Sense of Purpose | My Teaching Portfoli

Sense of Purpose: Why are we doing this?

"Commonly, state standards are written to address only one-fifth of the culturally and historically responsive model: skills They do not consider identity, intellect, criticality and joy.” -Gholdy Muhammad

Finding and establishing a sense of purpose for students can help cultivate joy in the classroom. Purpose, in this inquiry, moves beyond Common Core standards and builds upon real-life uses of and connections to lesson objectives. Of course, academic goals remain of important and learning objectives (Think: “Students will be able to…. In order to…”) should be clear to both the instructor and students. Standards and objectives, however, should be translated into student-friendly language. Additionally, I suggest that, in order to bolster joy in the classroom, a clear sense of real-world purpose should be established for our learning objectives before, after, and during the lesson.

Pictured below is a Common Core standard for 5th Grade Reading and Literacy.

I used this standard to create a learning objective for a lesson in my Fall Takeover (Artifact 6.1). To deepen student engagement and sense of purpose, the next slide (Artifact 6.2) directly addressed the question "Why we will be learning this?" and detailed how it will help us moving forward. I found that, when I began to include more detailed descriptions of why we were covering a topic, student engagement increased and students were less resistant to try new tasks.

In addition to providing "why" statements, we began to brainstorm "why"s for our learning together as a class and connecting our learning with previous knowledge. While introducing a topic, I would pose questions like:

Why do you think we might be learning this?
How could we use this strategy or knowledge in the classroom?
How could we use this strategy or knowledge outside of the classroom?
How does this relate to something you already know or have learned before?

Artifact 6.1

Artifact 6.2

Relating to joy, I suggest that this explicit connection to purpose and a clear "why" helps students move toward "sustained sense of fulfillment and self-determination, self-liberation, and self-empowerment" (100) that Muhammad defines as joy.

Furthermore, Artifact 7 shows a student response to a prompt about a joyful learning experience. This student wrote about learning to write in cursive, which we have been practicing daily throughout the year. This student expressed that she has learned writing in cursive is important because "you might think you don't need the little things but sometimes you do in life."

In class, we have discusses real-life uses for writing in cursive (signing checks, contracts, job applications, etc.). She has displayed joy and excitement surrounding writing in cursive and often opts to write assignments in cursive. Understanding the purpose of learning cursive has helped excite and fulfill her as a student, and that joy is palpable in the classroom and in her school work.

Artifact 7: Joyful Learning Student Work

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