During this semester I have been focused on choice in the classroom and have been challenged with the task of including choice in everything I’ve done. I thought this was going to be challenging simply because I had never experienced so much choice before. When I first started giving my tutoring student choice I gave her choice in everything she did. I let her choose absolutely everything with no guidance or options. I think the lack of guidance is what confused her. I would simply ask her “what do you want to do” and she would always reply with vague answers. It seemed as if we were both inexperienced with choice. I decided to do some research on giving choices to students who haven’t been given choice before. I found that for younger students it’s better to give them a few options to pick from and then eventually scaffold the choice of choosing whatever they want to do. I decided to implement this with my tutoring student and she started making progress in her skills and motivation.
I started writing my lesson plans with two options for activities. When we were working on word features and had to sort words based on their feature I gave her options to do it with pictures, written words, or both. Little changes like these helped her feel like she mattered and that I wanted her to feel like she was in control of our tutor sessions. Eventually, she got to the point where I would offer her three book options and she would ask if we could go find one in the library to read instead. I believe that working with her has grown me as an educator in many ways but specifically with providing choice. With the proper scaffolding and guidance choice can be included to any classroom. Even teaching my writing workshop lesson I gave them so much choice on what to write, which figurative language to insert into their writing, and if they wanted to present. Initially I was worried about giving choice but now I’m worried about my students not having enough choice in the classroom. Now that I have the experience of the writing workshop and my tutoring lessons I’m much more confident in my abilities to include choice within my everyday lessons as a teacher in the near future.
This experience has also helped me as a reader and writer. Going through school I never got the choice to write whatever I wanted or read books I wanted during school, so this discouraged me to write outside of school. After doing this research and teaching these lessons based on choice it has encouraged me to read, and not just books about education but what I want to read. I’ve also started writing and have aspirations to eventually write my own children’s book one day. Being a children’s literature minor put this dream into my head, but learning that I can write and should be able to write without judgment has made my dream a reality.