Authentic Learning

Real-World Experiences That Build 21st-Century Skills

Todd Stanley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781618217615
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000489996
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book offers teaching strategies that allow educators to provide students with authentic learning experiences that they can apply to their lives in school—and beyond. Beginning with a justification for authentic learning and how it teaches 21st-century skills, each subsequent chapter discusses a specific strategy and how it allows for authenticity. Strategies include project-based learning, problem-based learning, inquiry-based learning, and simulations. The book also includes a section on the role of the authentic teacher in the classroom and tips for managing an authentic classroom. The book concludes with specific tactics that can be used inside and outside the classroom to bring the real world to students.

Chapter
What Is Authentic Learning?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003233152-2

Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I
remember. Involve me and I learn.

—Ben Franklin

Simply put, authentic learning is real-life learning. It is more complicated than that, of course, but for the most part, that definition hits the proverbial nail on the head. There are many different ways to achieve authentic learning, but at its best, authentic learning should (Reeves, Herrington, & Oliver, 2002):

1. have real-world relevance;
2. be ill-defined, requiring students to define tasks and subtasks needed to complete the activity;
3. comprise complex tasks to be investigated by students over a sustained period of time;
4. provide the opportunity for students to examine the task from different perspectives, using a variety of resources;
5. provide the opportunity to collaborate;
6. provide the opportunity to reflect;
7. be able to be integrated and applied across different subject areas and lead beyond domain-specific contents;
8. be seamlessly integrated with assessment;
9. create polished products valuable in their own right rather than as a preparation for something else; and
10. allow competing solutions and a diversity of outcomes (p. 564).

Although all are necessary elements, there are a few that can be especially important for teaching students long-term skills:

Ill-defined tasks. Because the tasks are ill defined, students have to define the tasks themselves and determine what is needed to complete them. This leads to a very important lifelong skill known as task prioritization. Task prioritization is something that not only students could stand to learn, but many adults as well. Task prioritization helps prevent that dreaded P-word, procrastination. By creating a list of tasks and then determining which ones need to be done when, students not only learn how to fish, but also learn how to do so efficiently. Along with task prioritization comes time management. In learning this, students must choose how to manage their time. How much time do they need for each skill? What needs to be done first and by what date so they have enough time to finish the remaining tasks? They must manage their time the way that best suits their needs. What employer would not want someone who could prioritize tasks and manage time? What parent would not want that of his or her child? These skills will take one far in the adult world and will give someone an advantage over someone who does not possess them.

Polished products. Nobody likes busy work. And yet that is what students do a majority of the time in school. If they are lucky, an assignment might get hung on the fridge, or a parent might store it away in a memory box to pull out and look at years from now. Rarely are students creating something that can be used later or pointed to as an indicator of their ability. You would not take a test with an A+ on it and show it to a college recruiter. You would, however, take in a portfolio of your work that you created for a class or tell the recruiter about a campaign you worked on. If students feel there is value in a product other than just a grade, this adds to their motivation and produces higher quality work because they know someone other than the teacher might see it.

Opportunity to reflect. The best way to determine what someone has learned is not by having him or her complete a test or even create a product. The best way to determine what has been learned is through reflection. What a teacher wants a student to learn and what he or she actually learns can be two very different things. However, the lesson the student took from an assignment might be way more important to him or her than what the teacher intended.

For example, a student is working on a literary analysis paper for the book For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway The student receives a B- because the teacher determined he learned the basics of the themes she was focusing on, but he did not show a deep level of understanding. The student might have learned, however, that he needs to revise better. He understands the themes at a deeper level, just as the teacher wanted; however, he did not go back and compare his paper to the rubric. If he had, he might have realized he was not going into enough depth and would have added to his paper to make a higher quality product. His breadth of knowledge on Hemingway will not be of much use down the road. However, the lesson he learned of going back and revising his work will be a huge benefit later on.

The problem comes when the student does not reflect and come to the realization of what he actually has learned. What if he does not reflect upon the process and realize that the lack of revision was the reason for the B- paper? What if the student is content with a B- paper and goes on to make the same mistake later on, only at much higher stakes? We need to be more purposeful about allowing students to reflect on what they learned, not just assessing what we want them to learn. Authentic learning provides a space for reflection to occur.

BENEFITS OF AUTHENTIC LEARNING

There are many benefits of authentic learning, but here are six of the most impactful. Each benefit is important in its own right, but combined they make for a very powerful learning experience. Authentic learning offers (Windham, 2007):

• ■ relevance,
• ■ preparation,
• ■ critical thinking,
• ■ a multidisciplinary nature,
• ■ evaluation, and
• ■ interactivity.

Relevance

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. The image in Figure 2 sums up the importance of relevance quite nicely.

Figure 2. Relevance in the classroom.

Students often ask the age-old question, "Why are we learning this?" Just as often, the teacher does not have a compelling reason for this or will give the cursory answer of "because it is on the test." That is not acceptable. Students have the right to know the importance of what they are learning and how it fits into the fabric of their lives. Often, you will hear teachers complain, "These kids don't want to learn." Nothing could be further from the truth. These kids certainly want to learn. They spend countless hours of their free time learning about things that are interesting to them. They just do not want to learn what the teacher is teaching.

What if what the teacher wanted to teach and what the student wanted to learn intersected one another like in the picture? That is where relevance takes place. It makes it so much easier for the teacher to teach and for the student to learn when there is a common relevance.

