The most important factor in making your classroom (and by extension, your lessons) relevant is to KNOW YOUR STUDENTS. That includes knowing their names, their faces, their story, interests and academic background. You can’t just teach “stuff”. Content, no matter how important has no value or meaning unless it is tied to what’s important to us individually or communally.

The most basic of all questions is, obviously, WHO ARE MY STUDENTS? We often look for the obvious questions and answers when it is usually the less than obvious ones that impact our classrooms the most deeply.

The WHAT is the content of the curriculum itself and the key is to find the connection to the students. The HOW is the process of teaching and learning and it brings into play several factors for the learner and teacher. What are the learners’ styles for learning? What is the teacher’s style for teaching? Is there an optimal set of strategies for a particular content area and can these strategies be taught?

The WHEN brings into play, for example, in learning an additional language like English, what we believe about how age impacts acquisition and what strategies we can use to help our students acquire English, regardless of their age. Other when questions center around the amount of time spent learning an additional language. Is the learner exposed to three, five or ten hours a week in the classroom? Or a seven-hour day in an immersion program? Or twenty-four hours a day totally submerged in the culture?

One of the most interesting distinctions when designing a curriculum is the WHERE. Are the learners attempting to acquire the second language within the cultural and linguistic milieu of the second language, that is, in an “ESL” environment? Or are they focusing on a “foreign” language context in which the second language is heard and spoken only in an artificial environment, such as the teaching of English abroad (EFL)? The availability of English models for Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing are vastly different depending on the circumstances and teachers need to be aware of what their students will have access to when designing a curriculum. 

The WHY will give you insight into motivation. Why are your students attempting to acquire the second language? If you are teaching in a K-12 environment, the most obvious one is that they HAVE to be there by law; but beyond that, there are other factors that a teacher can tap into. That’s when the relevance of what you’re teaching becomes very important.

When addressing the different questions to help design your lessons and decide on strategies, you must look at your classroom as you would a giant puzzle. When faced with a puzzle of 2,000 pieces, for example, most of us develop strategies to narrow down the parameters. We look for corners, then for the pieces that determine the outside frame of the puzzle. We look at the picture to determine colors – such as brown for earth, green for foliage, or blue for sea or sky. If we are presented with a puzzle without a picture, we still try to make sense of the whole and we adopt or abandon strategies as necessary. In teaching, as in a puzzle, it is important to see “the BIG picture” in order to figure out the best way to proceed.

How do you really get to know your students? Do you use surveys and ice-breakers at the beginning of the school year? What about as the year progresses?