Working with At-Risk Youth: Choices

Once you’ve got them there, and established a “working group” (the way I envision a well-functioning group of learners), the third principle is to provide the maximum level of choice (within supportive structures). This is not something that your students are going to be good at initially--it will require training from you, and it won’t blossom overnight. The kinds of students with the fanciest labels are the very people with the least amount of practice making choices. The more labels you come to school with, the more likely you’ve been told what to do all your life. Kids with labels (Title I, SPED, ESL, whatever) are the ones who usually are “required” to do things, as opposed to the other kids who have had more experience with making choices about their future. But kids with labels need just as much practice with making choices as everyone else in the school. In fact, they need to get good at it because having a sense of personal agency (being a person who CAN make choices) is the only thing that will help them overcome whatever barriers happen to exist in their life.

You have to start out with baby steps, and build up to a greater amount of autonomy. Some examples of expanding choice in my classroom are: where to sit (I allow students to sit where they want as long as it works for me), what to read during SSR (students can choose from a number of different kinds of reading material, which may not always be novels), to work alone or with a partner (most of the things that occur in class aside from testing are things one could choose to work on alone or collaboratively—it doesn’t matter to me how it gets done), how much work to do (there’s set minimums for everyone, but students are welcome to exceed them for a higher grade since grades in my classes are based largely on productivity), what kinds of work to do (within various units, there’s a number of assignment options that students can choose from), how to spend free time if the work is finished, what kind of grade they want (I make the criterion for the grading very clear, and give students a choice to earn higher grades of they desire to do so) and later on, students help plan the curriculum by selecting some of the topics we study in class, or propose activities that support these objectives. Needless to say, going from “Where do I sit” to “What do I want to learn” is a bit of leap, and it takes time to get there, and not all classes can handle maximum choice, but no matter where they are, by the end of the year, you can bring an entire group of learners further up the spectrum on the scale of autonomy than where they were before they were in your class.