By Daniel Rodríguez

Real world application is transferring skills and knowledge from one class to a bigger opportunity in the future. I interviewed Jonathan Landman, assistant commissioner for teaching and learning of the Boston Public Schools, and I learned a lot about why vocational training and real world application is so important.

Daniel: So the first question is: How do you define “real world learning”?

Jonthan: So for me, all learning that we design for schools should have as its goal what I call “transfer,” which means that everything you learn in school you should be able to transfer to other experiences you have in your life. So as you learn to do analysis of a book, right, or you learn how to do the write-up of a lab report, or you learn how to calculate something in a math class, what I hope you’re also learning are ways you can take the thinking, the skills you’re developing there, and apply them in new situations and new places in your life, that you can transfer what you learn in one place to other places in your life. And in fact, I think the best curriculum, the best instructional practices, are all practices that give kids the opportunity to try out the skills that they’re learning in different contexts, in different ways; that get you thinking in creative, interesting ways, but also give you the chance to [inaudible] think about how something you’re learning in one place can be applied somewhere else.

Everything we learn in school should have value for the real world – that’s the first thing I’d say. But setting that aside – because that’s, I think, an underlying principle for good education – I think especially as you get older, it’s really important for students to be able to have concrete, meaningful opportunities to start seeing the connection between what they’re doing in school and the world they’re going to enter after they leave high school. So that means all sorts of things. That means that starting in middle school and all the way through high school, kids start getting exposure to what students do when they go to college, how to get into college, so that they can start imagining themselves as students later on. So that’s a kind of connection to the real world of continuing education after high school.

It also means that they’re getting opportunities to have experiences of growing depth as they get older that take them out of the high school walls and into the real world. That’s hard for schools to organize and set up, but there are some high schools in Boston where, by the time they’re seniors, they’ve participated in some kind of externship or internship experience where for a period of time – maybe in the spring of their senior year, or maybe at the beginning of their senior year and then they’re writing about it during the second half of their senior year – they’re going out to work, maybe to shadow somebody working in a health care office, or in a business or a school or a nonprofit. And they’re having an opportunity to see the relationship between the things they learned in school and the world of work, and being able to make those connections.

Often a well-designed program of that kind will happen in stages. For example, as a freshman or sophomore you might meet with people from a variety of careers and learn about what those careers are like, and get a chance to ask a lot of questions about those jobs and what they’re like. As a sophomore you might go out as a group and visit a couple of workplaces and have a chance to ask questions. As a junior, maybe you do a job shadow and as a senior do some sort of internship. And maybe if you’re lucky, you might have a few different opportunities to do things like that.

Daniel: What are some ways that students can benefit from real world learning?

Jonathan: …In your school, you’re talking and writing about those experiences. You’re thinking about “What do I want to study that will help me get ready to go out and explore in the area I might be interested in.” Those real world experiences might teach you about things you may get excited about, or they may teach you that, “Oh, I thought I might be interested in that, but actually, I’m not interested in that at all. Strike that off the list. That was boring.”

I actually had a great conversation the other day. We were over at Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital, because we’re trying to make a relationship between Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital in Brighton and the three high schools so that the kids can have those kinds of experiences with the hospital. And the hospital administrator was laughing because sometimes kids come in and they’re so gung-ho – they want to be a doctor or they want to be a nurse or a health care aide – and the first time they see blood they puke all over the place, or they faint, and they think “Oh, maybe a doctor is not such a great career for me … Okay, so I learned something!”

The last part is that I think it’s really important that teachers are really thinking about the issue of relevance when they’re planning a curriculum…that they’re thinking about how to bring what’s going on in the real world into the classroom. I love it when I show up in a History or Social Studies or Literacy classroom and kids are having a conversation about something really intense that’s going on in the media or in the news and are trying to understand it, to work out their views about it, debating and discussing. Or when I walk into a Science classroom and the science teacher is helping kids understand things that are currently going on in the world of science that may have an impact on their lives, that are changing the world they live in, that they need to be taking a stand on. “What do I think about these things?”