Student Choice

As RUSD moves forward with personalized learning, I’ve had a chance to see the emerging changes inside classrooms as well as teachers’ and students’ mindsets. Recently I visited two school sites, Liberty Elementary School and Matthew Gage Middle School.  Both of these schools are blazing a new trail as their students make choices about what and how they want to learn. Not only are students making choices in what they learn, they are making decisions on how to demonstrate  their learning and growth.

Student's WikiHow Doc

A 6th grader working on ELA standards was displaying his understanding of the standards via a coding program on his Chromebook. Another student in the same class was working on the same standards, but was creating a slideshow about Dunkin Donuts. At Matthew Gage, one student was embedding YouTube videos on modern dance for her wikihow while another student was creating a tutorial on how to beat Mike Tyson in an old Nintendo game. The diversity in students’ interests and how they were able to fit them into their own learning created a noticeable buzz of excitement in these classrooms.

RUSD PL Elements

What kind of change has this concept of student choice brought forth in school? I had a chance to ask students about their interest based assignments and the key word was passion. By enabling students to research and produce work based on their passions, there is an intrinsic motivation in learning because students are fully invested and engaged. A student said, “Teachers always told me what to learn and how to learn it. I don’t think I can go back to school how it used to be.”