Chapter 10 "Going Beyond the Classroom"

The most important part of this chapter is to understand how important it is for teachers to help students make the connection to what is being learned in the class to the real world. Studies suggest that students understand and remember information ten times better when it is related to a real life situation. A lesson that presents a real life scenario can reach out to students in so many different ways.
I remember in my high school biology class we were learning about trees and why each tree had different leave characteristics. This could have been just one of those lessons where students had to memorize the different kinds of fact for the test, however, our teacher took us out of the classroom into the woods and let us explore the different kinds of leaves. We had to collect five different leaves and compare and contrast the different characteristics of the leaves. Then we had to explain why these different characteristics were important to the trees. This was such a challenging lesson, but in the end we ended up learning so much more than what was expected of us.