Alfie Kohn writes and speaks widely on human behavior, education, and parenting. He is the author of twelve books, including Feel-Bad Education…and Other Contrarian Essays on Children and Schooling (2011); The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing (2006); Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes (1993); No Contest: The Case Against Competition (1986); and The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and “Tougher Standards” (1999).
This excerpt is from a longer article with the same name which appeared initially in PHI DELTA KAPPAN, September 1993. It is reprinted with permission. [1]
CHOOSING IN PRACTICE
Because quite a few programs and practices in which children can make meaningful choices have been described elsewhere, I will offer only a sampling of the ways this basic idea can be implemented. These suggestions can be grouped according to whether they are primarily concerned with academic decisions or with social and behavioral ones.
Academic issues
The four key realms in which students can make academic decisions are what, how, how well, and why they learn. What they learn is the most straightforward of these. Student participation here can range from choosing where in an assigned text to start reading to deciding what course to take. In between these examples is the question of what is to be read, not only by individual students but by the class as a whole. “Here are five books that the supply store has in stock,” a fourth-grade teacher may say to the class. “Why don’t you flip through them during your free time this week, and we’ll decide together on Friday which one to read next.” (Of course, if students are not reading stories at all but making their way through worksheets and workbooks, basals and primers and dittos, then their capacity to participate in their education has been significantly curtailed from the start.)
Teachers may not always have the discretion to let students participate in deciding what topic to study. But even when compelled to teach a certain lesson, a teacher might open up a discussion in which members of the class try to figure out together why someone apparently thought the subject was important enough to be required. The next step would be to connect that topic to students’ real-world concerns and interests. When teachers have themselves decided for one reason or another to exclude students from the selection of the subject matter, there is still room to give them choices about the specific questions within a general topic to be explored. A teacher might begin any unit, for example, by inviting children to discuss what they already know about the subject and what they would like to know.
The question of how students learn embraces a great many issues – beginning with whether to work alone, in small groups, or as a class – and including such incidental matters as where students will sit (or lie) while they work. (One teacher swears that achievement in her class improved markedly as soon as she gave students the right to find a favorite reading place and position.) And there are other choices as well: if a student has written a story, she ought to be able to decide whether or not to read it aloud and, if so, whether to answer her classmates’ questions about it afterward and, if so, whom to call on.
Every day ought to include at least one block of time in which children can decide individually what to do: get a head start on homework, write in one’s journal, work on an art project, or read a library book. Creative writing assignments offer plenty of opportunity for decisions to be made by the writers themselves. In expressing an idea or responding to a lesson, children sometimes can be allowed to decide what medium or genre they will use – whether they want to write a poem, an essay, or a play or do a collage, painting, or sculpture. Mathematics lessons can be guided by quantitative issues of interest to students.
The entire constructivist tradition is predicated on the idea of student autonomy, which is to say, the chance for students to view learning as something “under their control rather than as disembodied, objectified, subject matter.” The same can be said about some (but not all) models of cooperative learning. One version, devised by Shlomo Sharan and his colleagues and known as Group Investigation, is based on the idea of active participation throughout the process. Students break a subject into specific questions, sort themselves into groups to explore these questions, plan and conduct an investigation, and figure out how to share what they have learned with the rest of the class.
To talk about how well a student is doing is to raise the complicated issues of assessment and evaluation, the improvement of which has lately been of increasing concern to educators. But a key consideration in changing these systems, beyond whether judgments are based on sufficiently rich measures of student achievement, is the extent to which students themselves are involved in the process. Obviously, the chance to pick one of three possible essay questions for one’s final paper does not begin to get at what is important here. Students ought to help determine the criteria by which their work will be judged and then play a role in weighing their work against those criteria. This achieves several things at once: it gives students more control over their education, it makes evaluation feel less punitive, and it provides an important learning experience in itself. Students can derive enormous intellectual benefits from thinking about what makes a story interesting, a mathematical proof elegant, or an argument convincing. More traditional approaches to testing can also be improved if students are consulted about what the test ought to cover and when it ought to be given; there is no need for teachers to decide these things on their own.
Last, and most frequently overlooked, is the need to involve students in talking about why they are learning. Few aspects of education are more important than the “participation of the learner in the formation of the purposes which direct his activities in the learning process,” as Dewey put it. Children should be given a voice not only about the means of learning but also the ends, the why as well as the what. Even very young children are “curriculum theorists,” according to John Nicholls, and there may be no better use of classroom time than a sustained conversation following someone’s challenge: “Why do we gotta do this stuff?”
