Ask Yourself: Why?

How to examine what you’re teaching and make sure it has relevance to your audience

Recently, a former student teacher—who is now a full-time graduate student earning her language degree—wrote to share a recent lesson that she learned from our time together. 

She said: “Thank you for teaching me to analyze the relevance question. I had to do it repeatedly while student teaching with you.” 

The value of being able to answer the question of why you’re teaching a given topic is the reason that you will be able to honestly sell your material to your audience. 

My husband is a very successful mortgage broker, and most of his job involves “selling,” but as he shares, selling solely for selling’s sake is not the goal. “You only sell people what they need,” he says. “Otherwise, you are taking advantage of people, and then how can you sleep at night?”

Hence, the constant question in your mind should be: What do your students need and why do they need it? 

That is the key difference between simply presenting material to your audience, versus effectively teaching for your audience. Sometimes, but not often, it’s necessary to simply explain that your students have to memorize material in order to pass a test and move on to the next level, not necessarily because they will ever use this information again, but because it is a stepping stone to their next goal.

Honestly and opening sharing with your students the why behind the material, and then never forgetting to build upon that relevancy, builds an interconnected roadmap that guides both you and your students to a deeper understanding, as well as—hopefully—an ability to put their new knowledge and growth to work for them.

I once told my high school students that if you ask a teacher why you are learning something and they can not tell you, or they expect, “Because you have to” or “Because I told you to” to suffice, then it's probably not worth learning — or their teacher has not defined the why. 

Either way, it's a short road to disengagement, disinterest, and frustration for all. No matter what you’re selling, begin and end with the why.