(At our inservice today, I presented two sessions. Here are the notes I used for the first one)
Power of Choice
We all like choices, but as students get older, it can be harder to manage the process of giving them choices while covering needed curriculum and skills as well as managing a classroom where people are doing many different things simultaneously. There is also a movement afoot to encourage people to try different modes of expression to develop or show understanding of what’s under consideration in a class.
Choice Grids in Senior English
I have used the technique of a “Choice Grid” with great effectiveness. Students like choices, and I like reading different responses in a class instead of many variations on exactly the same theme.
First semester, I had the following grid of choices for my “Style and Content Seminar”; students wrote four of the six:
| Critiquing the Critic: Achebe’s essay on Heart of Darkness | Changing modes of writing usingThe Grand Inquisitor as source text |
| Soliloquy: inserting new information in 25 lines of blank verse into Hamlet | Imitating Style: inserting a new scene in Heart of Darkness |
| Critiquing the cinematographic elements of a scene of a previously unviewed production of Hamlet | How do style and content reinforce one another in a class reading? |
Second semester, students were expected to write 7 of the following 10 options in Literature and Philosophy:
| Literature inclass: how do the processes of reading and writing mutually influence each other? | “Merleau-Ponty[1] says that true philosophy consists in relearning to look at the world.”[2] From Merleau-Ponty’s perspective, where is the philosophy in Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler… ? |
| Literature inclass: how does Calvino’s style reflect the content of his novel? | How and to what extent does If on a winter’s night a traveler… support a Nietzschean outlook on the contemporary world?
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| Critique Cavel’s definition of philosophy as “education for grown-ups” | Critique Critchley’s assertions on the role of reason in argumentation |
| Where does meaning originate? | Illustrate how we do—and do not—live in a postmodern world |
| Independent reading with evaluation/contextualization | 2000-word paper on the social implications of a philosophy (counts as 2 choices) |
Selection of ISPs in senior math:
Seniors have a choice each semester of a project from the following grid. Each project requires work, reflection, and student evaluations if the student teaches.
Science: Molecular oscillations, Solving Schrodinger’s Equation, Maxwell’s Equations
Math and computer science: Group Theory, Coding in Mathematica, Number Theory, Complex analysis, Chaos Non-Euclidean Geometries
Politics and Economics: Modeling the economics and psychology of war, An economics primer
Music: Fourier series
Into New Modes: Teaching ; Making manipulatives for math courses
The choices serve two different ends: in the English seminars, the students can gain flexibility in scheduling and a little control over the pace of their lives (important to first-semester seniors) as well as have the opportunity to try several things related closely to the course topic but outside the mainstream of their experience.
The math ISPs are designed to take only a week and to introduce the students to topics well outside the mainstream of all their math courses to date–or to let them delve much more deeply into an area that they found interesting.
Maybe some questions if you’re thinking “student choice”:
- What should be required of all students?
- Are all choices equivalent?
- Do the choices emphasize breadth of possibilities or different means of demonstrating competence?
- Are you comfortable in assessing “apples and oranges” and in defending your grades if they’re questioned?
[1] Maurice Merleau-Ponty (14 March 1908 – 3 May 1961) was a French phenomenological philosopher. At the core of his philosophy is a sustained argument for the foundational role perception plays in understanding the world as well as engaging with the world. (from Wikipedia)
[2] From Simon Critchley’s Impossible Objects 2012 p44