Approval Over Choice

Hey 👋

How’s tricks? Fancy a quick Snack on the role of ‘choice’ in school?

Big idea 🍉

A common idea is that giving people choice or autonomy can be motivating. While this might be true in some contexts, it’s not valid in all.

For example, if you’ve ever been to a restaurant where there are pages of options... you’ll have experienced what’s called ‘choice paralysis’. Or imagine going to the doctor and being asked, “what do you think your prescription should be?”

Choice is only motivating when we’re in a good position to make a wise choice about our future.

School is a bit like the doctor example. Students aren’t always in the best position to make wise decisions about the what and the how of their learning. Worse: given a choice, those students with the most expertise will tend to make the best decisions, and we’ll end up re-enforcing educational inequities.

While there are times when it makes sense to give students choice (eg. what to focus an essay on), most of the time, it’s probably better if we make decisions on their behalf and instead invest our energy in getting their approval (aka ‘buy-in’). It seems that when we approve of a decision, it can be as motivating as if we’d made the decision ourselves.

How can we achieve student buy-in? We just need to explain the why of our decisions.

Uh... obvious Peps.

Sure, BUT... as teachers, we suffer from an ‘expert-induced blindness’ (aka curse of knowledge), which makes it hard for us to empathise with people who don’t know what we know. A such, we tend to assume that the why is obvious, when—to our students—it rarely is. And so, to compensate for this bias, we probably need to over-explain the why, more often than we think we ought.

🎓 For more, check out this paper on when choice motivates and when it does not.

Summary

• Choice is only motivating when we are in a good position to make a wise choice about our future.

• In school, it’s probably best to make decisions on behalf of our students and invest our energy in getting their approval.

• We can achieve this by explaining the why (more often than we think we should).

Little updates 🥕

• Meta-analysis on independent reading in schools → finds it helps improve word recognition and attitudes to reading, but has minimal impact on comprehension.

• Paper comparing problem-solving vs example study in math(s) → suggests that practicing problems helps students remember better in the long run, even with harder tasks.

• Study on effective schools in England → those which have a culture of peer observation (aka ‘drop-ins’) tend to generate better student progress (note: leadership observations don’t appear to have as significant an effect).

• Cracking analysis of the role of cognitive load in teacher development and how to optimise it.

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