Giving students choices – but which ones?

My memory of being a student at school is that there were not many choices. Sit here; look her; remember this; do your tie up; eat now, don’t talk.  My memory of being a student at University, in stark contrast, is that there were too many choices (dozens of courses; optional attendance; easy to avoid work; no monitoring of behaviours)!  Or at least, it felt to me like too many, perhaps coming from the restricted environment I had been used used to.  So, as we have been thinking about giving more autonomy to our own students, I have been wondering about the right balance.  What might be too little choice?  Too much choice?  And what’s just the right amount?

On the one hand, we know that students, and human beings in general, flourish when they can exercise choice over things that they value.  On the other hand, anyone who has ever honestly looked reflected on previous decisions – especially as a child – knows that not all our choices are wise ones. We need to square these two truths, and find ways to allow choices while recognising that as parents and educators, we have some duty and need to support, structure, and in some cases constrain these choices.

As far as students go, there is compelling evidence that lack of autonomy (that is a  command-and-control compliance culture) leads to poor outcomes in a whole host of areas. Psychologists Ryan and Deci in their seminal work on motivation write:

…children in classrooms where the teachers endorsed more controlling strategies and attitudes reported lower levels of intrinsic motivation, perceived content confidence and self-esteem than students in classrooms with more autonomy-supportive teachers. When teachers were more controlling, students reported being less curious about schoolwork, preferring easier rather than challenging assignments, feeling less initiative in their approach to school, and less good about themselves both as students and in general. (Ryan and Deci, 2017 p151)

[That’s for students – interestingly this psychological perspective also seems to apply to teachers.  McKinsey’s rightly-famous report (p28) shows that once you get beyond moving schools from poor to fair, and think about being good, or even great, the focus turns away from scripting and control, towards decentralisation and coaching models – that is, toward increasing teacher autonomy].

For these reasons, and my own generally fairly liberal beliefs, I firmly believe in promoting student autonomy.  But that’s the easy bit.  The much harder bit comes when we ask how much autonomy and where? because autonomy is one good among many, and any organisation deals in difficult trade-offs.

Total choice poses some fundamental questions of value.  Would we allow committed mathematicians to drop studying a second language?  Or linguists to drop maths?  Should everyone do Service?  Can anyone avoid all physical activity?  Should we all study our first language?

From the way I frame those questions, you can see why in most contexts, including ours, total choice is not a sensible thing to approach.  And to be fair, few schools or writers advocate for this extreme. 

However, I came across a new distinction which offers concrete immediate and easy steps towards autonomy.  Ryan and Deci argue that we can make … a distinction between option choice and action choice. Whereas option choice involves allowing people to choose from an array of diverse options (e.g. which topic will we discuss in today’s class?), action choice involves providing ongoing choice during activity engagement itself. Such action choice can have to do with when, where, how and with whom activities are carried out. …. 

Simply put, how we do things matters at least as much as what we do.  In the big picture, this fits into a meta-belief of mine – that while both are important, pedagogy trumps curriculum in terms of impact on students.

So teachers can offer autonomy in daily classroom routines by allowing students to action choices, such as

• where to sit or stand (but not whether to participate)
• who to collaborate with (but not whether to collaborate)
• which assignments to undertake (but not whether to do work)
• what precise understandings to explore (but not the general area of inquiry)
• whether to receive answers or hints (but not that feedback is essential)

There are also a range of linguistic cues that teachers can adopt (see refs below from Reeve et al) and  experimental studies found that action choices were more beneficial for eliciting a sense of volition and internal perceived locus of control and intrinsic motivation…. and concluded that in order for the provision of activities to positively affect intrinsic motivation, allowing ongoing action choices within activities may be most effective.

None of this is to say that we should not offer some option choices – we do and we should, but it does tell us that even within a totally prescribed curriculum, there are rich opportunities for student autonomy because action choices are at least as, and probably more important.