Provide+Students+with+Opportunities+to+make+Learning+Choices

“Students’ self-determination flourishes when they have some degree of power and control over classroom activities, but their self-determination is compromised, or negated, when teachers require them to rigidly follow curricula, rules, and assessments.” (Sancore J 2008) In his article ‘Reluctant Learners to Inspired Learners’, Joseph Sancore discussed his vast experiences of working with teachers and students and observing the significant advantages of allowing students to make choices about their learning. He noted that students become more interested in learning through teachers providing them with deliberate and constant encouragement to make choices. Teachers can provide students with the opportunity to make decisions about what material to read, what topics to write about, when to use peer sharing, how to assess class work etc.



The article ‘Student Voices and Teacher Choices’ by Boyd and Devennie, (2009) follows the story of grade three teacher Michael and his process of choosing a read-aloud book for the class. In the classroom students discussed books daily and were encouraged to describe why they liked certain books using literary terms.

The process for selecting a text to read aloud took less than half an hour and fell into five distinct phases that occurred over two days. 1) Michael selected four texts and presented them to the class by briefly discussing what they were about and then invited students who had read the books already to comment on his nominations. The majority of this time was spent by the teacher listening to the reactions and comments from the students and assessing the reactions of the students. 2) Michael then invites each student in the class to nominate their own text. The teacher then asks students to describe it if they had read it and as in step one the teacher observes and notes the class reactions and opinions of the book. (Students are given plenty of warning to bring the books into class so everyone can present a book to be chosen from) 3)Michael then takes a poll to determine the interest for each of the books. Note it is a poll not a vote so students can put up their hand as many times as they like. 4) A copy of each of the books stay at school that night and Michael quickly looks through the notes he took during the discussion and poll and from this reads a little of the most popular books. From this he determines which one will be the read-aloud book. 5) Michael spends a lot of time informing the students which text he has chosen. He provided justification to the students as to why some of the other books weren’t chosen such as ‘It really is better to read it yourself’ or ‘it had a lot of appeal.....I just decided to pass on that one for no particular reason.’ He then makes his final announcement and comments that “it looks like you’ll really like it, so we are going to give it a go.” (Boyd & Devennie 2009)

Michael ensures that through the discussion process he values all the students input and opinions and ensures all of the student input becomes significant to the process. “As Michael exploits the potential of children’s literature to entertain and inform, he evokes the power of personal involvement to motivate student engagement.” (Boyd & Devennie 2009) Michael also noted that through this process of a shared selection process his students are often introduced to other authors and students share and swap the books that weren’t chosen for the read-aloud.

Upon reflection of the two case studies, the process of giving students input into the decision making process in the classroom empowers the students as they are acknowledged and respected as active participants. The students therefore become more interested and motivated as they became involved in creating the task. During my teaching practicum I have witnessed the effectiveness of giving students the power to make decisions in relation to their learning. Within a grade 1 classroom the teacher often gave students the responsibility to make decisions and she strongly believed that this was essential to build an ownership of their learning and therefore more motivation to complete the task. The teacher would often allow students to make suggestions for activities or topics and class votes would occur. For example when learning about space the topic was introduced and students made suggestions about the different areas they would like to learn about. Some students then talked about what they knew about those topics and why it interested them. The students then voted and the teacher then designed activities and lessons to cover these. The students were more motivated and excited with the lessons as they had input into the topics being covered and therefore had a sense of ownership to the lessons.

To encourage students to participate in activities and motivate students to learn, Oakley (2006) states that students need to be provided with positive learning experiences. The article states that learning experiences should be delivered through providing ‘Control, choice and challenge to be scaffolded by teachers.’ Oakley (2006) states that teachers can increase children’s motivation to participate through appropriate scaffolded instructions with literacy activities. To increase students participation in a class students will need to want to learn. McCombs, Daniels and Perry (2008) state that ‘teacher practices need to be changed dramatically based on sound theory and empirical evidence to enhance students learning and motivation’. Teacher need to allow students participation in decision making, individual developmental differences and treat students as partners in the teaching and learning process. Oakley (2006) highlights that the teaching process needs to include ‘scaffolding, success, choice, control, challenge, interest and purpose.