LEARNING LEARNING
?Why ??
are we doing this?
Students don’t wonder why their lacrosse team practices, or why they have to memorize the lines in a musical. They know that the goal is to win games or to bring down the house on opening night. 28
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Building connections between classroom activities and the real world creates the same sense of purpose students love in their extracurricular activities—and it’s critical to the learning process. “People will learn deeply when they care about what they are learning and they understand the connection between what they are learning and the skills that they’ll want to have,” said Honors Ethics teacher Jed Silverstein. “They desire to learn something because they think that it matters, not because they were told to.” The passion for learning becomes even more powerful when students have chosen the topics they want to explore and the problems they’re interested in solving. Derryfield teachers build these connections with intention. Knowing the content or skills they need students to learn, from historical events to advanced chemistry, they create opportunities to help develop
relevant real world projects students are excited to pursue. Real world learning goes hand in hand with project based learning. When teamed up, students first build an in-depth understanding of a challenge or problem, then test various ideas before ultimately finding a solution. “It was so rewarding to work with friends and colleagues and to corroborate on the direction and breadth of a topic,” said Molly Mahar ’22 of a Civil War Medicine website her group designed and built in AT American Public History. Students enjoy that such projects let them choose their roles and responsibilities, which often build correlations to real world majors and even careers that they pursue as they grow. Although a student’s individual role might be as a marketer, a coder, or a visual designer, each person also builds the transferable skills like
