Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.

—Lord Alfred Tennyson

What makes a unit or lesson meaningful? Meaning, like beauty, lies both within and outside us. The same experience might be more meaningful for some students than others because of differences in their interests, personal experiences, readiness, and existing relationship with the teacher and with what is being taught. That said, as learners, we all derive greater meaning from experiences that are engaging, relevant, and authentic.

Engagement relates to the extent to which students are actively involved in their own learning. As described in the introduction, Kristen's active participation and initiative in identifying and prioritizing a problem in her community, developing strategies for addressing it, and engaging her peers and other members of the community illustrate such engagement. Learning experiences that are at the low end of engagement require little thinking or doing on the part of students, as would be the case with having students copy notes that teachers write on the blackboard or complete worksheets that don't demand much thought. In contrast, highly engaging activities require intentionality, focus, and energy, both physical and mental, on the part of students.

When I was a junior high and high school English teacher, I loved to teach Shakespeare—not because I'm particularly passionate about the bard, but because I adored hearing my students' moans at the mere anticipation of reading something written in iambic pentameter and Old English transform first into throaty chuckles as I helped them catch Shakespeare's earthy humor and innuendos, and then into pleas to read another of his works.

The yearly transformation, from groans to giggles to pleas for more, left many of my colleagues wondering and, to be honest, I couldn't have put a name to the experience at the time. Now, I recognize that I had figured out, very early on, how to engage students, how to tickle their antennae in such a way that what was in front of them seemed like a little bit of an adventure rather than a chore. When it came to Shakespeare, I relied on his bawdiness to hook my students, and it worked every time.

I realize now, however, that although I was quite adept in those early years at engaging my students, I didn't always pay as much attention to how meaningful or relevant the work we were doing was, resorting far more often to teacher-directed and prescriptive strategies and tasks than I now would like to admit. Although they paid attention and participated, whether they were making meaning and finding relevance in what they were engaged in is actually questionable. And though many of them returned to visit long after they left my class and even after graduating, they just stopped in to say hi. They never came back to ask about that amazing grammar lesson where we tossed erasers and learned about direct and indirect objects—or even to check on what Shakespearean play that year's students were going to be subjected to.

It wasn't until much later, during the last six or seven years that I taught and after some time learning myself and questioning my own practices, that I honed the skill of high-level engagement. This was my "authentic assessment period," when fully 95 percent or more of my curriculum had been tweaked to include essential questions and real-world skills, problems, purposes, and audiences. My students were still engaged—in fact, I came to judge the merit of a unit by how quickly I had to step away from the door to avoid being trampled by students trying to get into my room and by how many reminders I had to give about it being past the time they should have left—but this was different engagement. It was an engagement that transcended merely attending or having fun, one that involved grappling with questions that defied simple answers, one that didn't leave at the end of a period or a day or even a year, but that often had our minds whirring through weekends and vacations. These students returned to visit, as had their predecessors, but the students of my authentic assessment period returned not only to say hi but to ask about specific learning experiences ("Did anyone bounce a check paying their bills this year?" "Have you asked them if all children are children yet?" "What do you think they'll decide to market?") and to offer their assistance in facilitating some of the new work that was happening during their free periods or on school vacations.

Meaningfulness and relevance lie primarily in the subject of students' learning, whereas engagement lies primarily in the ways in which students participate in their learning. Engagement can occur in terms of actual physical activity or inside our minds as learners. When teachers ask students to seriously consider questions such as "How far is far?" or "Are humans inherently inhumane?" they are engaging students' minds even if such engagement is physically evident only to the extent to which we can infer students' thinking through their nonverbal communication.

Meaningfulness relates to but is not the same as relevance. It concerns the extent to which students perceive the lesson/unit as significant, even if the material learned or the skills acquired are not immediately relevant. Significant learning experiences promote depth of knowledge and skills related to a theme, problem, or issue; they require students to use what they learn to form opinions, solve problems, make decisions, or create real products or performances. The most meaningful learning experiences are authentic, requiring that students engage with real-life problems and issues for real purposes and an audience that can benefit from their work. Following are some examples of meaningful and engaging learning experiences:

Students select a specific insect to research and use a variety of nonfiction materials (books, magazines, filmstrips, encyclopedias, pamphlet series) to gather information about the insect chosen. They use graphic organizers to help them take notes about the insect's physical appearance, eating habits, habitat, reproduction, and other interesting information. They keep a research journal about the research process and use their notes to draft and revise a chapter for a class book titled Insects Galore!

