Moving from Connections within Units to Connections among Units

Like rabbits swept by the shadow of a hawk, the students suddenly still, striving to become invisible, only eyeballs roving to see if anyone has an answer for the question the teacher has posed.

Moments earlier the class bubbled with discussion, pulling together the introductory nonfiction pieces of our human dignity unit before plunging into our central work, the Holocaust memoir Night by Elie Wiesel. Students commented on the power of the line in the movie Hotel Rwanda about people watching the atrocities on the news, then saying, “How awful,” and going back to their dinners—recognizing that we have all done exactly that. They debated the extent to which the question of suffering is answered by the claim of Gary Haugen, founder of International Justice Mission (IJM), “The question is not where is God but where are his people.” 

Then I ask, “This concept of regard for human dignity—do you see any connections with our first unit, about people being made in the image of God?” The silence is deafening. Baffled, I explain one connection: the Christian belief that people are made in the image of God is the very basis for human dignity and human rights. 

Next question, “This concept of regard for human dignity—do you see any connections with the unit we just finished on shalom?” More silence. Then a tentative, “No?” I am astonished. “Any connection to God’s call to join him in his work of restoring the relationships he originally intended people to have with himself, with others, with creation?” Some giggle sheepishly. The speaker protests, “I meant, when shalom was broken in Cry, the Beloved Country, there wasn’t any regard for human dignity.” 

I posed these questions because of a recent Blinding Flash of the Obvious, I just didn’t expect my hypothesis to be so resoundingly confirmed. Occasionally a student has ventured while working on a unit final paper to ask whether it’s okay to refer to a central theme of a previous unit: “Is it okay if I talk about people being made in the image of God when I’m writing my shalom paper?” “Is it okay if I talk about shalom when I’m writing my human dignity paper?” The connections seem so clear to me, and it’s such an epiphany to them that they’re not sure it’s valid. It wasn’t until last week that I realized: oh, my—I don’t actually teach them to make connections between units. I systematically target, teach, and assess making connections within a unit, but not among units.

This realization hit when discussing The New Art and Science of Teaching by Robert Marzano with a couple of colleagues. I read about the strategy of cumulative review: “The teacher not only reviews content from the current unit but helps students relate it to content from previous units…. Periodically, students list their generalizations from previous units or sets of lessons and create one or more all-encompassing generalizations” (57). I wrote, “10th grade!” in the margin by those words.

I didn’t mean to make my students feel like hunted rabbits. I thought that just prompting them to look for connections among units of study would trigger the finding of connections. Clearly this is a thinking strategy I need to teach more specifically. After all, life is not a series of unrelated units, and learning is more effective when it is more connective, synthesizing new learning with what has gone before.

Are there connections among your units of study? Do your students know them? Ask—see what happens.