career goals. Relevance is exceptionally important to
students who are required to take lessons they did not choose, such as general
education courses.

Relevance can help students realise how useful all knowledge can be. Fulfilling
students’ need for relatedness, showing them how seemingly unrelated content fits
together and then into their own scheme of things, and giving students real reasons why
today’s content will be useful to them later on are all good ways to provide relevance for
students.

You can help them discover that what you teach is actually interesting and worth
knowing.