There is abundant literature on the many benefits of promoting student choice (for an accessible overview see, “The key to making improvements: as the students”).
Among the positive outcomes associated with giving students authentic choices in what they will learn, how they will learn it, and how they will demonstrate their learning are:
- Better attainment of learning objectives
- More engagement in the classroom
- Better generalization of classroom learning to real life situations
I would like to suggest another reason for providing students, especially adolescents, with meaningful choices and then honoring those choices – they know better than adults what is really important to them.
This may be particularly true in the field of social and emotional learning (SEL). Although tremendous gains have been made in the past 25 years in terms of understanding the importance of SEL, best practices in implementing SEL, and the many positive outcomes associated with high quality SEL programs, it is still a budding field, as evidenced by the existence of at least 40 different SEL frameworks encompassing more than 100 social and emotional skills.
- Promoting student choice through SEL self-assessment - January 31, 2022
- How social and emotional competence leads to educational equity - October 26, 2021
- Building student resilience yields positive mental health behaviors - September 8, 2021