This is a very engaging activity, involving a variety of resources and, ultimately, the creation of a class book. It is meaningful in that it involves research and the development of a degree of expertise relative to the chosen insect. The activity lacks authenticity, however, because its audience begins and ends with the class. If this book were shared with an audience that would benefit from the information—for example, if the insects researched were classified as helpful or pests with a section included on how to acquire them or how to get rid of them, and the book was shared with gardeners or farmers—it would shift the audience from the classroom to the real world with a true purpose.

Students create a Thanksgiving menu for their family. They choose the number of people that they will serve and select foods from the food pyramid to serve a healthy meal based on guests' dietary needs. They hear from a nutritionist and interview a person who has planned and cooked a Thanksgiving dinner, collecting data that will be used to create a shopping list for the foods and ingredients necessary for their own Thanksgiving meal. They look in a grocery circular and find the prices for each item. They record the prices and find the exact cost for the menu.

Especially during November, this activity will hold students' attention. To make it even more meaningful, the students could create a recipe book complete with grocery lists and costs. These books could be desktop-published and given to each child or sold, with the proceeds used to purchase a holiday meal's ingredients for a needy family.

During a study of United States history, students work in cooperative groups to choose an important historical event from a list of events provided by the teacher. They use a variety of sources to research the significance of the chosen event in the political, social, and economic areas. They draft, revise, and edit a script for a short play that teaches about the significance of the historical event and the impact the event has had on life today. They self-assess using a rubric, submit the script to the teacher for feedback, and revise it based on feedback. They prepare costumes and props, perform and videotape the play, and respond to and evaluate each other's performances.

Highly engaging and meaningful, including depth of understanding and the creativity of script writing and performing, this activity falls short of authentic because it has no real-world purpose or audience outside school. What could a teacher do to make this activity more authentic? How would doing so also increase its meaningfulness for students?

Relevance concerns the extent to which students can personally relate to the information or learning strategy included in the unit. We find most relevant what is within our immediate experience and interests; that is, relevance lies in the world within our reach. Asking students to gather information about the person they admire most, then write about and present what they have learned is, in principle, more relevant than asking them to engage in the same work related to a historical character the teacher selected for them, although it's possible that at least one student might consider such a character personally relevant. Kristen found relevance and meaning in the unit by identifying and exploring problems that affected her community; engaging in a reasoned process that allowed her to research and understand these problems, prioritize them, and address them; and discovering her strengths, needs, and preferences as a learner. Tinkering with relevance involves connecting the known to the unknown and drawing on examples, texts, objects, events, and places that lie within the familiar.

Meaningful learning experiences can create the illusion of relevance because they enable students to imagine themselves inside a world in which they could be doing things they aren't currently doing. To better understand the relationship between meaningfulness and engagement, review Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1. Relationship Between Meaningfulness and Engagement

Sometimes, we encounter relevance by surprise. When I was 28 years old, nothing was further from my mind than the idea of teaching teachers. I was a researcher exploring individual and organizational changes that resulted from different types of innovations. During one of my research studies, while evaluating the impact of comprehensive in-service programs on teachers and students, my colleagues and I designed a series of measures of critical thinking and problem-solving skills. One such measure was an exercise consisting of planning a camping trip in northern California for a hypothetical family. Students were given a road map of California, along with a list of state and national campsites. They were also faced with some constraints, such as the need to find a campground that included facilities for people with disabilities and to alter their return route due to a bridge workers' strike. Another measure was a performance assessment of students' application of geographic knowledge and skills in which they acted as members of a disaster response team and planned an evacuation plan for a community where an oil tanker had exploded.

When we presented these and other measures to the teachers in our study and asked them for permission to administer them, we discovered that they liked the measures as assessments, but they also wanted to use them as learning experiences inside their curriculum. These teachers appreciated measures of outcomes they found worthy, such as the application of problem-solving and thinking skills to geographic and social issues, and recognized them as significantly different from the tests and quizzes they used. They also appreciated how much students learned while using these measures.

