making learning meaningful

R — relating
Bloom’s Levels: Remember/Understand

Connect the content to the learner’s knowledge or experience. Think local, newsworthy, or personal to students.
Cognitively, this mostly draws on recalling existing knowledge and building basic comprehension, Bloom’s foundational level. The process of relating provides a mental scaffolding of familiar situations, preparing learners to engage with new information. This can be as simple as beginning a lesson in an environmental science class with a discussion of a news story about local efforts to control the spread of an algal bloom, or as complex as launching the lesson with a video interview of a commercial fish farm owner or water treatment technician. In a cybersecurity class, relating might involve noticing which apps on their phone ask for permissions they don’t need or discussing connected home devices and appliances.
Locally relevant scenarios catch students’ attention and spark interest and curiosity.
They may have questions such as:

• Why does this situation happen?
• Can we affect the situation? (What happens if….?)
• What are the best/worst outcomes in this scenario?

E – Experiencing/Exploring
Bloom’s level: Understand/Apply

Provide opportunities for exploration, discovery, invention, and critical thinking. Think hands-on.
Hands-on exploration and discovery with scaffolding pushes students from understanding a concept toward the beginnings of application, so it falls in between Bloom’s understanding and applying levels. In a microbiology course, for example, students could compare the cell counts in tap, distilled, and cloudy lake water samples and observe the effects of light, temperature, and growth accelerators (nitrogen and phosphorus) on the samples over several days. In a cybersecurity class, students might run network mapper against a deliberately vulnerable virtual machine within a contained sandbox to discover what they can view or access (e.g., the open ports, services running) and explore which ones look exploitable.

A – Applying
Bloom’s level: Apply/Analyze

Design activities that allow students to use new concepts to address a real problem, ideally tied to their career interests or program of study. Think minds-on.
A real-world scenario should push students toward creative problem-solving while also providing an opportunity for low-stakes formative assessment of understanding. Continuing with the algal bloom example, because fish die during large algal blooms, students might want to know how much oxygen is in water with and without algae. They can formulate a hypothesis, discuss the idea with a partner, refine the idea and co-design an experiment to perform. The instructor demonstrates equipment such as dissolved water test kits and reviews mathematical procedures and lab journaling practices. In the cybersecurity class, students could take the results of their exploration of the virtual machine’s vulnerabilities, prioritize them by risk level (critical vs. low) and write a recommendations memo to address fixing the security gaps. In this case, the instructor will review programs that patch vulnerabilities and maintenance of change logs.

C – Collaborating/Communicating
Bloom’s level: Analyze/Evaluate

Build time into lessons for students to exchange ideas, actively listen, respond, co-create solutions, and present quality work. Think teamwork.
Social learning is all around us through social media and user forums, and in person through clubs and sports teams. In the classroom, working in pairs or small groups not only helps most students learn the material, it also is consistent with the real-world focus of contextual teaching. Discussions involving the whole class can be used to model authentic professional communication. Employers value new team members who can communicate effectively, who share information freely, and who can work comfortably in a team setting.

T – Transferring Bloom’s level: Evaluate/Create

• using new knowledge in a similar context (near transfer)
• applying it within a significantly different context (far transfer),
• making connections across contexts, or
• taking learning beyond the classroom, through work-based learning, internships, or apprenticeships.