Choice in the Classroom: Where Do I Start?

I really truly believe that one of the most powerful elements of technology in the classroom is the opportunity to embed choice in our classrooms. There are a million ways to create choices for students, but too often we overcomplicate things.

Problem #1 is that we think giving students choices means we have to create all kinds of rubrics and templates and examples and...we get burnt out and hate it. So this is really the first barrier to choice in the classroom. There's a fairly simple solution to it, but I'm not going to get to it...yet.

Problem #2 is that choice often ends up watering down the learning experience for students. We end up finding things that are fun and flashy and exciting, and we build a million options, and eventually we end up with a bunch of dioramas, glued together pipe cleaners, and videos explaining how they built them.

And then you realize...I have no idea what students just learned. Did they learn important things? I mean, probably, but what were they supposed to learn?

I have ended up in this position far too often. I created choices for students and I ended up with a bunch of amazing projects created by students who had no idea what learning they were demonstrating.

So what's the solution?

The answer is simple: step back and figure out what your learning objectives are. 

Everyone reading right now is probably feeling an intense amount of letdown with that solution. 

Give me a chance to explain. 

Here's how this solves problem #1. When we step back and identify the essential learning students need to do, we realize how much of what we feel like we have to do is really unnecessary. For example, I used to always have students write persuasive essays. I would dictate everything. I chose the prompt, I identified the structure they needed to follow, and I dictated what was going to happen with the product. 

NONE OF THE ELEMENTS I JUST DESCRIBED ARE PART OF THE ESSENTIAL LEARNING. 

Really, think about it. If they need to learn about persuasive writing...how does that dictate a prompt? How does that dictate what they do with the product? And really, how does that even dictate the product? 

For this issue, I blame poorly-designed, overly-glorified pacing guides. Too often pacing guides tell us that the important things are the lessons, assessments, and products. They dictate what doesn't need to be dictated. 

So, here's how to cut out the feeling of being overwhelmed: find out what's the essential learning, and let go of the rest. It's freeing. It cuts your workload by like a million. There are so many things that aren't essential in our curriculum guides. 

Here's what's essential: learning. Everything else is either icing on the cake or lead stones tied around our ankles. Choose whichever metaphor works best for you. 

Okay, so that's problem #1. What about problem #2?

Well, it's really the same answer, but with an added piece. The effectiveness of student choice is directly connected to the effectiveness of the rubric. 

So many rubrics aren't focused on the learning. I see rubrics all the time that dictate the demonstration of the learning. "Your paragraphs must have two pieces of evidence." Really? Do they? Or should we really just be writing rubrics that encourage kids to use evidence to support their ideas? 

When I learned how to design rubrics focused on just the learning objective and how to make the different levels dependent on the depth of that learning, the demonstrations of learning that I got back from my students were such better quality. 

So, the pivotal element HAS to be the rubric. It has to be quality in order for choice in the classroom to be really meaningful. 

This sounds like too much work. Why should I add choice?

Here's why choice matters: when you give students choice, you are inviting them to be themselves in your classroom. You are telling them, "You matter, your interests matter, your passions matter, and I want you to bring them into this classroom."

And here's the hard truth: if we aren't providing students choice, we are telling them they don't matter, that the curriculum matters more than they do. 

That's a message I would never want to send to any student. 

The story that drives this home for me is my student, J. I'm using an initial to protect their identity, but J. came into my class hating school. They were a student at a rural, small-town school, and they were discovering and exploring their identity as transgendered. You can imagine how that was going. 

When they came into my intervention class for ELA, I set them up to write a book. I didn't dictate what the book was about. I didn't even dictate necessarily what the final product had to look like. What I said was, "We are going to learn to become powerful writers, and if you want to, you can write a book. I will get you a published, printed copy if you complete it."

And J. blew me away. They wrote a collection of personal essays about their experience. It was incredible. It was so powerful, and it opened up conversations about their identify with their friends and parents. They ended up publishing their book, passing their ELA test, and graduating. 

Years later, I got a message from them on Facebook. They were writing another book. Not only that, but they were going to college to study English because they learned how powerful writing could be, and they wanted to be able to teach other students to feel that, too. 

Friends, THAT is why we give choice...because it can change lives. When we empower students to be themselves and allow them to celebrate that in our classrooms, it makes all the difference for some students. 

So please, no matter how daunting it may be, give your students choices so that they can learn who they are and become empowered to share that with others. 

It will change lives. I guarantee it.