Teachers' reactions to these measures were a surprise to me and marked the beginning of my journey into professional development. Until that moment, I had never thought that there was that great a gap among what teachers valued, what they taught, and the learning they assessed.

Figure 1.2 includes some examples of meaningful learning experiences as well as others that would be considered rote. One can easily imagine that these examples would be more relevant to some students than others. For example, students who are interested in weather or science in general might find the second example very relevant. However, regardless of their perceived relevance, all three examples in the left column promote meaningfulness because they relate to the study of people, concepts, events, or issues that are found in the real world, within and outside schools.

As part of an action research study undertaken by a third-year teacher, a class of 7th grade students was tracked for two days, and notes were taken about the learning experiences that they had participated in during that time. What follows is a list of those learning opportunities.

Day 1

• English—corrected vocabulary homework assignment; read two chapters in Tom Sawyer; answered questions about what was read
• Science—took notes and began an electricity lab
• Social studies—watched a video on life in colonial America
• Math—took a quiz on determining the volume of geometric solids, graded in class; corrected homework; began geometric solid project: making a geometric ornament

Day 2

• English—took a quiz on Tom Sawyer chapters from last night's homework; took notes on author's methods of characterization; read two more chapters
• Science—finished the lab and began writing it up
• Social studies—outlined Chapter 4 in textbook
• Math—decided on geometric solid for ornament and created pattern using dimensions provided

Assuming that Figure 1.2 really depicts a continuum from rote to meaningful, where would you situate each of the two observed days? What questions does this raise for you? If you could change reality for these students, where would you want the two days to be situated? What kinds of learning experiences would it take to achieve those placements?

Figure 1.2. Meaningful vis-à-vis Rote Learning

Meaningful	Rote
Students conduct interviews to learn about the roles of different members of the community. They share their information with other students. The class is invited to ask questions of two or three guest speakers from the community. After listening to the presentations, each student creates a plan of action for acting as a good citizen in the community.	Students review and memorize words associated with citizenship. They write one sentence for every word.  Or  Students read a chapter from their social studies text and answer questions about the different roles of community members.
Students record their observations about the daily weather upon arriving in school. They compare their observations with the weather predictions for the preceding day and chart discrepancies between the two pieces of information. They write a letter to the newspaper editor or to the television news channel on their findings.	Students color worksheets on different weather scenarios (e.g., snow, rain, clear and sunny).
Students are asked to gather examples from the newspaper and other popular media that require the use of mathematics. They then answer the following questions: What math was involved? Which math was used the most? Which math areas are you confident working with? What impact will your confidence in these areas have on your life if you do not study them further?	Students complete a series of worksheets with different and unrelated math problems.
Source: Copyright 2003 by Learner-Centered Initiatives. Used with permission.

Thinking about the table once again as a continuum from rote to meaningful, where would you place your current practice? On what are you basing this thinking? Where would you place your ideal practice? Focusing on what you will teach during your next two weeks in the classroom, what changes can you make to the learning opportunities that you have planned so that they begin to move your practice from where you placed it currently to where you want it to be?

Meaningfulness is enhanced when students have some flexibility in terms of how they can approach, process, or present their learning. Choice, even when it is limited, is a great motivator. Think of the difference between asking students to write a report and giving them the option of writing an editorial, an article, a script, or a report using the information they have gathered about a subject. Or consider the value of letting students determine whom they can interview rather than telling whom they must interview.

Sometimes, choice can come at the end, not in terms of what students can learn or how they can learn or demonstrate it, but in how much their work counts. Imagine if students could determine the relative weight of some of their assignments even though they have to complete all of them. This scenario is illustrated by the following list, which gives students the ability to decide how many points from within a set range each of their assignments will have, as long as the points add up to 100.

Research notes and bibliography: 25–45

Interview transcripts: 25–45

Write-up: 25–45

Total: 100

Choice can be a wonderful ally when we consider the inherent limitations of anticipating and addressing the learning needs of a diverse group of students.

How Can Rationales Enhance the Quality of a Curriculum?

