Professional Resources in Support of Student Choice

ALAN Review, Fall 2003 by Dunn, Susan

High school students are difficult. As educators, we find ourselves searching through our mental archives on a daily basis trying to get our students excited about learning. I will never forget standing in front of a class of twenty-five giggling reluctant readers with my little brother's dinosaur figurines trying to act out a scene from the book jurassic Park. I was constantly trying to find new and innovative ways to make my students excited about reading the way that I was in high school when I first picked up a copy of Stephen King's The Green Mile. I read that book cover to cover in four days. I forgot to eat, lost sleep and even convinced myself to read just one more chapter as I was driving in the car. I saw how a good book could pull you in, make you cry, and inquire about life. I also saw how reading one good book could lead me to find other good books. It is in this passion for reading that I have found my calling as teacher.

The books that I remember reading as a child and as a young adult were those that I picked myself. It is in this choice that I felt ownership of my own knowledge. This ownership is one of the traits that we all want to pass on to our students. It is through student choice that we can accomplish this goal. By implementing student choice in the literature classroom students are more likely to find motivation to read and become lovers of reading.

In our search for resources pertaining to student choice, we found a plethora of information about students' reading preferences in the literature classroom. However, few resources focus on teaching students how to choose in the literature classroom specifically. The following are reviews of two resources that could be of interest to teachers who intend to implement choice into the classroom. The first resource, authored by Alfie Kohn, focuses on the theoretical implications of choice in education. The second, a collection of proceedings from a conference held by the NCTE, focuses specifically on the practical implications of choice in the English classroom.

Kohn, Alfie. "Choices and Children: Why and How to Let Students Decide." Phi Delta Kappan (1993): 8-20.

In this article, Alfie Kohn illustrates the power of providing student ownership through choice in the classroom. Kohn describes how choice can have an astonishing effect on students' behavior and values as well as in academic achievement. While Kohn does not focus specifically on the literature classroom, his insight can be applied to various areas of education at all levels. Kohn describes the importance of giving students a sense of self-determination through allowing them to be in control of their learning and their lives; he argues that student choice can have lasting effects on academic achievement. Kohn states,

Every teacher who is told what material to cover, when to cover it, and how to evaluate children's performance is a teacher who knows that enthusiasm for one's work quickly evaporates in the face of being controlled. Not every teacher, however, realizes that exactly the same thing holds true for students: deprive them of self-determination and you have likely deprived them of motivation. If learning is a "matter of following orders, students simply will not take to it in the way they would if they had some say about what they were doing. (1993)

Kohn supports his views on choice by speaking of the democratic classroom. Giving students a sense of ownership in their learning prepares them to live in society in the future. Creating a classroom that promotes choice will help to give students a sense of control over their actions and achievements. Kohn states, "Students should not only be trained to live in a democracy when they grow up; they should have a chance to live in one today" (1993).

This article also touches on structural impediments, teacher resistance, student resistance and strategies for dealing with elementary-aged students' responses to choice and change. While Kohn focuses primarily on the elementary classroom, sec ondary teachers can benefit from his message as a valuable teaching resource for implementing choice into the classroom.

Power, Brenda Miller, Jeffrey Wilhelm and Kelly Chandler, Ed. Reading Stephen King: Issues of Censorship, Student Choice and Popular Literature. Urbana: NCTE, 1997.

In the spring of 1996, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) held a conference at the University of Maine entitled "Reading Stephen King." The discussions that spawned this conference inspired the book Reading Stephen King: Issues of Censorship, Student Choice and Popular Literature. The book, edited by Brenda Miller Power, Jeffrey Wilhelm, and Kelly Chandler is a compilation of articles from conference attendees in response to the seminars, debates and commentary that fueled this two-day event. The book is broken into three main parts: Choice, Popular Literature, and Censorship. Within these three sections, one can find articles pertaining not only to a rationale for teaching King but also to how teaching nontraditional literature can lead to great things in the classroom.