Here is an excerpt from a teacher’s point of view about student voice. For me, this raises a lot of questions:
How do age/grade level impact student voice/choice?
How are choice and teacher mandates (CCSS, for example) related?
How does knowing “what it means to learn” influence student voice/choice.
Here is one starting place – from a high school teacher’s point of view:
Do We Give Students Too Much Choice? By Brian Field
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2016/08/24/do-we-give-students-too-much-choice.html
August 23, 2016
A few brief excerpts:
There is an increased focus on student choice in K-12 education today. This focus has created more student-centered classrooms that use problem-based learning and differentiation of instruction to give students agency in what and how they learn. As a high school teacher, I understand why teachers feel the necessity to cater to all of their students’ strengths by providing opportunities for student choice. But, as schools try to incorporate student-centered initiatives into the classroom, there is often a lack of critical consideration for the potentially negative effects increased choice may have on student learning…..
The new question now becomes: What degree of choice should we have? Though these studies apply to retail, they have grounds in the field of education regarding student choice. As these studies help to show, the current debate surrounding this classroom strategy is not whether students should have choice, but to what degree student choice is effective…..
I have learned in my own experiences that effective feedback takes copious amounts of time when all students complete the same assignment—and the greater variety of student choice only increases that time. There needs to be a balance between an appropriate amount of student choice and the ability of the teacher to impart the feedback necessary to reach maximum student growth in a timely manner….
