Читать книгу The Perfect Blend - Michele Eaton - Страница 34

Choice is often a good first step to creating opportunities for student agency in the classroom. It is a very important first step, too. We know a lot about the importance of choice, not only in education but also in our day-to-day lives.

Some interesting consumer research exists about choice and shopping habits, which offers a lot of parallels with our blended classrooms. In his 2013 research on purchasing decisions, Daniel Mochon found that choice is incredibly important and identified a tendency he called “one-choice aversion.” Imagine going to the store to look for a particular item. If you get to the store and there are no choices, just one product available, even if that particular product is the best on the market or the most highly rated option of the item you are looking for, you are subconsciously more likely to still hate that product. This is simply because you do not have a choice (Mochon, 2013).

Consider how this applies to our own classrooms. Even with those subjects that we view as very interesting and naturally engaging for students, what happens when we don’t give students a choice in learning that content? Is it possible that when we teach these lessons and hand-select every piece of content or map out exactly how a student demonstrates mastery, we are encouraging students to dislike or disengage with the lesson? Are we fueling one-choice aversion? To some extent, I would argue that it is not enough to even create incredible assessments or projects. It is not enough to find the highest-quality interactive content to create beautiful, interactive digital content. By not giving the students any choice, even the best lesson ever written could be received poorly by students because they were not given a choice.

How can we provide students more academic choices? Students can have choices in how they learn content, and they can be given a choice in how they are assessed over that content. You can incorporate both these opportunities for choices effectively in online lessons used during blended learning.