One of the ways that teachers can establish the meaningfulness, relevance, and engagement of the learning experiences they teach is through the articulation of curriculum rationales. A rationale justifies the existence and value of the unit as a classroom teaching tool by addressing the following questions:

• Why would teachers and students consider this a worthwhile unit?
• How do the knowledge, skills, and dispositions addressed in the unit help to prepare students for life outside school?
• How is the unit supported by current research on best teaching and assessment practices?

The rationale of the unit that led to Kristen's letter is included in Figure 1.3.

Figure 1.3. Sample Rationale for a Unit

This comprehensive unit is about the future. It is designed to give students opportunities to develop their own ideas, to think critically, to develop an informed opinion, to arrive at their own answers, to be creative, and to gain practical experience by working in their community. Every generation is responsible for envisioning and inventing the future. The world students inherited is different from the world that their parents or grandparents inherited, and presents them with different challenges and opportunities.  The goal of this unit is to prepare students to think broadly, deeply, realistically, and creatively to invent a sustainable future for them and future generations by giving them opportunities to develop a sense of place and value for the local knowledge in an effort to begin the process of restoring and improving the beauty, integrity, and health of the places in which we live and work; explore the unique values and cultural characteristics that will shape their future; discover "the commons," that which is shared by all, in our communities and our society, on which we are all dependent and for which we are all responsible; investigate new ways of thinking about the relationships between and among society, the economy, and the environment; document and examine the assets (what do we have going for us?) and the liabilities (what are the challenges we are facing?) that exist in our communities; design and participate in projects that contribute to positive change (examples could include creating community gardens, school-community partnerships, street tree planting, etc.).

What Steps Can Teachers Take to Refine Their Curriculum?

I know very few teachers who have structured their entire curriculum around significant concepts or questions that are supported by meaningful, authentic, relevant, and engaging learning experiences. The pressures to prepare students for externally imposed tests and our emphasis on a myriad of state standards and priority indicators, compounded by rare opportunities for teachers to prioritize them and align them to texts and other resources, among other factors, make it difficult for teachers to find the space and time to continuously construct, adapt, or use powerful and effective learning experiences.

Seeing the pressure and angst experienced by teachers whenever the conversation rolls around to "the test" makes me appreciate how sometimes not knowing what you don't know is a major advantage. When I first made the change from 14 years of teaching high school and junior high English to teaching 6th grade, I was blissfully unaware of the fact that, in New York State at that time, 6th grade was a "testing grade." I was also ignorant of the fact that I had to take something called "lunch count" and would likely have starved my students on my first day but for the intervention of one little boy who quietly came to me and explained the daily ritual. Luckily, my ignorance about the state tests had no greater negative effect on my students than the slightly delayed lunch count on that first day.

By the time the testing was upon us and my colleagues thought to ask how many practice tests I had given, it was too late to do much of anything except quickly share a sample with my class so they recognized what was coming and trust that the work we had done all year would somehow be enough. Somehow, it was—and I entered the next year less oblivious but far more cocky, and this time I purposefully ignored the shadow of the tests.

Those tests (state social studies, math, reading, science, and others chosen by the district) remained in 6th grade for the rest of my classroom career, and as my commitment to authentic assessment grew, my confidence in my students' abilities exploded. Even some of my most tenuous learners were able to handle what the state dished out. The questions we dealt with every day, the problems we tackled, the discussions and debates we had, the work we produced—all were far more rigorous and challenging than anything that could ever turn up on a standardized test. Dealing with authentic assessment is dealing with real life, and real life is a tough teacher. To this day, I would put my students up against any test the state or district had to offer and feel confident that they would be up to the challenge.

I do wonder, though, had I known about the tests that first year, would I have been caught up in the pressure and angst? Would I have had the courage to go my own way had I known how far from the accepted path that way truly was? I would like to believe that I would … but when I see the faces of the teachers with whom my colleagues and I now work, I appreciate the strength and determination that approach would take. Although I stand by my experiences and faith in authentic assessment, I reconsider the statement that "ignorance is bliss," and I support and celebrate incremental or focused change as wholeheartedly as I do that which is more intense and accelerated. This is not an all-or-nothing proposition.

Pondering the following questions might be a good entry point for exploring quality curriculum and its relationship to teachers' practices.

