Curriculums with Real-World Connections

Curriculum guides developed by the Texas ASCD feature hundreds of activities demonstrating the connection between kids' studies and adults' work.

Students who ask, “When are we gonna need this?” may not simply be complaining; they may actually be looking for the utility of the topic at hand. In fact, by presenting information in a meaningful context, a teacher greatly increases the likelihood that students will retain the information over the long term. As University of Oregon educator David T. Conley (1992) has written, Students must be actively involved in constructing meaning.... Learning must have utility. Often this is accomplished by linking learning to the world outside of school.

This is the guiding principle of the Real World Connections activities that are a vital part of the K–12 curriculum guides being produced by the Texas Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. The goal of the innovative project known as Alternative Blueprint for Curriculum Development (Project ABCD)—is to develop activity-based curriculums designed to help teachers and students see the relationship between a course's content and the world of work and also among various courses. The material is available on CD-ROM software that teachers may customize for both local and personal use.

In Mrs. Collier's 4th grade class, students are looking through newspapers for bicycle advertisements. They compare how much it will cost if they pay for the bicycle with money they have earned, as opposed to borrowing the money at 10 percent interest.
Mrs. Morua and her 7th grade math class are looking at the way the song “America” is conducted. They determine the triangular pattern for the beats and the size of the triangle as compared to the volume of the song. The patterns of music correlate well with the patterns in mathematics. Students see the interrelatedness of the content areas, as well as the need to understand these concepts in a workplace not usually associated with number crunching.

During the past five years, teachers selected as Curriculum Fellows have been developing the activities and the complete guides in five subject areas: mathematics, science, social studies, English language arts, and English as a second language. (This summer, work will begin on guides for high school foreign language and advanced placement courses.)

The Fellows begin a two-year curriculum development process by spending two weeks in residence at a university. There they examine the content of the curriculum and guidelines for the type of real-world and interdisciplinary connections needed for their subject area. They then begin developing objectives for each course on each grade level, together with teaching activities and real-world and interdisciplinary connections. They also go on to develop alternative assessments and suggested grading criteria based on these objectives, material that is also included in the software.

To create appropriate activities, the Fellows interview professionals with expertise in their particular subject area. For the 4th grade example mentioned earlier, a bank vice president helped the social studies Curriculum Fellows create a realistic view of borrowing money. For the 7th grade example, math Curriculum Fellows interviewed a university band director.

To date, curriculum guides have been completed for 68 courses. Together, they contain more than 600 Real World Connection activities that teachers may use to create lesson plans and to adapt alternative assessments.

No Canned Lessons

The Real World Connections are not canned lessons; the teacher must use them thoughtfully. For example, the 2nd grade mathematics curriculum includes an activity that a landscape designer described (see fig. 1). He has been hired to create a patio garden using specific types of plants. Planning the garden requires knowledge of both patterns and the plants themselves. For instruction in mathematics, a teacher could use this open-ended activity to teach 2nd graders about various patterns and their relationships, as well as what the various plants look like.

Figure 1. Real World Connection Math: Patterns, Relations, and Functions

Date of Interview: May 16

Interviewee: Andy Dobbins

Title: Landscape Designer

Company/Organization: Greenthumb Nursery

Type of Business: Lawn and garden

Concepts Applied: Identify, describe, reproduce, extend, and create patterns in real-world situations; measurement.

Use of Mathematics: Landscape designers must create a pattern when designing a lawn or garden area for a customer. They must measure the designs to ensure that they will fit the available space.

Example Problem: The owners have asked Andy to landscape the patio area using periwinkles, begonias, and pansies. They would also like to have caladiums and monkey grass in the design. What kind of a pattern could Andy design?

Solution: The teacher could use gardening magazines to get pictures of the plants requested and ideas on how to create landscape patterns.

From Project ABCD, Texas ASCD

The same Real World Connection was adapted for a teacher inservice on problem solving. The activity, called Mary Contrarie's Garden, shows teachers how to convey the concept of symmetry through a real-world application: The principal has asked Mary Contrarie to plan a garden for the front of the school. She may make the garden as large as she likes, so long as there are equal numbers of purple petunias, pink carnations, and white daisies. The principal likes orderly gardens. She has told Mary to make sure there is a pattern in the way she plants the flowers.Plan the garden on the grid paper. Each square will represent one plant. Think about the color patterns you could make with the number of plants you have chosen. Again, the activity is open-ended, allowing the students to apply their understanding of a specific concept in a real-world setting. This time, however, there is no need to know about the plants, only the mathematics content.

When planning real-world activities for elementary school children, such adaptation is necessary and commonplace. High school students, however, are often capable of dealing with the real-world problem directly. For example, an activity in the Physics I curriculum, developed from an interview with a NASA engineer, involves a large vacuum chamber used to simulate space conditions. Students apply their knowledge of pressure and the transmission of forces in fluids to solve the problem (see fig. 2).

