With one (or all) of your courses in mind, finish this statement:
If students remember one thing from this course, it should be _______________________________.
What kinds of takeaways did you come up with? Maybe you want students to remember foundational concepts and build upon them in future courses. Maybe you hope students remember to apply a specific process from your course to their professions. The one thing I always want students to remember from my courses is course content connects to their lives. These connections could be distant memories, significant life events, or anywhere in between, but I like to stress to students that course content can connect to their lives in some way. Here are a couple ways I encourage students to make these connections.
Weekly Reflection Prompts
I’ve found that prompting students to apply course content to their lives can be done through repeated reflection. In my Lifespan Development and Educational Psychology for Teachers courses, students respond weekly to the following prompt:
Each week, you will compose a brief reflection (at least 10 sentences) that answers the following question: What was one interesting concept we covered this week?
Incorporate these things into your response:
- One interesting concept from the week.
- An explanation of why this concept was interesting for you.
- An example of how this concept applies to your own life.
I believe this prompt is successful at encouraging connections between course content and students’ lives because students get to choose to discuss something interesting to them each week. If a concept is interesting to students, they almost always have some real-life connection to it. Students then build on this connection by providing one example of how the concept they choose applies to their own life.
In response to this reflection prompt, students have discussed connections between course content and their everyday experiences with current events, education trends, cultural traditions, early memories, other college courses, hopes for the future, and daily life at home or on campus. If students find it challenging to connect a concept to their own personal life, they tend to choose a family member or friend to apply concepts to. I’ve heard from students that they enjoy completing these reflections because they begin to see course material outside of class and they can stay up to date with their learning.
Anonymous Online Responses in Class
Students love to talk about their own experiences. Sometimes they might be reluctant to share personal experiences in a large or small group, but if given the opportunity to participate anonymously, they open up. And boy, do they have some interesting experiences to share!
I use free online response systems like Mentimeter, Kahoot, and Zoom polling to ask students questions about how content applies to their lives. Most questions ask students to give an example of when they experienced a certain event or concept (e.g., When have you seen teenagers make risky decisions? or What is the worst test question you’ve ever seen?). Here’s how I do it:
- I post the question on a screen at the front of the classroom.
- Students type in a code on their laptops or phones to access the online system.
- Students enter their responses in a text box and hit submit.
- Responses appear immediately on the screen! These can be in the form of word clouds, individual responses, or graphs.
- If I’m using a Zoom poll, I create the poll in my Zoom account before the meeting begins so it is ready to launch during class. Students can see it on their screens, click their answer, and hit submit.
- After all responses are in, I click “share results” and students can see how their classmates responded.
Students love to see how their classmates connect course content to their everyday lives. During these activities, I can see in students’ reactions how much they relate to other students’ responses. You can imagine some smiling, some laughing, some nodding, some head shaking, etc.
If I’m lucky, these quick connections in class set the stage for students’ weekly reflections. Students tend to choose to reflect on the interesting connections they made during the anonymous class activities.
My hope for students is that they try to make connections between course material and their everyday lives in my class and other courses. Encouraging reflection and sharing of personal experiences are two methods that have worked for me.
