Real-World Authenticity

Learners connect the particular content or tasks they are focused on in the moment with authentic personal, local, and global situations and issues.

Tier 1: This Look For is one of seven that represent Quality First Instruction for all learners.


person in the foreground and a measurement scale in the background with positive and negative sides

Have a positive attitude and interest towards the learning experience because of its personal, local, or global relatedness

Evidence of Learner Behaviors

  • Describe how their current learning task or experience connects to a personal, community, or societal issue (e.g., a city-wide problem, an ongoing debate in the news)

  • Demonstrate enthusiasm for the learning experience because of connections to other personal or societal issues

Questions to Ask Learners

  • How does this task (or learning experience) relate to your world or something else in the world?

  • Why do you find this learning experience/task interesting?

a hand with a thumbs up and a graded paper

Demonstrate appreciation of how the topic or learning contributes to their lives or the lives of others

Evidence of Learner Behaviors

  • Show how their project/task has an impact on them or others (i.e., emotionally, through social reasoning, or in personal relevance)

  • Create a task or project outcome that goes beyond the learning environment (e.g., op-ed to a newspaper, community-based experience)

Questions to Ask Learners

  • How does this project/task make you feel?

  • How does it have an effect on others in your life – your family? Friends?

  • What kind of next step will this project or task lead to?

the earth

Problem-solve real-world, complex issues in their learning tasks

Evidence of Learner Behaviors

  • Create projects/tasks that have connections to larger global, civic, or societal topics

  • Share their thinking and learning on solutions to these larger topics and how they are using them in their project/task

Questions to Ask Learners

  • How does this current project/task relate to something else, like a topic in the news or in your community?

  • How have you been thinking about solving this issue?

  • How are you making your thinking and learning on the solution to this issue part of your project/task?


Integrating real-world context contributes to effective learning through direct experiential confrontation with practical, social, ethical, and philosophical problems, and enhances learners’ appreciation of how the subject and field contribute to their lives or the lives of others.


Simply put, learners build new knowledge on top of existing schemas. Therefore, creating learning experiences that are relevant to the lives of learners help young minds integrate new knowledge and make it useful.

Educator Actions

Learning facilitators help learners connect content and tasks with authentic personal, local, and global situations and issues.

CSTPs: 1.3, 6.5

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Create motivating learning opportunities with learners, at Level 3 and Level 4, that allow them to address issues that matter to them, including those at home and in their community.

These opportunities can create great connections to the Civic, Global, and Personal spheres of Lifelong Learning!


  • Design learning activities that are embedded in or simulate real-life situations and issues (P)

  • Contextualize the content or skills in a way that demonstrates applicability to real-world problems and situations or connects to learners’ communities (P/F)

  • Support learners to connect learning activities, content knowledge, or skills to their own lives (P/F)

  • Highlight when problems do not have a single right answer to increase learners’ understanding of the complexity of problem-solving in the real world (P/F)

P = planned F = facilitated spontaneously