Remember high school? Your friends, your music, your style? What lessons from high school classes do you still use today? If you could go back, what do you wish you’d learned about real life?
Research shows that many high school students see little relevance between their education and what they’ll need in the real world. According to a recent Gallup poll, less than half of students said their schoolwork positively challenges them.
After witnessing widespread school disengagement during the pandemic, I set out to create a class that my students would see as genuinely valuable to real life. In 2022, I began conducting surveys both in person and on social media. I asked parents, students, educators, community members, and various professionals what topics should be emphasized more in high school.
The responses were consistent: They wanted topics related to practical life skills, such as how to budget expenses, how to manage stress and time, and how to resolve conflicts.
This interest is supported by research, which has found that teaching meaningful life skills can improve student self-esteem and decrease anxiety.
I’ve long worked to integrate authentic life skills into my language arts and social studies classes, but after 18 years as a high school special education teacher, I realized my students could use dedicated time to build practical knowledge and life skills, along with the curiosity needed to contribute positively to their communities.
I wrote a detailed proposal to my administration for a personalized life-skills class. To my good fortune, my administrative team and colleagues supported the vision from the beginning. In the 2024-25 school year, nearly two years of curriculum development later, I was finally ready to launch the Your Life, Your World elective. (This course is for all students, not just students with special needs. )
Many of my students have told me that the course is the most relevant class they’ve taken in high school. Parents regularly express enthusiastic support and have said they wish every student had the opportunity to take a course like this.
When creating this course, I drew on John Dewey’s principles of education to emphasize experiential learning and Waldorf methods to prioritize practical skill-building. Over the yearlong course, students explore topics aligned with both their personal interests and essential life skills, such as strategies for well-being, conflict resolution, time management, personal goal setting, consumerism skills, media literacy, civic and community engagement, productive AI use, current events, and more.
I encourage my students to take ownership not only of what they learn but also how they learn it and how they demonstrate that learning.
For example, in our unit on career planning and postsecondary exploration, I begin with a survey to gauge student interest in 30 to 50 related topics. Based on student responses, I lead a few whole-class lessons on high-interest areas, and students then select their own research topics based on areas of their individual interest.
Depending on student responses, they might learn how to identify their personality type for career alignment; how to research college majors and career projections; how to apply for schools, financial aid, and scholarships; how to prepare for a job interview; how to research trade, vocational, or military careers; or how to start a small business online.
I use a flexible scoring guide designed to incentivize students to follow their own lines of inquiry. For example, a student researching how to prepare for a job interview would earn more points by researching a question like, “What should I wear?” and following up with “How do I tie a necktie?”
Students have options for how to demonstrate their knowledge, choosing between making an oral presentation with slides, filming an educational video, writing a detailed paragraph, designing an infographic, or proposing an idea of their own.
My role as a teacher in this framework is to guide and support students with suggested research topics/questions, personalized feedback, credible sources, content knowledge, and enthusiastically encourage any sparks of curiosity. In the job interview example, students can choose to do a mock job interview with a classmate or me. They might also practice answering job interview questions using an AI chatbot. In this unit last school year, some of my students were actively seeking employment, which made them genuinely curious to learn more.
I also periodically set time aside for students to choose any school-appropriate topic that interests them. This might include a current event, solving a personal problem, or just a random question they might have such as:
- What videos are most engaging on social media and why?
- How does political lobbying work?
- How do I get faster at the 100-meter sprint?
Students then use their current interest topics to launch passion projects that dive deeper into their interests aiming toward developing meaningful skills and real-world outcomes.
For instance, a few of my students were baseball fans, and with my guidance, we created a schoolwide Mets vs. Yankees trivia competition to raise money for a charity of their choice.
In the life-skills class, we also created a schoolwide Screen-Free Day to raise awareness about the dangers of excessive and unproductive screen time. As a class, students promoted the event, organized engaging lunch activities, and secured donations of food, drinks, and gift cards from local businesses.
My students were intrinsically motivated to take on these tasks, not because they were practicing for a future hypothetical scenario but because they were personally invested in a real-world project with natural consequences and rewards.
If you’re an educator or a parent interested in creating a similar course at your school, I’d be happy to share what I’ve developed. The personalized life-skill model requires a great deal of planning, instructional work, and design strategies. Feel free to reach out to me for advice on customizing this course for your school. Together, we can bring more relevance, curiosity, and life into our classrooms.
