How am I ever going to use this?

Making learning relevant for students, making it authentic, means that we make an obvious connection between the learning and how we use it in real life.  Sometimes, it takes just a little different spin to make an activity authentic.  Here's an example of how you can do it.

Objective:  Students will identify how they use reading strategies in non-fiction text.  (I choose this because non-fiction text is in every content area)

Typical assessment example:  Students present their strategies and summarize which ones they used, why they used them, and where they used them in the text.

Authentic assessment example:  Students are textbook publishers selling their non-fiction material to a school district.  They will present to the school administrators why the text is a good fit for teaching non-fiction reading strategies.

In both examples, students have to identify non-fiction reading strategies to build their content-area comprehension.  The typical assessment requires they practice and share.  The authentic assessment requires that they practice and share, but they also have to evaluate the best strategies in order to sell their audience.

Consider your assessments...

Beyond assessments, check out these examples of real-life applications in learning...

Listening to a historian about how the History Museum incorporates students' work into their exhibits.

Practical map-making skills from a cartographer.

Seeing what those maps really do for our world today.

A skit in Spanish where students are acting out a conversation they would have when traveling to another country.