Hodder Education Blog Post: Student choice, Agency, and Co-Design in Language A
Part of developing the voices of our students is in listening to the topics or texts they want to study. Student choice on your syllabus will not only motivate your students to read but will also help the entire classroom, including yourself, hear new perspectives. Even if students are choosing from a set of topics or texts you have pre-selected, the reasons they vote on particular items help us to understand the children better and allow us to see the matrix of our selections in a different way.
You can build student choice into your course in a variety of ways. This is something I address at several points in the IB DP Language A concept-based learning book. In this recent post on Hodder’s blog, I discuss these aspects. It is also something we can work on together in a workshop or through consultation. This is just one of many ways to make the learning in your classroom more relevant, dynamic, and fun.