Can we all agree students put forth more effort when they get to feel like they in some way have chosen their assignment?
One day I can walk into class and everyone wants to share what they think, other days are pure silence. Of course this often depends on the class as well as who is in attendance but we have all have had those days on both ends of the spectrum. Can hear crickets versus total uproar.
*Sometimes just giving a class a way to share their voice in a positive manner is not a bad idea.
While we know we can not necessarily just let our students make up their own assignments we also know that giving them some basic guidelines and letting them go sometimes can have the best results.
Today, I was working on coming up with a way for my Child Development 2 students to learn not just about Multiple Intelligences but what they actually mean AND what it means for a teacher to plan for a lesson where they know they have different types of learners in the classroom.
Today, I was working on coming up with a way for my Child Development 2 students to learn not just about Multiple Intelligences but what they actually mean AND what it means for a teacher to plan for a lesson where they know they have different types of learners in the classroom.
What I came up with was a lesson where students work in groups to create a lesson to teach a child with a specific (assigned) type of intelligence. Now where do I give the students their choice in this? They could choose their group members, they could choose the type of intelligence, or they could choose what lesson they would teach using the type of intelligence. There are pretty obvious negatives as well as positive to each choice. What I plan to do is let them choose their group. I will assign each group a type of intelligence to research and then to plan for. Then I will allow the class to vote on what they want to focus on teaching. In this way each group will plan for a different intelligence but will be teaching the same basic information.
Now, how do I get the majority to vote? Not only vote, but vote with what they are actually interested in and not just what their friend is voting for?
For me, I chose polleverywhere.com. Its easy, free and gives some options. It looks a lot like the picture below when given to students. They can answer from text or on the web link from their computer.
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| Before feedback - This is what I show on my smartboard. |
After having used this several times in several different classes I do feel that polleverywhere.com is a good choice to take a poll but there are tons of other choices.
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| What the poll looks like with responses. The class loves to watch for results! |
As you can see this class voted to teach about the seasons. (The other class chose Animals, but then narrowed that down to Farm Animals - if you were wondering.)
It seems like such a small thing to give a class a choice about, but something about them having some say about their assignment made the overall feel of the classroom burst with excitement. Excitement from high schoolers is something amazing considering it only took about 3 minutes of class time to make the majority of the class feel like they suddenly had some kind of control over what they wanted to do with their assignment.
If you have not used any type of polling technology to get feedback from students I strongly encourage you to find some websites you like to use and that you feel meet your needs. If you have any questions or would like to discuss some ideas please let me know!
Other Options?
Below are 2 links that will tell you about various other types of poll/survey type websites. They are from a blog called Educatorstechnology which has a ton of great resources for any teacher.
13 Free and Easy Survey Tools
Great Tools for Teachers
Also, if you are wanting to ask more than one question you may want to do something more like survey monkey or google forms. These are great for more quiz like questions or just when you have more than one or 2 basic questions to ask.
