Everyone likes to feel like they’re in charge. Kids are no different! When we offer students choices, it allows them to feel like they are in control over a given situation. All students benefit from having choices as we all learn better when we have a say in our learning. For students who struggle with compliance or motivation, sometimes offering frequent choices is the magic formula for student success.
Giving Students Choices Gives the Teacher More Control, Not Less
Some educators are reluctant to give students too many choices for fear that they’ll lose control of students’ learning. But students are so much more likely to feel motivated when they have a say in what or how they are learning. Therefore, giving choices actually makes it more likely that they’ll engage than if they’re told the exact path to take. Empowering students with choices makes them feel like they have control, when it’s still the teacher who has control.
Low-Prep Opportunities for Choice
There are limitless times throughout the day when we can give students choices instead of a concrete directive. In fact, for some students, changing every single directive to a set of choices is the only way those students will have success. These types of choices can be as simple as where a student sits during independent reading, or what they use to write in their journal. They can also be more complex, like whether a student wants to write an essay or a play for their end-of-unit project. The more choices they have, the more success they are likely to have.
High-Prep, High Yield Opportunities for Choice: Choice Boards
The more thought and preparation a teacher puts into the choices they are giving their students, the greater the reward. While quick, low-prep choices are important and can be very powerful for some students, the positive effects they can have pale in comparison to those which have been given real thought and deliberation.
One of the most popular ways teachers facilitate “high prep” choices is through a choice board. A choice board is a set of items students can choose from, usually presented in a grid. Choice boards can be for academic purposes or they can be for non-instructional times of the day. Most typically, choice boards contain a 3 x 3 grid, each square containing one of the choices. Many teachers use these for homework, telling students they must, for example, choose 3 of the items to complete for homework each night. Others use them for independent or group projects or classwork. However choice boards are used, they always empower students to feel ownership over their learning.
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