Social and behavioral issues
School is about more than intellectual development; it is about learning to become a responsible, caring person who can make good choices and solve problems effectively. Thus educators must think about ways of helping students to take an active part in decisions that are only indirectly related to academics.
Is it necessary to raise one’s hand before talking or to line up before walking through the school? How much noise is too much? How should the furniture be arranged in our room? Where might we take a field trip? These are the sorts of questions that children should be encouraged to ponder and argue about. In considering what kind of classroom or school each person wants to have, the point is to reach consensus on general guidelines or principles, not to formulate a list of rules. (Specific admonitions tend to invite legalistic thinking about their application and a preoccupation with enforcement that emphasizes punishment over problem solving.) Moreover, this process goes well beyond, and may even exclude, the practice of voting. What we want to promote are talking and listening, looking for alternatives and trying to reach agreement, solving problems together and making meaningful choices. Voting, which is an exercise in adversarial majoritarianism, often involves none of these acts. It may be the least objectionable method when a quarter of a billion people must govern themselves, but classroom teachers can do better.
A structured opportunity for members of a class or school to meet and make decisions provides several advantages: it helps children feel respected by making it clear that their opinions matter; it builds a sense of belongingness and community; and it contributes to the development of social and cognitive skills such as perspective taking (imagining how the world looks to someone else), conflict resolution, and rational analysis. Few contrasts in education are as striking as that between students participating in such meetings, taking responsibility for deciding how they want their classroom to be, and students sitting in rows, having been bribed or threatened into complying with an adult’s rules.
Thus, when problems develop, the adage for teachers to keep in mind is “Bring the kids in on it.” This approach may call for a class meeting in the case of a conflict involving a number of students, or, when only one or two are directly concerned, it could mean a conversation just with them. If a child is daydreaming and failing to complete assignments, or if two children cannot seem to be anywhere near each other without becoming nasty, the most successful (and respectful) solutions are those that emerge after the teacher asks, “What do you think we can do about this?”
REASONABLE LIMITS
A number of writers and teachers who resist giving children the chance to make decisions have justified their opposition by erecting an enormous straw man called “absolute freedom” and counterposing it to the status quo. Since most of us do not relish the idea of children spending their time at school doing anything they please, deprived of structure or adult guidance, we are encouraged to settle for the controlling practices that now exist.
Not only is this a classic false dichotomy, but virtually every influential proponent of choice for students – as well as the programs that have put the idea into effect – proceeds from the assumption that there are indeed limits on the capacity and right of children to decide. The scary specter of laissez-faire liberty that shows up in the rhetoric of traditionalists is not easy to locate in the real world. Nearly every essay on education by John Dewey, the father of progressive schooling, stresses the importance of adult guidance and derides the idea of “leaving a child to his own unguided fancies.” Even A. S. Neill, whose Summerhill school and philosophy lie at the outer edges of serious discussion about the issue, distinguished sharply between freedom and license, emphasizing repeatedly that “a child should not be permitted to violate the personal rights of others.” All reasonable adults, meanwhile, acknowledge that safety concerns will necessitate placing constraints on certain kinds of actions.
While agreement exists at a general level about the need to restrict students’ choice, however, there is far less consensus about when and how to do so. The issues most frequently raised in support of such restrictions are not as simple as they first appear. Take the question of age. It goes without saying that a 16-year-old can approach a decision in a more sophisticated way than a 6-year-old and therefore can usually be entrusted with more responsibility. But this fact is sometimes used to justify preventing younger children from making choices that are well within their capabilities. Moreover, the idea that we must wait until children are mature enough to handle responsibilities may set up a vicious circle: after all, it is experience with decisions that helps children become capable of handling them.
A second rationale for restricting choice is time: if students were entitled to make decisions about, and had to agree on, everything they did, there would be no time to do anything else. True enough, and yet the heuristic value of such discussions is often overlooked in the rush to get on with the “real” lesson. In class meetings, for example, teachers would do well to remember that, at least to some extent, the process is the point. The idea isn’t just to make a choice, reach a decision, and move on.
