A Menu of Options/ Do Your Own Assignments

One piece that is really sticking out to me this week is the idea of a menu of choices for students when it comes to projects and papers used for assessment. The cookie example displays perfectly why it’s important to give students equally weighted options when having large assignments. Not everyone thinks a like and approaches tasks the same. Thinking back to Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences Theory, not all people learn the same. So giving choices that are weighed equally, or as equally as you can get them, allows students to have a choice in how they want to best demonstrate their knowledge. But as stated in class, it’s important that students know that they may have a choice, but they must choose all the options presented to them at least once. So for example, give students an option to write a paper about “Of Mice and Men,” film and write a script for a scene from the movie, or create an eight page, multi-panel comic of their perception of the book along with a one to two page analysis of why they chose which scenes and how they accented the themes and motifs of the book using visuals.

 

The idea of choice and creative freedom was one I didn’t get to experience until college in some of my writing ad English classes. In SED 445, How to Teach Writing in Secondary Schools, we were required to create an assignment for students based on a wordless graphic novel.  One thing that stood out to me about that assignment, that I am reminded of again this week is the idea of weighted options. That stands for an important question: How can you be sure that your choices are fairly heavy? Well in my past SED 445 class, we not only created an assignment and rubric, but we did our own assignment. And let me say, it was a powerful experience and one that I’d advocate that teachers do more often. Doing your own project helps you see into the eyes of a student more effectively. It was hard to pick myself apart from what I knew about the assignment and just go off of what I had created, but the attempt yielded results that showed me how much or little I was asking from students. It also shows you what’s important about your assignment and what isn’t. For one of my classmates in SED 445, he had created a film project with a packet to guide their process. Doing it himself, he realized that the packet was confusing and asked way too many insignificant details that detracted from the actual content.

 

Giving choices to students allows them entry into the assignment. Students feel more invested and excited when they get the chance to break out of the norm of paper writing and get creative. Its where thinking outside the box and hands on skills can thrive and where students can get a sense of what they can really do when guided effectively and given the chance.