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The Three-Legged Stool of Learning
1. Relevant - How do teachers make learning relevant to their students? Making learning relevant means making it important, giving students a reason to be learning the information. This means taking the information and guiding students into making that information into knowledge that can be applied beyond the classroom.
2. Rigorous - Rigor does not mean to present the information repeatedly to students. It means to make the student curious, to engage the student in a deeper understanding of the material. Rigorous content learning involves principles of inquiry based learning that allow students to construct their own understandings of material and allows them to investigate what is meaningful to them. This is an important element of learning that was forgotten in my experiences in education. I was never challenged to develop deep meanings and relation to the content but rather provided with surface-level understandings of information.
3. Relationship - Without a strong teacher-student relationship, rigor and relevance are not pertinent. Information and subject matter will not be interesting to students if their relationship with their teacher does not exist. It is important for teachers to develop comfortable and trusting relationships while maintaining professionalism. To me, this is the most important component of the three-legged stool. Relationships are required to make information relevant and to inspire students to further themselves as individuals.
All three components of the stool are necessary to support learning.
1. Relevant - How do teachers make learning relevant to their students? Making learning relevant means making it important, giving students a reason to be learning the information. This means taking the information and guiding students into making that information into knowledge that can be applied beyond the classroom.
2. Rigorous - Rigor does not mean to present the information repeatedly to students. It means to make the student curious, to engage the student in a deeper understanding of the material. Rigorous content learning involves principles of inquiry based learning that allow students to construct their own understandings of material and allows them to investigate what is meaningful to them. This is an important element of learning that was forgotten in my experiences in education. I was never challenged to develop deep meanings and relation to the content but rather provided with surface-level understandings of information.
3. Relationship - Without a strong teacher-student relationship, rigor and relevance are not pertinent. Information and subject matter will not be interesting to students if their relationship with their teacher does not exist. It is important for teachers to develop comfortable and trusting relationships while maintaining professionalism. To me, this is the most important component of the three-legged stool. Relationships are required to make information relevant and to inspire students to further themselves as individuals.
All three components of the stool are necessary to support learning.