• What are your curriculum units or learning experiences mostly about? What lies at their center or core?
• Why should students engage with any or all of these units or learning experiences?
• What justifies the time and energy that one or more of these units or learning experiences require?
• Is there a universal question, bigger than the specific work itself, that drives student learning in one or more of these units?
• How actively involved are students during one or more of these units or learning experiences?
• To what extent do students feel personally connected to or invested in the information learned from these units or learning experiences?
• How significant is this learning to my students?
• What content areas are necessary in addressing one or more of these units?
• Is there a real audience and purpose for these units or learning experiences?

Teachers can take other incremental but important steps to increase the effectiveness of their learning experiences:

1. Revise the assignments related to a unit, learning experience, or chapter to increase engagement and meaningfulness to students. Consider asking a question that would draw students to the material, placing the learning experience inside a real-world problem or need, or having students assume a significant role shaping the ways in which they will pursue their learning.
2. Design or revise an assignment in ways that enable students to draw from their own experience or curiosity.
3. Design or revise a unit or learning experience so that students organize, interpret, evaluate, and use information to produce a piece of original work.
4. Design or revise an assignment in ways that enable students to select either what to do or the specific approach or method to demonstrate their learning.

Needless to say, some of the preceding options may be more difficult than others, depending on the context in which teachers work and the school-, district-, or state-related constraints imposed on their curriculum. Even in contexts in which teachers are subjected to scripted curricula and pacing guides, however, there may be spaces to ask students questions such as "What do you already know about X?" or "How is X connected to Y?" or opportunities for teachers to consider if at least one of the letters, reports, models, or problems students are asked to complete could have an audience besides the teacher or a reason for their completion besides getting a grade.

Incorporating quality curriculum components into our teaching practices can help transform education from what is required to what is inspired. Quality curriculum is good for students; after all, they are the beginning and the end reason for education. The difficulties and obstacles related to change will always be present, but the results of that change—the effects of that change on students—provide the reason to persevere. When I think about my teaching career, it is the faces and actions of students that populate my memories, not the umpteen revisions or the political and social negotiations around my own work.

I will never forget the 8th grade girl who ran down the hall to my classroom, yelling, "Look! I'm an author!!" and my turning around, expecting to see her with a piece published in a magazine or some other publication, only to find her holding a copy of the children's book she had written in my class two years before and that she had just taken out of the library, or the boy who transferred into my class in the late fall and spent his first two weeks climbing on desks and throwing books and chairs around, secretly squeezing through my classroom emergency window every day after school during a week in April so that he could finish his marketing portfolio by its due date in spite of the fact that he was out of school that week because of a death in the family, or the timid girl who had routinely scored below grade level on standardized reading tests looking up at me as the test was placed on her desk, smiling and turning confidently to the back of the test booklet to do the most difficult passages first (she tested out of remedial reading that year and is now an English teacher), or the mother of a severely dyslexic girl who approached me in tears at the end of a student-led portfolio conference to tell me that, for the first time in her child's academic life, she had seen her daughter as a proud and capable learner who recognized her strengths, was able to identify her needs, and could articulate clearly some of the things that she had done and could do in the future to help herself meet those needs.

The great thing about teaching is that every group of students and every year provide us with the opportunity to reinvent our practices, to choreograph new and better learning opportunities, to take new risks and create new possibilities, and to learn with and from our students about teaching and learning. Figure 1.4 describes application activities for this chapter.

Figure 1.4. Application Activities for Chapter 1

A. Check whether the following tasks demand a meaningful or a rote approach to learning.
Tasks	Meaningful	Rote
1. Students practice repeating greetings in French.
2. Students read a chapter from their science text and answer questions about the different parts of the cell.
3. Students review and memorize the capitals of different states. They write one sentence for every capital.
4. Students engage in a debate around the question "Is war inevitable?"
5. Students create a collage of their neighborhood.
6. Students conduct a scientific experiment comparing the buoyancy of different materials.
B. Develop or revise an activity, assignment, or lesson so that students are actively involved in learning no less than 50 percent of the time. The teacher's role during that time would be one of observer, troubleshooter, or monitor.  Consider the following: Posing problems that will require students to discover a process as they work toward a solution. Asking questions that will spark student interest and learning as students develop responses. Creating a situation that establishes the need for information or skills that are not yet present and thereby setting up the need for learning.