Red Green Color Blindness
Students can be actively engaged without really thinking for themselves or making decisions on a deeper level.
Show What You Know: This is a common entry point into student choice and creation. In this option, students find creative ways to “teach back” what they have learned. Ideally, they will apply it at a higher level, but even a simple reteaching of a concept can help cement the learning while also giving room for the higher-level cognitive tasks of creation and choice.
Often, teachers will allow students to decide either what they teach or how they will communicate it (or both).
If your creation project is framed as an inquiry activity, choice will drive much of the experience. In an inquiry project, students will typically start with a question and then work to find an answer.
This might be in the form of a problem/solution activity, and the solution may come in the form of some sort of creation.
Throughout this process, it’s questions, inquiry, and problem-solving that drive the learning, and it all leads up to some type of creative solution in the end.
The “creation” might be an idea, or it may be a physical product. Inquiry leverages the power of allowing students to ask questions.
Once they have generated questions, they seek out answers through research, experimentation, creation, and/or other forms of discovery.
In a history class, students could seek answers to why certain events occurred as they did and whether or not the outcome might have been changed.
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In upcoming articles, we’ll explore different strategies and approaches for fostering student choice and creativity in the classroom. Check back for specific tools and strategies that you can add to your own instructional toolkit. By giving your students the opportunity for creation and choice through technology, you will empower them as they move on to college, careers, and more.
The key word in all of this is empower. We want to empower our students. John Spencer, a professor and former middle school teacher, talks about the importance of empowering students throughout the learning process. He describes how schools need to shift the student experiences
Students can be actively engaged without really thinking for themselves or making decisions on a deeper level.
To be truly college, career, and life ready, students need to be empowered.
While engagement is a huge improvement over compliance, its still not good enough. Students can be actively engaged without really thinking for themselves or making decisions on a deeper level.
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