Of course, it is still true that there won’t be time to hash out every matter; sometimes a teacher will need to request that students just do something. But a democratic approach doesn’t demand that everything is actively chosen, only that it can be. As Deborah Meier has said, what matters is not whether a given issue is discussed but that it is discussable. Unavoidable time constraints should not be used to rationalize avoidable authoritarian practices.
Third, the importance of choice is often weighed against the fact that children need some structure or limits for their behavior, if not for their learning. Once again, this point may be accurate but does not justify much of what educators actually do. “The critical question,” as Thomas Gordon has put it, “is not whether limits and rules are needed . . . but rather who sets them: the adults alone or the adults and kids – together.” Before depriving children of choice, then, an educator is obliged to demonstrate not that they need some structure but that there is some reason to exclude them from helping to shape that structure. The crucial difference between structures and limits, on the one hand, and control and coercion, on the other, has generally gone unrecognized.
Fourth, and possibly most compelling, is the caution that the right to choose must give way to the needs and preferences of other people. Even the minimalist sort of liberalism articulated by Neill (in which one’s connection to others is limited to not violating their rights) implies that people cannot do whatever they want. A more ambitious commitment to the value of community would seem to restrict choice even more severely. While each child ought to have more opportunity to make decisions than is typically allowed in American classrooms, such decisions must take into account their impact on the other people in the room. This may not feel like a burdensome restriction once a child has internalized a concern about others’ well-being – but, strictly speaking, one person’s freedom to choose is always compromised by a set of obligations to others. At a recent town meeting of the long-standing experimental school-within-a-school program at Brookline (Massachusetts) High School, one student remarked that someone’s choice to show up in class without having done the reading assignment adversely affects the quality of discussion for everyone. “It’s not just ‘You get out what you put into it,’” another girl added. “It’s ‘You get out what the class puts into it’ “ – and vice versa.
On closer examination, however, it seems clear that what must occasionally be restricted is not choice but individual choice. (It is an interesting reflection on our culture that we tend to see these as interchangeable.) To affirm the importance of community does not at all compromise the right to make decisions, per se, or the importance of involving everyone in a class or school in such a process. In fact, we might say that it is the integration of these two values, community and choice, that defines democracy.
I think we can conclude that, while some legitimate limits to the right to choose can be identified, the most commonly cited reasons for those limits may not automatically justify restrictions. But this discussion also raises questions about a conventional response to the matter of appropriate limits. Many people, understandably impatient with an either/or choice in which the possibilities are limited to freedom and its absence, assert that we need to find a happy medium between these two poles. This seems facile. For one thing, such a pronouncement offers no guidance about where on that continuum we should set up camp. For another, it overlooks the fact that the sensible alternative to two extremes may not be an intermediate point but a different way of thinking about the issue altogether. The interesting question here, for example, is not how much adults should limit the power of children to make decisions, but how they should get involved.
In a broad sense, that involvement may consist of suggesting the tasks, teaching the skills, supplying the resources – in short, providing the conditions under which students can choose productively and learn effectively. The teacher’s role is to be a facilitator, but, as Carolyn Edwards points out, this doesn’t mean to “‘mak[e] smooth or easy,’ but rather to ‘stimulate’ [learning] by making problems more complex, involving, and arousing.” Notice the implication here: a democratic classroom is not one where the teacher has less work to do. There is no zero-sum game in which more responsibility for the children means less for the adults. Helping students to participate effectively takes talent and patience and hard work. “I’m in control of putting students in control,” one teacher told me – a responsibility that demands more of an educator than simply telling students what to do.
Notice also that this role for the teacher does not always amount to being a voice for moderation or mainstream values – a conservative counterweight to students’ reckless impulses. If, for example, children have been raised to assume that anyone who does something wrong must be forced to suffer a punitive consequence, they will be likely, left to their own devices, to spend their time deciding what should be done to a rule breaker. Here, the teacher might intervene to guide the discussion away from “Which punishment?” and toward the more radical question of whether an entirely different response – “Something has gone wrong; how can we solve this problem?” – might be more productive.
On a range of issues, adults can participate and circumscribe children’s choices in fundamentally different ways. To wit:
- The teacher and the students may take turns at deciding something, each choosing on alternate weeks, for example, which book to read next. Or the responsibility can rotate between individual students, cooperative learning groups, the whole class, and the teacher.
