Let The Students Choose

Last year, after a classroom observation, one of my principals asked me a simple question, "Did your students help you plan this lesson?". My answer, which at the time seemed obvious was no. I wasn't going to let my eight and nine year old third graders help plan my lesson. If they had their choice, we would have coloring sheets and game time forever. The idea seemed crazy.

Well, after I answered. He told me that I could have scored higher on my TLE (Teacher and Leader Effectiveness) Evaluation System if they had helped me plan my lesson. This made me think...

I had read so much research about the importance of involving my students in classroom rules and procedures, but I'd never considered letting them be involved in the planning stages of their own learning. I decided that I was going to come up with a plan which would allow my students to choose how they wanted to learn; however, I still had to have control of my classroom. I created this packet to do just that. Below is a sampling of the packet. The pack includes 6 choices for the students; however, the students do not know the learning objective attached to the choice. The objectives include: rounding, multiplication strategies, regrouping, multiplication facts, properties of multiplication, and missing addends. You can find it in my TPT store if you want to see more. Enjoy!