Relevancy in Education: Effective Classrooms

This episode centers around how making subject matter relevant for students will engage our students and lead to an effective classroom environment. Relevancy is the bridge between teaching and learning. When students see purpose, connection, and meaning in what they are learning, engagement increases, motivation strengthens, and classrooms become spaces where learning comes alive.

In this episode of The Road to an Effective Classroom Environment, you will hear the importance of relevancy in education and its role in building effective classrooms. This conversation highlights how culturally responsive practices, real-world connections, and student-centered instruction help educators move beyond delivering content to creating meaningful learning experiences.

Listeners will reflect on how relevancy influences classroom culture, student behavior, and academic investment. Dr. McCray-Sarvis shares insight into aligning lessons with students’ lived experiences, interests, and future goals while maintaining rigor and high expectations.

Designed for teachers, instructional coaches, and school leaders, this episode encourages educators to examine how intentional planning, purposeful relationships, and authentic connections can transform instruction and strengthen classroom environments.

Because when learning is relevant, students don’t just comply—they connect.

The environment we create determines the learning that takes place. Build it with purpose.

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Hello, everyone. This is the Road to an Effective Classroom Environment, and I am Lashonta, your host. If you are joining me for the first time, welcome to our discussion as we look at several topics relevant to the classroom environment. If you are an educator or you are associated with education in any type of way, this is for you. This podcast is for you. Today we will discuss the relevancy of education. So we will look at the global aspect of making our curriculum, our lessons relevant to our students so that we can have a purposeful classroom environment and a positive and effective classroom environment.

In our last episode, we talked about rapport, and we talked about how rapport is making those connections with our students so that we're building those positive relationships, and that was in our prior episode. So now we want to take a look at our curriculum and looking at our lessons and why is it important for us to make the curriculum relevant for our students? And so we're going to get a good running definition for what relevance is. Relevance is that quality or state of being closely connected or appropriate.

So we're looking at connections still, but we're now looking at these connections with the material, what you teach in your classroom. And again, if you are an educator, if you're affiliated with education in any type of way, even if you are working in the cafeteria, you're a paraprofessional, instructional assistant, a custodian, there are lessons that you teach students every day just by being in that building with them. There are things that your students can learn from you. So again, this podcast is focused on the classroom, but again, there are tips that you can pull from this if you are an educator working in different aspects within the school building.

So let's go back. So we're looking at making the curriculum relevant to our students.

Many times when we're looking at our lesson plans and we're talking about what we have to teach within the given school year, whether we're on a traditional school year schedule or we're year-round, we're looking at how can we make our lessons more and exciting for our students? How can we have our students wanting to learn what it is that we're talking about? And sometimes as educators, we get so caught up in the ideas of testing and knowing that our students may have to take some state test, whether it's SC ready, whether it's ACT, whether they're taking some type of EOC or EOG, we're knowing that our students are having to take the state tests or district tests or school level benchmarks.

We focus our attention on having the students know this is what you're going to eventually have to do. Now, students who are data-driven themselves, the ones that are always trying to be the first in the class, that already have that intrinsic motivation to want to learn and to do well and to be better, whether it's intrinsic motivation or whether they're motivated about what they will be in the upcoming years when they finish schooling, or because their parents haven't instilled it in them, these students, when they know that a test is coming, that is relevant for them.

Just knowing that there is some type of assessment that is coming up, that is relevant for those types of students. That may be five or ten percent of them, of students in general. So, what about the vast population of students? How do you make the material relevant to them? Well, no matter whether you're teaching English, math, science, social studies, if you're teaching an elective, if you're teaching a magnet course, each and every day your lessons should revolve around enticing the students to wanting to learn the material.

So you may ask, well, how do I do that? You have to look at each lesson that you are teaching and find those hidden jewels within the lesson to tie in that information to things that are real life experience, real world problems, things that will connect to the past, things that will connect to the future. For example, teaching English. English is about communication. It's also looking at writing, looking at how well you speak. And we know that each and every day, no matter what type of job that we're on, what type of career we're in, and if we're going to school, that we're always using what we learned in our English classes in some aspect of our lives.

In math, we can always tie math back into measuring foods when we're trying to cook or bake, or we may look at balancing our checkbook. When we're talking about science, we're looking at chemistry and how certain um certain things that if you put them together, that they are combustible. Um, looking at um just different aspects of how certain molecules interact and change. And then with social studies, we are always looking at problem solving, looking at how things happened years ago, hundreds of years ago, thousands of years ago, and the impact that it's having on us now, and how we can prevent making the same mistakes or making the same choices as years ago.

So we can tie those things in in a general perspective. Just as I did, I gave you some examples, those are some general ways to tie in how each of those subjects are relevant to students beyond the school walls, but every day you have to analyze your lesson and find, as I said, find those hidden jewels that connect the students to the material. Because if you only stop to say, this is going to be on your test on Thursday or next week, this is preparing you for your unit test, or this is preparing you to take uh the SC ready.