Figure 2. Real World Connection Physics I: Systems and Structures

Date of Interview: June 6

Interviewee: Steve Martin

Title: Engineer, Thermal Vacuum Laboratories

Company/Organization: NASA—Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center

Science Concepts Applied: Pressure and the transmission of forces in fluids.

Use in Science: The Thermal Vacuum Laboratories contain two large vacuum chambers. Chamber A, used for testing spacecraft during the design stage, can simulate the plasma, magnetic, and radiation environment of near Earth space. The engineer's job is to keep the chamber functioning properly and to configure it to simulate various space environments.

Chamber A has a circular access door 12.2 meters in diameter. Its floor is 13.7 meters in diameter. The chamber includes overhead cranes capable of lifting as much as 45,000 kilograms into and out of it. The vacuum pumps are capable of pumping air from the chamber at a rate as high as 3 c 105 liters per second and achieving an ultimate vacuum of 6 × 10-5 Pa (pascal—newtons per square meter). To simulate the radiative absorption of space, the walls are cooled with liquid nitrogen to 90 kelvins and painted black.

Example Problem: During the first pump-down of Chamber A in the 1960s, the top of the circular door began to buckle. What would be the total force exerted by the atmosphere on the door?

Solution: Force = Pressure × Area. In this case, the pressure is the pressure of the atmosphere, 1 × 105 Pa. To find the area of the door, use the equation for the area of a circle, A = Pi × r². The area of the door is 468 m². The total force is therefore 4.7 × 107 newtons.

From Project ABCD, Texas ASCD

Kids Make Connections

Many of the Curriculum Fellows, recognizing the value of activity-based instruction, used their experience as an opportunity to involve their own students in the interviews. Students asked adults to tell help them find real-world connections with the material they were studying. Once they found possible activities, the students presented them to the class. In this way, they not only contributed to Project ABCD, but also connected their studies to the world of work.

Consider what one student in a Curriculum Fellow's American history class did. He interviewed a lieutenant in the Texas State Capitol Police. The officer talked about his need to understand the cultures, customs, and histories of the people he sees every day, then described a very real problem that tied in well with the history course's citizenship cluster. June 19 is called Juneteenth in Texas, a day that has tremendous significance among the African-American citizens. On June 19, 1863, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was announced in Texas. This year, the Ku Klux Klan has requested permission to hold a rally on the south steps of the state capitol building on June 19. In addition, the John Brown Society is scheduling a Juneteenth rally for the same location only one hour earlier. Will it be possible to allow both rallies to occur without conflict? The lieutenant's solution: The rallies must be allowed; to forbid them would infringe on each group's rights of free speech and assembly under the Constitution. My officers and I must be very aware of the history of these two organizations and the psychology of dealing with each group, as well as the groups as they may intermingle. To find ways to allow each group to exercise its rights without infringing on the rights of the other group, my department must study their past encounters, draw up a strict timetable of events, and exercise caution to ensure the assembly remains peaceful, as provided in the Constitution. This solution brought into focus the pressures of law enforcement in an ethnically and politically diverse society, thus helping to prepare students “to become citizens of a world community” (Texas ASCD, 1994). The activity presented teachers with a way to focus on real issues, real problems, and real solutions.

You Don't Have to Be a Fellow...

Investigate the occupations of the adults in the school community. Find out who would be willing to be interviewed by teachers or students.
Examine the curriculum to find natural connections with these occupations, although interviews will probably uncover additional connections.
When interviewing the adults who volunteer, be open to new ideas. The more interactive and conversational the interview, the better the results.
Create and use an activity drawn from the interviews. As with any new activity, it may not work as expected. Be willing to make adjustments and try it again. When it proves successful, discuss the success with the adult who helped create it. He or she may be able to provide additional insights to make it even more fruitful.

Many of the professionals that the Curriculum Fellows interviewed created the entire problem/activity themselves. Not all the applications presented could be duplicated in school, but even those that could not be provided the teacher with a better understanding of the discipline. Often, the interviews veered off in unexpected directions. The teachers typically had a particular content area and activity in mind, but many responses generated new ideas about how to apply that area of expertise.

For the most part, the people interviewed were excited about sharing their expertise. They were intrigued, too, with the possibility of their life's work being incorporated in school lessons. They not only suggested new and unexpected connections, but also saw ways the school could better prepare students for the world of work. Besides creating a bank of real-world activities, the interviews ultimately may foster much greater cooperation between the school and the community at large.

References

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Conley, D. T. (1992). “Some Emerging Trends in School Restructuring.” Eric Digest No. 67, ED343 196.

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Texas Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. (1994). Project ABCD. Austin: Texas ASCD.

End Notes

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1 The curriculum guides are now available only in a Macintosh version, but a Windows version will be out this October. The software can accommodate more than one user in schools where teachers share computers. Membership fees for mathematics, science, and social studies are $7,500; and for English language arts and English as a second language, $6,000. Additional maintenance fees cover improved software versions and annual updates in all subject areas that a school district owns. For details, contact the Texas ASCD, 16811 El Camino Real, Suite 124, Houston, TX 77058; (713) 286-3603.