The Power of Student Choice

This year, I made many Shifts to my teaching that greatly impacted my classroom environment.   For the most part, it was all positive.  Scary for me, yes.   But positive.   I made the decision that a risk I wanted to take was to give my students more control and more choice.   For the most part, students did extremely well.   Of course, I had a few goobers trying to push the limits, and they were appropriately disciplined.  

During Teacher Appreciation Week, the students are able to go to the main office and fill out a "Teacher Kudos" form.   Basically, they fill it out, it goes in a bucket for a drawing, and then when all is said and done every teacher gets their Kudo.  

This year, I received eleven awesome Kudos from my kiddos.    The one had said that they like me because my class is fun and I let them do whatever they want.    Agh.  That could totally be interpreted the wrong way.    I met with the student and first thanked them for thinking of me and told them I appreciated the Kudo.   I then asked them to clarify their statement.    They told me that they really liked being able to have choices in my room.    They liked being able to choose an article of their interest to apply their current reading strategy.   They liked being able to choose their seat.    They liked being able to work independently and call on me when they were stuck rather than me be all up in their bubble.

As I reflected on this I thought... time to ask all students what they thought about student choice.   The conversations that were had yesterday afternoon were simply amazing.    One student said, "You know we have some problems with our learning but you don't treat us like we can't do something."

Here are some images of their writings - these are the only ones I had permission to share.  

I would seriously love your thoughts on this!   Please send me a message/tweet or comment below!