If every time that you relate the material back to just an assessment, and it's not to negate that assessments are not important, but because we know that assessments are driving much of what goes on in the schools, assessments are looked at at the state level, so we know that assessments are here to stay. We have to know what the students are learning, whether we use formal assessments or we use summative assessments, assessments are here to stay. But if you're always tying the information to an assessment and nothing else, then this is when you begin to have issues in the classroom.

Because the students who care about the assessments, which may be five or ten percent, they're gonna be engaged, they're gonna listen to what you have to say in preparation. But for those vast majority of students who are not driven by assessments, how are you going to have an impact on them to where they want to come into the classroom and they want to learn what you are talking about for that day? And every day is different. Every day of you pulling in information and tying it in to the real world, every day is going to be different for you.

And that is one of the challenges within education, is how we as educators can make our lessons come alive for our students each and every day that we're in the classroom and not be so pressed about assessments. Now, there are conversations that we can have about teaching to the test and pre um preparing students and is teaching to the test. Is that relevant? Is that okay? That's a whole nother episode. Our focus today is on making sure that you understand and you can grasp the importance of making your lessons relevant to the students and making those connections so that they want to come in, they want to learn, and that they are engaged and that you have their attention.

And we know some of the pointers when it comes to engaging our students, making sure that we don't monopolize that time. Our classrooms should be student focused. So, how can we make our classrooms more student focused and giving a little bit of our power up per se in class so that the students are directing the instruction? That's another episode in itself as well. But what I want you to get for today is when we make our material relevant to our students, when we are talking about the relevancy of the education, let's step away from just saying we're preparing for an assessment, we're getting ready for a test.

I can remember when I was in middle school and high school, um, I would hear, and this is going to date me, but it's okay. Um, I can remember getting prepared to zap the BSAP. Those of you that might remember the BSAP, zap the BSAP, and there was that that was the buzz phrase, and we were getting all geared up and ready. So there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with being geared up for your assessment, but just keep in mind as you are preparing students to test, don't miss out on the opportunity to engage your students in the material because when you engage them, they will remember, they will learn it, which means that they can apply it not just for a test, but they can also apply it in everyday life later on.

And that's the whole purpose of education: preparing our children so that they have this world of knowledge for when we have them that they can use later on, and that they can continue to build on that and grow from it. So, what I wanted to break down and look at today was relevancy, why it's important. And as I talked about in the introductory episode when I began the podcast, is that looking at positive relationships, looking at a building rapport and relevancy of the material, I felt like it was important to look at those three things separately and not together, because you need to focus on each in its own.

Building the positive relationships for the students and looking at that is important because you need those ideas of how to build them. When is a good time to build the relationships? How long do you build relationships? And then the rapport. How do you make connections with the students? And how that then goes back and connects to the positive relationships. And then now talking about making the material relevant within its own content, looking at each of those three things by itself was very important.

I felt it was very important to share so that you can begin to look and analyze how you are in your classroom and what are some things that you may want to focus on. You may be heavy on the positive relationships and rapport, but you may want to work on the relevancy of the material. And I know it's a struggle. I know sometimes it can be a struggle because if you have information that you know, okay, the kids are on coming here, they're just gonna drag, they're not gonna be really interested in what I'm doing today.

If you have that mindset, then yes, they're going to come in and they're gonna be exactly what you said, they're not gonna be interested. So you have to be interested in what you're teaching, just your personality alone will help engage students, and it doesn't mean you have to be the wacky teacher that has a joke before you start your lesson. That's not everyone's personality. Keep in mind that your students they they bond with you based on whether or not they feel you know what you're doing and that you enjoy doing what you're doing, and making them believe in you by just presenting who you are as a genuine person, that in itself will help when it comes to engaging our students.

So look back if you haven't had a chance to go to the previous episodes. I implore you to go back and listen to the positive relationships and listening about um rapport and connections and go back. In our next episode, we're going to dive into some specifics about the classroom environment and begin talking a little bit about how our classroom management, how our classroom management plan may look. And um, so this series will go into several different topics, but I wanted to start off with a foundation and looking at those three areas because I feel that it's very important.

Very, very important. And again, if you are enjoying the series, enjoying the episodes, please um shout, shout out and send me an email. And my email address is L-A-S-H-A-W-N-T-E, the number six at gmail.com. That's Lashonta6 at gmail.com. And also just leave some um words of encouragement. Let me know what you think about the podcast so forth, and also share it with your other educator friends. Share the podcast if you are enjoying it, and reach out to me and let me know how I'm doing. This has been Lashonta with The Road to an Effective Classroom Environment, and I hope everyone has an enjoyable weekend and upcoming week.

See you next time.