Choosing Wisely

I love making choices about the perfect fall sweater to wear when the weather gets cold or which book on my TBR list I will pick up next. There is something absolutely delightful about having choices. 

At least until they leave you in a stupor unable to function... 

Like a family trying to decide where to go to dinner among the myriad restaurants available to them, too many choices can be a nightmare.

It turns out that years of research have proven the difficulty of operating in an environment with too much choice. More choices rarely mean more freedom to choose appropriately. As I work in classrooms with adolescents and adults daily, this research has weighed on me. It is estimated that teachers make 1500 choices a day when considering instruction, curriculum, and the social-emotional needs of their students. That would create fatigue in even the most developed minds. 

When we consider the decisions our students are asked to make each day, the added layer of underdeveloped executive functioning skills creates more complexity. The Harvard Center on the Developing Child has activity guides for supporting executive functioning skills in various student age groups. According to the experts in this area, executive functioning skills are not at fully formed adult levels during adolescence, but students are often asked to perform adult brain functions in their communication and mastery of organizational tasks in school. 

Adults are making too many choices and are exhausted, and students do not have the executive functioning skills to make all the choices required of them each day. It's a recipe for burnout and disaster. We need to reexamine when we offer meaningful choices that support both students and adults.

Here are two areas to consider when planning for choice in the classroom:

Grouping

I get it. Students want to choose their own groups. They should absolutely be able to do that during occasional appropriate assignments. However, if students frequently choose their own groups or are allowed to choose whether or not to work in a group, that is not developing the classroom community and learning environment necessary for success. All the brain science tells us they cannot, and will not, always make good choices in this area, even if we prompt them. We also need to group students intentionally according to the goals of the collaborative work, and student-chosen groups do not allow for purposeful teacher-chosen learning objectives. Additionally, there are always students who do not have friends in the class and will be uncomfortable when choosing groups.

When planning collaborative work that will support student needs, consider Trevor Muir's collaboration toolkit with resources for self-assessment and organizing group work to help students' brains manage the increased choices involved. To form random groups that build community and promote thinking, Peter Liljedahl's grouping strategies using playing cards are simple and effective. Hand the students a card when they walk in to form a visibly random group of three that varies for each assignment. Jennifer Gonzales, who operates the Cult of Pedagogy Podcast, recently released an episode with tweaks to group work that make it more effective. She discusses the intentionality in when and how you group students to take the cognitive load off the students and teachers with preplanned structures and protocols.

To decrease choices and increase success, create a spreadsheet with various student grouping strategies you could employ at any moment in the classroom based on your goals for the collaborative time. When you want to intentionally group, use the groups you already have formed on the spreadsheet. If you want to use random groups, have your playing cards on hand. If you do the thinking ahead of time, it takes the choice out of the equation for you and your students in the moment and leads to more learning in the long term.

Engagement and Participation

In a post-Covid classroom world, I hear increasing teacher uncertainty around calling on students in class and feelings of intrusion when requiring student engagement. While student autonomy in choosing how to show mastery has proven effective, there is very little support for autonomy in allowing students to opt out of engaging in classroom discussions and learning activities. Considering the brain science...some brains literally cannot make a good choice in that scenario. Unfortunately, there are too many secondary classrooms where students avoid learning by leaving class often or sit quietly in the back without speaking throughout an entire lesson. Teachers have to push, scaffold, and maintain high expectations, especially for our historically marginalized populations.

Zaretta Hammond calls this combination of care and push required for student engagement and participation part of being a warm demander. Brain science tells us that students need to discuss learning and engage in class, but they need teachers who have earned the right to demand that engagement. With care and scaffolding, any teacher should be able to call on any student in class. It is also vitally important in the post-Covid world to use all student response systems to increase response rates. We may occasionally need to ask one individual student to volunteer an answer to a question posed by the teacher, but that should be the exception and not the norm. In general, we need to have quick ways that all students engage so they cannot make a choice to opt out of the learning.

Ultimately, when we allow students to disengage we may feel like we are meeting social-emotional needs in the moment, but it simply adds more to the choices and cognitive load later. We all reap the consequences of lowering our expectations for work completion and engagement when students frantically try to pass a class where they are largely disengaged or pass a test when practice and study are optional. Engagement in learning should never be a choice.

While making choices for fashion and fun frees my mind and brings joy, too many choices forced on a brain in a learning situation create confusion and delay learning. If we decrease choices that allow students to quietly disengage from the content, we will all be choosing wisely.