- The teacher may offer suggestions and guidance, questions and criticism, but leave the final choice to students. Thus I have heard a third-grade teacher advise her students that it might not be a good idea to go outside for recess on a day when there is slush on the ground but then make it clear that it is up to each child to make the final decision for him- or herself. A high school teacher, meanwhile, suggests that it might make sense for the whole class to talk about the homework together but offers them the option of discussing it in small groups if they prefer.
- The teacher can narrow the number of possibilities from which students are permitted to choose. He or she may want to do this to make sure that any material or text a student works with is likely to be of educational value and of approximately the right level of challenge. (On the other hand, neither of these goals always requires restricting children’s choice. And even when the teacher does decide to limit their options, she should explain her rationale for doing so and remain open to reasonable additions to her list. As a general rule, it is more important for children to have the chance to generate different possibilities than merely to select one possibility from among those that have been set before them.)
- The teacher may provide the parameters according to which decisions can be made, perhaps specifying the goal that has to be reached but inviting students to figure out how they want to get there. For example, “It’s important to me that no one in here feels scared that other people will laugh at him for saying something stupid. How do you think we can prevent that from happening?” Or, “I need some way at the end of this unit to see how much you understand. Think of a way you might be able to demonstrate what you’ve learned.”
- A decision does not have to be thought of as something that teachers either make or turn over to students. Instead, it can be negotiated together. The emphasis here is on shared responsibility for deciding what gets learned and how the learning takes place. This process can become a lesson in itself – an opportunity to make arguments, solve problems, anticipate consequences, and take other people’s needs into account – as well as a powerful contribution to motivation.
While well-meaning educators may offer very different prescriptions regarding the nature and scope of students’ participation in decision making, I believe that certain ways of limiting participation are basically deceptive and best described as “pseudochoice.” It is disturbing to find these tactics recommended not only by proponents of blatantly controlling classroom management programs, such as Assertive Discipline, but also by critics of such programs who purport to offer an enlightened alternative.
In the first version of pseudochoice, a student is offered a choice that is obviously loaded. “You can finish your math problems now or you can stay in during recess. Which would you prefer?” The problem here is not just that the number of options has been reduced to two, but that the second one is obviously something no student would select. The teacher is really saying, “Do what I tell you or you’ll be punished,” but he is attempting to camouflage this conventional use of coercion by pretending to offer the student a choice.
In a variation of this gambit, the student is punished after disobeying the teacher’s command, but the punishment is presented as something the student asked for: “I see you’ve chosen to miss recess today.” The appeal of this tactic is no mystery: it appears to relieve the teacher of responsibility for what she is about to do to the child. But it is a fundamentally dishonest attribution. Children may choose not to complete a math assignment, but they certainly do not choose to miss recess; teachers do that to them. To the injury of punishment is added the insult of a kind of mind game whereby reality is redefined and children are told, in effect, that they chose to be punished. This gimmick uses the word choice as a bludgeon rather than giving children what they need, which is the opportunity to participate in making real decisions about what happens to them.
Another kind of pseudochoice purports to let a student or a class make a decision even though there is only one choice that will be accepted. I recently heard a well-known educator and advocate for children reminisce about her experiences as a teacher. Recalling a student of hers who frequently and articulately challenged her authority, she commented with a smile, “I had to be a better negotiator than she was.” This remark suggests that what had taken place was not negotiation at all but thinly disguised manipulation. As Nel Noddings has written, “We cannot enter into dialogue with children when we know that our decision is already made.”
If students are informed that they have made the “wrong” decision and must try again, they will realize they were not truly free to choose in the first place. But the last, and most insidious, variety of pseudochoice tries to prevent students from figuring this out by encouraging them to think they had a say when the game was actually rigged. The “engineering of consent,” as it has been called, seems to offer autonomy while providing “the assurance of order and conformity – a most seductive combination. Yet its appearance and its means should be understood for what they really are: a method of securing and solidifying the interests of those in power.” This description by educator James Beane might have been inspired by the behavior of politicians, but it is no less applicable to what goes on in schools. If we want students to learn how to choose, they must have the opportunity to make real choices.
[1] Copyright © 1993 by Alfie Kohn. This article may be downloaded, reproduced, and distributed without permission as long as each copy includes this notice along with citation information (i.e., name of the periodical in which it originally appeared, date of publication, and author’s name). Permission must be obtained in order to reprint this article in a published work or in order to offer it for sale in any form. Please write to the address indicated on the Contact page at www.alfiekohn.org.