by Heather Webster
Tucker patiently documented his steps as he crafted a wooden fishing lure using carving tools, a belt sander, and a drill press.
Katrina experimented with the zoom features on her phone as she studied the changes in frog eggs over a four week period.
And Oscar worked on his mapping skills as well as kept a travel journal on his journey through Scrap Mechanic, an open-world sandbox game.
Would you be surprised to find that these students were all working on their English assignment?
Projects such as these are embedded with skills typically practiced in English class: research; accurate documentation; thinking critically; writing clearly, concisely, and sometimes quite creatively; and presenting and communicating effectively.
Yes, I could target those same skills by having each student write the same research paper, but in the end almost everyone will end up bored with the process and the product, including me. Instead, I offer learners opportunities to make choices and explore their interests, leading to higher engagement, stronger focus, and deeper learning.
One of my growing passions is sparking student engagement. I’ve found one of the best ways to engage learners and encourage deeper learning is to offer choices, and today’s technology makes offering choices a relatively simple task. This year, especially as students work remotely either part or all of the time, high engagement is a necessity, and I’ve built choices into almost every part of my course.
Students have choices in the prompts they are responding to in their writer’s notebook. They have choices in the mentor texts they read. They have choices in the projects they will complete for their independent reading. Recently, my freshmen all read a short narrative called “Mississippi Mud” and practiced with the choice board that they will be using for their novels at the end of the month. How fun to see a variety of one-pagers, blackout poetry, diary entries, playlists, and book trailers instead of a single pile of essays, or worse, worksheets. Each student is able to demonstrate their understanding of and interaction with the narrative in a way that interests and engages them.
It’s not that I didn’t offer students active learning in the past, activities I thought were both educational and fun. The difference is that offering choice means giving up control and giving students agency in their own learning. And the rewards are, at least to me, clear: greater investment, higher productivity, and deeper learning.
Heather Webster is an English teacher at Medomak Valley High School in Waldoboro, Maine and a 2021 Maine State Teacher of the Year Finalist. She is a Maine Writing Project Teaching Consultant and currently pursuing her Master’s in Education with a concentration in Literacy in Writing. Heather Webster can be reached at heather_webster@msad40.org.
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