Skip to main content

Letting Go: Giving Students Choice

Choices, Choices, Choices!  When you walk down the toothpaste aisle at your local grocery store, there are so many choices.  Decades ago, you had two choices:  Colgate and Crest.  Now we have to choose between the brand and variety: cavity protection or whitening, gel or paste, mint or bubble gum, and so on.

Our students are born in a day and age where they have numerous choices, and, with technology, they can research and find the best choice that suits their needs.  Well, education should not be any different.

Choice boards and student menus are excellent avenues that allow for student choice, but still give you, the instructor, an idea on how students are learning and mastering specific content.

Choice Boards

A choice board is a graphic organizer that allows students to decide how they will learn a concept or demonstrate mastery of content. Choice boards focus on students' interests, abilities, and needs.  In the example below, you can see the student has to pick three activities to complete in a Tic-Tac-Toe fashion.  When designing a choice board, be sure to include activities that will accommodate the various learning styles:  visual, aural, verbal and physical, logical, social, and solitary.  You will find that choice boards are easily adaptable to various learning levels in your classroom.

https://www.smore.com/z12ay-tic-tac-toe-choice-boards-menus

How to Create a Choice Board

  1. Identify the instructional focus.
  2. Determine your students' interests, needs, and learning styles.
  3. Design tasks that meet the students' interests, needs and learning styles.
  4. Arrange the tasks in a 9 celled table.
  5. Have students pick tasks in a Tic-Tac-Toe fashion:  diagonal, vertical, horizontal.  

Student Menus

Student menus, like choice boards, allow for student choice.  The difference between a student menu and a choice board is how the information is presented.  Let's take a look at a student menu.
https://iqe4efxsuu-flywheel.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Digital-Menu-for-Student-Creation.png
Tom Spall, Creator


In this example, the student menu is set up like a HyperDoc.  Students choose an appetizer, main entree, beverage, side dish, and dessert.  This menu can be adapted to any grade level, content area, and learning ability.

Here is another example of a student menu.  
https://www.smore.com/z12ay-tic-tac-toe-choice-boards-menus

Letting Go

Are you ready to let go a little by creating a choice board or learning menu?  Your Technology Integrator would be happy to assist and facilitate the process.  Let's give our students the opportunity have voice and choice in their learning.

Resources




About the Author

Becky Poljac is a technology integrator with Chesterfield County Public Schools.  She recently moved to the Richmond area from Springfield, VA where she was a high school teacher and a school based technology specialist in Fairfax County.  She enjoys spending time with her husband and two young children, gardening, running, and traveling.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is an LMS?

What is a LMS? What is an LMS and why should I use one?  You may have heard the term LMS (Learning Management System ) talked about in meetings, or read about in the board docs or ACTS notes.  Well, what is it? And more importantly, why are moving in this direction? An LMS is a learning management system that will provide a true one stop user experience for your teaching materials, assessment tools, projects, rubrics, learning outcomes, group conferencing,  etc. The learning management system we have chosen to purchase is Canvas. Canvas is a large company that currently provides LMS functionality to many major universities, the Virginia Community College System,  and the entire K-12 public school system in North Carolina. Canvas allows you to create assessments, manage instructional content, conduct group discussions or video chats/leave student feedback, create rubrics, and will auto grade your assessment materials.  Canvas integrates with ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Re-Situating Hapara

Best Practices for Supporting Students  Working in the Digital Real m      When you hear people talking about “Hapara,” what comes to mind? Is it “that website that works with G Suite?” Perhaps it’s “that tool that lets you close student browser tabs.” If you are not familiar with all of what Hapara can do, it can be easy to get caught up in Hapara's administrative features and use it just to police student chromebook activity. In this post, we’ll “re-situate” Hapara so that you will be better equipped to support learners working with tools in G Suite and beyond. Why Hapara?      You may have read or heard about the research of John Hattie, a Professor of Education at the University of Melbourne in Australia. Hattie synthesized a wealth of existing studies to determine the most impactful ways to raise student achievement.  The top five strategies include: student visible learning, formative assessment, acceleration, feedback, and other metac...
Post a Comment
Read more