As an elementary school teacher, I have observed an interesting relationship between school engagement and personal choice. Wherever I can give my students true ownership and satisfying personalization of their school experiences, I find learners who are more willing to engage in the persistence that deep learning requires. Adult-directed days have become more common for children as families move toward highly scheduled after-school and weekend time. I believe that school can and should be a place where students have some measure of control over their learning.
Working in an independent school often provides teachers with the flexibility to create personalized learning. My school has provided me with flexibility and trust as well as an opportunity to learn from University of Kansas researcher and professor Yong Zhao about student autonomy and voice as a component essential to the development of creative and entrepreneurial students.1 My passion for student-centered learning with a focus on relationships creates the foundation for student choice in our fourth-grade community; this passion is shared by my co-teachers and makes for an ideal teaching team. Student choice is manifested in our classroom environment, student voice and feedback, reading, writing, and even learning topics.
Classroom Environment
When students believe that a classroom belongs to them, they become engaged and care about what happens within its space. We invite our students to bring in a framed photograph to keep in their homeroom. Most students put their picture on the desk, but others choose to put it on a bookshelf or in another location. Visitors immediately notice the photographs and comment on the pleasure they must bring to the students.
We cover our reading journals in the fall with unique fabric prints chosen by the children. It is an opportunity for them to express their likes (chickens, stars, lions, colors, etc.) and to personalize the journals and make them immediately identifiable. Our students are generally free to work in the classroom wherever they would like, provided they are getting the work done and not distracting their neighbors. Very rarely do we need to intervene with an incompatible choice. Some learning activities allow students to choose which classmate to work with or even to work solo if they want to. We mix this up with teacher-chosen groups, and we also talk about how to choose productive partners. Some students have learned that their best friends are often not the best partners when they want to get serious work done. Additionally, we recognize that some students need to move their bodies to think, and so we have yoga balls, bungee chairs, wiggle seats, and standing desks to provide more avenues for student choices in the learning environment.
Student Voice and Feedback
Teacher relationships with our students assist learning — theirs and ours. We get to know our students well, and we share bits of our lives with them. They know that we care deeply about them as individuals, and, over the course of the year, trust grows. We survey the parents at the beginning of the year to discover more about their children. Students frequently assess themselves, particularly after math tests or large projects. A common question for them as they reflect on their progress is, “How can your teachers support you to learn more?” When I sit down with a student for an individual conference, I frequently ask, “How can I help you?” We have our students write letters to us midyear, telling us how things are going. We encourage them to tell us about the “warts” too, because that helps us become better teachers. Sometimes the feedback is that they wish we could change desk arrangements more often, or perhaps I am not calling on an individual student very much. More significant is when a student trusts us to hear that he is feeling a lot of pressure and yet is trying his best. Knowing what is important to our students helps us to be responsive to their needs.
Pernille Ripp’s work has been invaluable to me as I explore more ways to incorporate student voices and share responsibility for learning with our students. Ripp’s Passionate Learners: How to Engage and Empower Your Students has expanded my understanding of how to create community and elicit feedback from students.2 This winter I felt brave and, for the first time, I allowed students to choose their own groups for a science challenge. This experiment was a success and has influenced my grouping options. After reading about Ripp’s ideas on limiting homework, I am motivated to look closely at the research on homework and have conversations next August with my co-teachers and Lower School faculty about the goals and value of homework. We rarely use traditional grades in our Lower School, yet Ripp’s work has prompted me to think about how to improve the feedback I give students on their tests, projects, and writing.3
Reading
Donalyn Miller and Nancie Atwell talk about the importance of student choice of independent reading material as a crucial element to engage students on a path toward lifelong reading or, as Miller likes to call it, “reading in the wild,” as opposed to required school reading.4 In the fall, our fourth-graders choose a personal level for our yearlong Reading Challenge. When a given class of learners might read between 10 and 100 books on its own, it is just wrong to have identical expectations for every child. We have three levels of challenge where students are required to read a variety of genres to expand their familiarity and comfort level. But students choose their own independent reading titles. Throughout the year, they track where each book fits on the genre requirements. If a student gets hooked on a series or an author and fills up the “slots” on the challenge, they can record their books on an additional reading chart to help track their total reading.
Other ways in which choice plays into reading instruction involve our comprehension strategy lessons. We model comprehension thinking with picture books and short readings and expect students to apply their learning to whatever books they are reading. When we have individual reading conferences, we can check in with their application of comprehension strategies for whatever book they have chosen. Our two fourth-grade classrooms share a common novel that we read aloud in our homerooms. We choose one novel each year as a platform to teach annotation skills and give students their own copies to follow along. We model different ways of marking up our books and stress that annotation is a way of making their thinking visible. In the way that an animal leaves tracks in the snow, we can leave the tracks of our thinking in the margins. Students have the choice as to what and how to annotate as we read together.
Writing
We build digital portfolios throughout the year using iBooks Author, and we see a marked change in the quality of student writing between September and May. These portfolios have immense student choice built in. We require students to include artifacts for designated sections of the portfolio, for example “Who Am I?” or “Language Arts,” but they can choose what is important to them. In building artifacts, we create an organized library of photographs accessible through Google Drive, and students simply drag and drop the images they would like. For example, for a recent science lab, we tried to get photographs of all students and materials in action. Some students might choose only one photograph for their page, while others will choose two to five photographs, depending on their engagement with the lab. They are welcome to include photographs of their friends.
In building their portfolios, students learn great word-processing skills as well as elements of visual design. As with any writing project, students work at different speeds. We have a group of artifact categories that are required, and those students who work more efficiently may choose options from a section called Above and Beyond. This allows teachers to differentiate writing expectations while also creating more opportunity for student choice. The icing on the cake? This ongoing writing project becomes the platform for student-led conferences in May when students celebrate and reflect with their parents on their full year of learning.
Learning Topics
Periodically, students have an opportunity to choose the focus of their learning. We have three Passion Projects across the year where students learn research skills while exploring topics they have chosen themselves. The projects increase in scope and responsibility as students develop and practice their skills. For example, last year one student decided to learn more about the brain and dyslexia and, as a result, has embraced her own learning difference. Another student who was fascinated by Buddhism decided to learn about the Dalai Lama and was thrilled to discover that he planned an upcoming visit to a nearby location. A student who is fascinated with geography may choose another country to study. Because the students chose their topics to explore, these students were fully engaged and motivated to dig deeper and learn more.
Once they have done their research, students have choice in how they present their learning within specified parameters, and we share this at a Passion Project Fair, inviting parents to attend. Of course, a student can exceed expectations and bring in a family member willing to wear a puffin costume while she entices visitors to her station with a board game to learn about puffins, their life cycle, their environment, and more! Or a student can present his or her learning in a classic trifold board or electronic slideshow. The presentation choice can play to a student’s strengths and be his or her best work. Within our relationships with students, we are able to provide individual feedback for them to stretch with each successive project cycle.
When I think about myself as a learner, I know that I do my best learning when I am invested and care about what I am doing. I am often able to have a level of choice and control over what I’m learning and how I’m applying it. My success and joy in learning lead me to continue to seek out even more opportunities. I owe it to my students to provide similar experiences as learners so that they are engaged and motivated. Offering choice and autonomy is an excellent path.
Notes
1. Yong Zhao, World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, 2012).
2. Pernille Ripp, Passionate Learners: How to Engage and Empower Your Students, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2016).
3. Ibid.
4. Donalyn Miller, The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2009); and Nancie Atwell, The Reading Zone: How to Help Kids Become Skilled, Passionate, Habitual, Critical Readers (New York: Scholastic, 2007).