Contextual teaching strategy - RELATING

RELATING

Relating is the most powerful contextual teaching strategy. It is also at the heart of constructivism. Relating is learning in the context of one’s life experiences or preexisting knowledge.

Teachers use relating when they link a new concept to something completely familiar to students, thus connecting what students already know to the new information. When the link is successful, students gain almost instant insight. Caine and Caine call this reaction “felt meaning” because of the “aha!” sensation that often accompanies the insight. Felt meaning can be momentous, as when a student first sees the solution to a problem that he or she has spent significant time and effort in solving. Felt meaning can also be subtle, as when insight leads to a milder reaction, such as, “Oh, that makes sense.” 

Excellent teachers plan carefully for learning situations in which students can experience felt meaning. Careful planning is needed because often students do not automatically connect new information to the familiar. Research shows that, although students may bring memories or prior knowledge that is relevant to a new learning situation, they can fail to recognize its relevance. When teachers both provide environments in which

students activate memories or prior knowledge and recognize the relevance of the memories or knowledge, they are using relating.

As an example, consider a mathematics lesson on ratio and proportion. A traditional

approach typically begins with a definition, followed by an example:

Definition: A ratio is a comparison of two numbers by division.

Example: Suppose that a bag contains five marbles. Three of the five marbles are blue. The numbers 3 and 5 form a ratio, which can be written in three ways:

3 to 5 or  3 : 5 or 3/5

A teacher using relating could begin the lesson by asking questions that almost every student can answer from life experiences outside the classroom: “Have you ever made fruit punch from frozen concentrate? What did the instructions say?” The teacher then reinforces the students’ prior knowledge by reading the instructions from a real container.When a teacher relates this familiar experience to the definition of ratio, students can immediately see the relevance of their prior knowledge. Most students feel that they already know about ratio, or that the concept of ratio is accessible, because they are familiar with the experience of making fruit punch. They are also more likely to remember the definition of ratio because they can relate it to the fruit punch instructions.

“What students learn is influenced by their existing ideas.

People have to construct their own meaning regardless of

how clearly teachers or books tell them things. Mostly, a

person does this by connecting new information and

concepts to what he or she already believes.”9

“Sound teaching usually begins with questions and

phenomena that are interesting and familiar to students, not

with abstractions or phenomena outside their range of

perception, understanding, or knowledge.”10

American Association for the Advancement of Science,

Project 2061

Research shows that learning is enhanced when teachers use relating, especially at the beginning of instruction with students’ prior knowledge and beliefs as a starting point, and then adjust teaching in response to students’ changing conceptions during instruction. But how do teachers know, or discover, their students’ prior knowledge and beliefs? There are three primary sources of this information.

(1) Experience – from the teacher’s own experience with students of similar backgrounds or from the collective experience of the teacher and his or her colleagues

(2) Research – from documented evidence of students’ commonly held ideas

(3) Probes – from carefully designed questions or tasks that reveal students’ prior knowledge and beliefs

“Because students learn by connecting new ideas to prior knowledge, teachers must understand what their students already know. Effective teachers know how to ask questions and plan lessons that reveal students’ prior knowledge; they can then design experiences and lessons that respond to, and build on, this knowledge.”

National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Students’ prior knowledge and beliefs can serve as a foundation upon which new knowledge can be built. But prior knowledge can also be an impediment, especially in science. Sometimes probing questions reveal incorrect, incomplete, or naive understanding. These prior misconceptions can be especially difficult to overcome. Without careful instruction, students can construct a perfectly reasonable (for them) interpretation of new information while deeply misunderstanding the information. When this happens, the misconceptions are reinforced and become part of a faulty foundation for constructing new information. In contrast, careful instruction can provide opportunities for students to collect experimental evidence. Experiential learning is a means for students to confront misconceptions and also construct new knowledge. This is the second contextual teaching strategy.

Relating connects new information to life experiences or prior knowledge that students bring with them to the classroom. But this approach is not possible if students do not have relevant experience or prior knowledge. Teachers can overcome this obstacle and help students construct new knowledge with orchestrated, hands-on experiences that take place inside the classroom. This strategy is called experiencing. It is learning by doing— through exploration, discovery, and invention. In-class hands-on experiences can include the use of manipulative's , problem-solving activities, and laboratories.