Equality Shown Through Choice - Fair doesn’t always mean equal
I pay attention to movements in education when ideas start popping up in multiple places. I have seen this image now three different times throughout the past school year, and I’m paying attention.
Source: Out Front Minnesota
The notion of allowing students different modes of expressing what they know has been echoing for me the past few years. One of my favorite workshops to facilitate is: If You Give Students Choice, You Are Able to Hear Their Voice. Why shouldn’t we allow student choice? Many times this conversation begins from a Special Ed perspective, but it gets really good when those ideas are transferred to the whole class of students.
#studentchoice and #studentvoice are searchable on Twitter. That speaks loudly to me. Teachers are rolling with this idea, and seeing the results.
In a lesson I taught last month, modeled after one of the ELA/ELD Framework Snapshots, the student engagement was sky-high when students were asked to choose the 6 words they thought were the most important in an article. After they defended their choices to their group, they had to narrow down their choices to the top 3 most important words. They wrote each word on a sticky and made a bar graph of the words.
In the past, I would have taught them the words ahead of time, and told them why they were important. This time, they had to grapple with the words first. They had to make decisions, and test out how their decisions sat with their team and class. Every kid had their own level of access. Some students chose the word egg. Other students chose the word burrow. Both were important to the article on the nesting habits of Puffins. After all of their work with the words, then we could move to a more detailed understanding of the overall meaning of the article. Flipping the activity made for a much deeper interaction with the text. It was exciting both for the students, and for me to facilitate.
This video from The Teaching Channel blows my socks off every time I see it. The first grade teacher allows her students to choose how to represent the storyline of Goldilocks, and she has them explain why that choice helps them learn. If metacognition and student choice in First Grade is possible, then what can 8th graders do?
Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is another piece on the topic of equity that keeps echoing for me. Thinking about how we engage, represent and express knowledge is so transformative to a classroom.
http://www.cast.org/ and http://www.udlcenter.org/ are solid sites for discovering more about UDL. The free e-book on the CAST site has videos, case studies, and research to back up the foundations of UDL. The book was designed with a lot of accessibility supports to model best practices. You can highlight, take notes, use the glossary, and navigate easily through the chapters. The content of the book really helped open my eyes to possibilities I didn’t know were possible before.
In order for me to expand upon a concept, I need to see or read about other teachers implementing the practice. I ate up The Classroom Chef by John Stevens and Matt Vaudrey.
Even though math hasn’t been my focus for the past two years, I was able to easily relate to the examples these two gave about offering choice in their classroom. Their realization that one student’s poster was another student’s video really hit home for me. As I discussed class projects for Open House with teacher groups I worked with, I wondered what would happen to the quality of production and engagement if student choice was offered more frequently?
I’ve been out of the classroom now for four years, learning, exploring, and trying ideas out. I am really looking forward to getting back into my own classroom next year to see how all of these ideas play out in the reality of the day to day grind of teaching. #studentchoice = #studentvoice
