Should We Trust Students to Take Charge of Their Learning? The Answer May Surprise You!

From my brief time working with adolescents in my field work (and a few interviews conducted with some students), I’ve started to get an understanding of “teen literacies” that aren’t all that different from my literacies when I was in high school. Some of the biggest takeaways from being around students and interviewing some of them are the importance of choice (which is a huge surprise only if you’re not paying attention), how a school workload influences students’ abilities and willingness to take part in reading and writing for pleasure, and of course how varied teens are when it comes to their literacies.

Without contest, the biggest insight gained from both interviewing students and just talking with students in general is how important the aspect of choice is when completing things. I know that I also grappled with the notion of reading as an adolescent because so often the only thing that I was reading were things that were assigned to me in classes where I felt less than autonomous.

Because of that (and honestly even before these interviews, because I’ve been paying attention) one of the things that I plan to implement into my teaching is choice. Even if it’s a choice from a list of things, it’s still better than no choice at all. These choices don’t stop at what a student reads in class, though. The students I interviewed all said that they didn’t write much for fun, and the ones that had a strong opinion on the matter said that if they could make a writing assignment that they wanted to do they would enjoy it more. The suggestions for composition always trended toward other forms of academic writing, so I’m sure that bringing multimodal production as an option of a “writing” method into class would certainly get some student buy-in.

Another factor is the school workload. Of course, there are assignments that need to be assigned to evaluate where students are in their learning, but I remember being in school and being assigned things that I had to constantly wonder what purpose they served. I suppose that leads me to something that I might consider trying. Instead of having a “read this by then” approach, maybe I could get away with assigning just a certain amount of reading from some variety of text. Of course, this sort of relates to choice, but I’d also like to keep the workload as small as it needs to be so I can instead encourage students to really engage in texts (both consuming and creating) that bring them joy to foster that healthy long term relationship with literature.

A third thing that I would love to incorporate into my classroom is a vast classroom library because of the varied interests of teens. Naturally there’s the issue of cost and making sure that all the texts are things that aren’t going to get huge backlash from students, but I’m sure with the help of sites like donor’s choose and with a little time an excellent library for a classroom can be pieced together. This is, again, just an extension of choice. It seems like allowing students to choose what they read, when they read, what they write, and how they write might be the best approach to getting students engaged with literature. It’s almost like we should let the students run (or, maybe, lead) their own learning. I wonder if anyone’s written anything on that yet that would support my hypothesis (:O).