How often should students be offered choice in a classroom?
For your consideration:
How often should students be offered choice in a classroom?
My answer: How often are we offered choice outside the classroom/school day? And if we don’t like our choices, we often look elsewhere for even more choices.
Then we ought to offer for sure MS and HS students at least as often as that. Because if we’re preparing them to live in a life beyond school, wouldn’t we want to offer more, rather than fewer choices so they learn how to navigate the world beyond school?
How are we offering more choices *at the very least* regarding HOW they’re learning what we’re serving up?
And in a more learner-centric environ, maybe they even get to make more choices in WHAT they’re learning?
And why is WHEN they’re learning almost always off the table for discussion? Is it because the answer is centered around the convenience of someone else other than the student? So if that’s a real thing, how do we balance (or tame) the needs of others with the needs of the students, whom we’re trying to educate?
And how will agency and learning how to make decisions affect engagement, buy-in, and responsibility in students for the long run? And how do we get them from no-decision-making through the learning of poor-decision-making into good decision-making?
What a delicious topic topic to chew over in a PLC.
Or with students, particularly in a school that’s redesigning how they operate. 🙂
