Your lesson, should you choose to accept it, is to put students’ own values at the center of their learning in order to make school meaningful beyond academic skills. The special agent assigned to help you with this task is Lauren Porosoff of Scarsdale, New York.

In this episode we discuss:

• Parents advocating for meaningfulness

• The three kinds of relevance: personal, practical, cultural

• Her favorite meaningful units: A Midsummer Night’s Dream & spoken word poetry

• Addressing three criticisms of making curriculum meaningful: kids need to learn that not everything is about them, there’s no time to get to know students, and young people don’t know what is meaningful to them yet

• What to do if a teacher wants to change their curriculum

• Feeling lonely or disempowered while innovating

• ACT: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

• Her decision to no longer teach Sherman Alexie’s Absolutely True Diary of A Part-Time Indian

• How to get in touch with Lauren

Links:

• Lauren’s Twitter, Facebook and Website

• Book: Two-for-One Teaching: Connecting Instruction to Student Values

• Book: Empower Your Students: Tools to Inspire a Meaningful School Experience

• Article: “A Midsummer Night’s Gender Diversity”

• Article: “Why I’ll Never Teach This Powerful Book Again”

• For more about ACT: The Association for Contextual Behavioral Science