An effective way to create this relevance is by focusing on skills rather than content. For example, in a junior high biology class, you might be teaching about hereditary and nonhereditary traits. In the past, students have completed a Punnett square worksheet to determine the dominant/recessive genes and the most likely traits a person will have. What if you made it more relevant by having students make their family tree going back three generations and follow the traits as they have been passed down? Suddenly, instead of just learning about Punnett squares, students are using them to learn about their own family history as well as how to conduct genealogy research. This is a topic that most likely will be of interest to them, as well as a skill that can be used later in life. They are learning about themselves as they are learning what you wanted them to. That is how you create relevance.

By creating relevance, you provide students with something they may not show a lot when it comes to their studies: motivation. A motivated person can accomplish so much more than an apathetic one. A motivated person will go places you did not even imagine, but an apathetic one will only go where you lead him or her. Creating motivation through the use of relevance can be a powerful method of teaching. It also makes learning authentic.

Preparation

Preparation is how ready one feels about tackling a particular task—whether it be cooking a meal or managing life after college. Preparation has a lot to do with confidence. The more confident you are, the more prepared you will feel. The best way to develop confidence is through practice. The more exposed one is to something or the more he or she practices it, the more prepared he or she is going to be when it arises in life.

An example of this is driving. When most people start out as drivers, they are very hesitant. This is why teens, those just learning to drive, are the highest risk group for an accident. For every mile driven, teens are four times as likely to be involved in a car crash (Autos.com Editor, 2013). The best way to learn to drive is not by reading about it, watching someone else, or analyzing characteristics of the best drivers in history. Authentic learning would have students actually driving. Exposing young students to experiences where they can drive in a safe environment will begin to build their confidence. As they become more confident, they will also feel better prepared when high-stakes situations arrive on the road, such as someone swerving into their lane or icy conditions.

Critical Thinking

Teachers should ensure every child leaves the classroom having the ability to think critically. Critical thinking is the difference between being educated and having an education. Educated people know a lot of things that other people do not. People with an education can learn about anything the educated person knows, as well as add to their abilities.

This will be talked about in more depth in the next chapter, but the simplest way to start students thinking critically is by asking two additional questions: How? Why? In the classroom, we are very adept at asking, who, what, where, and when? We ask these questions and then hunt and peck until we locate a student who is able to give us the correct answer. With questions like these, there is not much critical thinking happening. You either know the answer or you do not. When a student gives you the correct answer, you should take him or her even deeper by asking, how or why? Here is an exchange between a teacher and student that demonstrates this:

Teacher: What is four minus two?

Johnny: Two.

Teacher: How did you get that answer, Johnny?

Johnny: What do you mean?

Teacher: I mean, what technique did you use to arrive at the answer of two?

Johnny: I subtracted.

Teacher: Why did you subtract?

Johnny: Because you told me to.

Teacher: I never said to subtract.

Johnny: Yes, you did.

Teacher: No, I said "minus." How did you arrive at the idea of subtracting?

Johnny: "Minus' means having a smaller number than I started with. In order to make that number smaller, I would have to subtract.

Teacher: Why not add?

Johnny: Because I would get the wrong answer.

Teacher: How would the answer be wrong?

Johnny: Because the number from adding would be greater than I started with, so I would not be minus-ing like you asked.

In this exchange, Johnny has to really think about why he chose the answer he did. It is not simply, "Give me the correct answer, and I will reward you with praise." Instead, the teacher effectively says, "I want you to understand how you got this answer."

Thinking critically leads to the following skills (SkillsYouNeed.com, 2011—2017):

• ■ understanding the links between ideas;
• ■ recognizing, building, and appraising arguments;
• ■ approaching problems in a consistent and systematic way;
• ■ reflecting on the justification of their own assumptions, beliefs, and values;
• ■ identifying inconsistencies and errors in reasoning; and
• ■ determining the importance and relevance of arguments and ideas (para. 6).

This all boils down to students being able to think for themselves. In real life, if you do not think for yourself, someone else will do it for you.

Multidisciplinary Approach

Authentic learning lends itself to a multidisciplinary approach. By working on an assignment across subject areas, students can see and understand the context of the skill they are learning. Being multidisciplinary is not reading just in language arts class and doing arithmetic problems just in math class. It is using whatever skills are needed to complete the assignment and understanding how they work together to provide the solution—no matter the content area.

Any modern-day invention is a combination of multidisciplinary skills. In order to create a laptop, someone has to develop the initial idea. Then, it is turned over to engineers who actually have to figure out how to turn the idea into a product. Several different types of engineers might be employed because there are so many aspects of a computer, including software and hardware. Industrial designers become involved in determining how to make the computer visually appealing. Marketing and advertising professionals likely generate web, print, and multimedia campaigns for the device, so that it may be sold to other companies and consumers. Finally, in order to mass-produce the device, workers need to craft all of the various parts and assemble the devices. At every step, there are very different skills being used by very different people. Without the combination of them, however, that laptop is not a success. When you break these various tasks down you cover many of the subject areas we break apart in schools, such as engineering (math), industrial design (science), and marketing (reading, writing, and communication).

The synergy of these subjects working together gives you a big picture of how they fit together into one product. We should be doing the same thing in our schools. Multidis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• INTRODUCTION
• Chapter 1 What Is Authentic Learning?
• Chapter 2 The Importance of 21st-century Skills
• Chapter 3 Exploring Rigor and Relevance
• Chapter 4 Inquiry-Based Learning
• Chapter 5 Collaborative Learning
• Chapter 6 Project-Based Learning
• Chapter 7 Problem-Based Learning
• Chapter 8 Case-Based Learning
• Chapter 9 The Authentic Teacher
• Chapter 10 5 Practical Strategies to Take Your Classroom to the Real World
• Chapter 11 5 Practical Strategies to Bring the World to Your Classroom
• CONCLUSION: Now That Your Classroom Is Authentic, What Do You Do?
• REFERENCES
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR