
How many times have you sat in a PD meeting that didn’t apply to you? One where you were learning an 11 letter acronym for a strategy you’d never use, a 3 point plan for a new program that wouldn’t fit with your curriculum, or a training you’d already had?
A PD meeting that was… irrelevant.
In their book, Disrupting Thinking: Why How We Read Matters, Kylene Beers and Bob Probst use one word to describe a key component we need in our in our curriculum in order to keep students’ attention: relevance (115).
Relevance hit home for me, conceptually.
For many years, I’ve argued here for authentic audience, more contemporary texts featuring diverse voices, real-world projects like genius hour and podcasting, exploring modern mediums for communication, and student-led discussion.
Relevance – in the words of the latest visual trend on Insta – fits the #vibesibringtothefunction here at Spark Creativity.
I want it for you, of course, in your professional learning, and that’s why I’m here. And I want it for your students, in their learning in your classroom.

When Beers and Probst polled high school students on what issues they’d be interested in exploring, the issues that feel relevant to them, they named things like solving hate/bullying, fighting racism, ending discrimination around mental illness, and protecting the environment (117).
It’s not easy to dive into issues like these if you’re tied to an aggressive standardized curriculum. As Beers and Probst put it, it’s easier to create a learning environment that matters to students “if the question begins, ‘What do kids want to know?’ rather than ‘What does the curriculum say we must cover?'” (116).
And yet, there are inroads you can make in your classroom toward relevance, while you have larger conversations with your colleagues and administration about the wider curriculum and the freedom (or lack thereof) it allows you as you design your units.
So today, I want to explore ways to build more relevance into the curriculum, even if you don’t have carte blanche to teach whatever you want, however you want to.
Genius Hour

Genius hour gives students the freedom to choose a project that they’ve always wanted to pursue, making it fundamentally relevant to them. It’s a project you can build in anywhere, in a week, with 30 minutes every Monday, with a spare 2 weeks after testing, etc. The idea, pioneered by Google, who called it “20 time” is to give students a chance to dive into a project of their own choosing.
Students who are passionate about the big problems facing the world can design projects around understanding them better and making an impact.
Students wishing they could start focusing their energy on the field they want to work in can dive in and get their feet wet.
Students wanting to learn a new skill – whether it’s making pastry, fixing cars, or speaking Slovak – can finally have the time to do it.
For many students, genius hour is a chance to develop what David Kelley calls “creative confidence” in my favorite Ted Talk of all time. Creative confidence lets you see an issue in the world and believe you can do something about it. Believe that with your skills, your passion, and your creative approach, you can figure out a solution.
Students choose what to explore, how to explore it, and how to showcase what they’ve learned. Along the way, they have a chance to build creative confidence and learn to tackle the challenges directly in front of them.
More Text Choice through Book Clubs and Independent Reading
Another way to build relevance into the student experience is to give them more choice over what they read. Building in more book clubs, choice units, and independent reading into your curriculum will automatically push students toward reading material that is more likely to matter to them, and therefore more likely to keep them engaged in the long term.
With book clubs, you can curate many voices you believe will be meaningful to your students, then let them choose what feels most important to them.
With independent reading as a complement to your class curriculum, you can provide a wide range of possibilities, and let students explore. As you build a reading culture in your classroom, you’ll have many opportunities to help students find great books to choose.

If you run a choice unit or reading workshop, you can help students learn about writer’s craft moves and text structures, and discuss the deeper meaning in their texts together, even if they’re not reading the same books. I recently read Jared Amato’s wonderful book, Just Read It, which I’d really recommend if you want to move your classroom toward a more overall choice-focused curriculum. Nancy Atwell’s The Reading Zone is another helpful take on reading workshop, as is Donalyn Miller’s The Book Whisperer.
Build Units around Authentic Audiences
We’ve talked a lot about authentic audience here, and as I see it it’s another key way to make learning relevant. Teaching others, sharing a performance or piece of art, creating change in the community, persuading leaders about something important to students – all of this feels fundamentally different than turning in a piece of homework for a grade. Even if these projects eventually receive a grade too, likely that’s not the main thing students will get from doing them.
Let’s look at a few examples.
In this podcast project (pictured below), students design vocabulary podcasts to help each other (and other students around the world, if you have a way to publish the podcast) learn vocabulary words. Rather than study a list of words, they’ll examine podcast mentor texts, craft their own scripts, learn their assigned words so they can teach them, record their podcasts, design their covers, and share them out.

In a poetry slam project, poetry workshops and analysis suddenly get supercharged with interest as students prepare to host a poetry slam and perform for a live audience. Suddenly understanding the great poets – historic and contemporary – feels a lot more relevant, since students will want to draw on their craft moves to build their own performance pieces.

Graphic novels are a contemporary medium that students often choose when given the chance. In this final project to complement graphic novel book clubs, a graphic novel choice unit, or a full class graphic novel, students will create their own visual story to showcase in a class art exhibit. Once again, their work won’t be just to show you, as the teacher, but to show to their classmates and the guests they invite to learn from their stories.

It’s hard to throw a rock right now without hitting a conversation about AI. And students are wondering about it just as much as we are. In this PBL unit exploring the ethics of AI use (grab it free here), which I was inspired to design after this podcast conversation with Ben Farrell, students will have a chance to research a subject with a profound impact on their lives and play a role in helping decide policy at their school.

Any project that puts students in the position of sharing their learning with a wider audience adds – in my view – a layer of relevance to the process.
Leverage Modern Mediums with Student Choice over Topics
I always laugh about the fact that I studied English, became an English teacher, then used my English skills to share English teaching ideas with English teachers through English-y mediums like podcasting, writing articles, blogging, writing social media captions and emails, and videos.
It’s so meta.
And it give me a unique angle on some of the mediums being used on communications these days – mediums that are so very relevant to folks trying to share ideas in the world today.
Which brings me to my fourth gateway to relevance – leveraging modern mediums. The five paragraph essay isn’t dead, but it’s not the end all be all of sharing ideas today either. When we open up the chance to practice communicating over a wider range of mediums – like podcast, documentary film, even social media-style videos and carousels, we give students a chance to create in mediums they likely see as more closely connected to their daily lives and future careers.
The great thing is, it’s so easy to build the skills we want students to practice into projects these mediums while freeing up students to choose their own topics.
A podcast can demonstrate strong storytelling or argument while focusing on almost any issue students want to dig into.


A documentary video can demonstrate the skills of interviewing, scripting and recording audio, editing clips into a logical order, and effectively making points through visuals and storyline while focusing on virtually any subject fascinating to a student.

A project to come up with a nonprofit business idea and launch it on a social media platform can show skills with design thinking and effective writing no matter what issue that nonprofit will confront.

When you design a project around a modern media platform, and leave students the choice to create in an area that truly holds their interest, you provide them with the opportunity to create their own relevance.
Center Student Voices with Socratic Seminar or Harkness Discussions
Last but not least, let’s give a nod to student-led discussion. There’s a whole chapter in Disrupting Thinking about the types of teacher-led discussion Kylene Beers and Bob Probst experienced as students and experimented with as they began teaching (and why they feel it DOESN’T work). Once again, I find myself very much on the same page. If you’ve been here with me for long, you know how deeply I believe in centering student voices with Harkness discussions, and I’ve seen others do similar things with the Socratic Seminar.
When you put students’ ideas, questions, and connections at the heart of your classroom discussions, you once again allow them to create relevance for themselves. It won’t happen automatically. It takes a lot of time and attention to help them learn to ask questions that actually matter to them, listen to each other’s views carefully, and make connections with what’s happening the world and across their other subjects.



Relevance Matters
There are so many ways to help school feel relevant to our students – building in more choice over texts and topics, more authentic audience, more student-centered discussion, and more modern mediums are all great places to start in my book. I’m sure you’re already experimenting with lots of these, but as always, thanks for letting me brainstorm alongside you!
Works Referenced:
Beers, Kylene and Robert E. Probst. Disrupting Thinking: Why How We Read Matters. Scholastic, 2015.