Choice at Finland Middle School

by Paul Smathers, Debbie Camp, David Hampson, Barry Alcock, Julie Ison, and Lynnette Stephens

At Finland Middle School, in each of the four major academic subjects, students are offered choice as a means to motivate them and to enable them to take charge, even in small ways, of their own education. A member of the staff at In Perspective had an opportunity to chat with a team of Finland staff members at the 2010 Ohio Educational Technology Conference. The team members—the principal, four teachers, and their 21st century learning coach—were attending the conference as part of their professional development with the 21st Century Learning in Ohio: Transforming Education project (an ARRA Title II-D Competitive Grant). Since the project focuses on student learning that is engaging and relevant, we asked the teachers to tell us about ways they are using choice to involve students in content learning.

Students in David Hampson's seventh grade social studies class have recently begun a Google Earth project, where they are taking a tour of Ancient Rome. The students are in the process of choosing the particular location in Ancient Rome that they are going to study. The students will work on their project throughout the year. At the end of the project they can choose how they will present their findings. "We have all these different methods of how kids can present the project, for example, through Photo Story, xtra normal (an animation site where kids create their own animations), PowerPoints, vodcasts, podcasts. The kids can choose any one of those methods as long as they follow a rubric that I created about what I am looking for."

Principal Paul Smathers, 21st century learning coach Debbie Camp, and the teachers agree that choice serves as a motivator. They also agree that it makes for a less traditional-looking classroom. It is a messier way to teach, though it takes more organization on the teacher's part, not less. You really have to be on top of things to allow the students choice since now there is more than one "right" way of doing something in the classroom.

And Julie Ison (the team's mathematics teacher) adds, "You have to have a principal who understands that when he walks into a room and it's not silent, it's okay. And luckily we have that—a principal that supports innovative learning."

Underscoring this idea, David Hampson comments, "The classroom is more disorganized, with one student working one way, another a different way—you get the picture. Students are more motivated to do projects than they would have been before. Yes, in the past, I might have said, 'We're doing a poster project, and you have to have six pictures on the poster and have this many facts. But I've come to the conclusion that the kids are much more motivated when I say, 'Okay. Here's a list of choices. Choose one. As long as you follow the steps in my rubric, you're fine.'"

David continues, "One of the things I had to learn recently was to let go and allow the kids to experience the consequences of their choices. And maybe there's a failure. Maybe a kid was trying to do a vodcast and he couldn't get the video to work correctly on the computer. That's a learning opportunity for that child. Because it was his choice, he's going to try to figure out a way to make it work—sometimes with the help of a fellow student."

There are a number of opportunities to work choice into language arts, and in today's classroom, technology is often involved. Eighth grade English language arts teacher Barry Alcock explains that it should not be a surprise to anyone that the students in his classes read a lot. "And what we'd always done in my classroom was a written response to literature. We would have class conversations where students shared their ideas; but at the end of the day, I would gather up the two paragraphs each student wrote and take them home to read, grade, and turn back in, with nobody else getting the chance to read them.

"This year, with Debbie Camp's help, I'm putting together a wiki where my students will have to respond a certain number of times a week to whatever they've read. I am going to give them a series of questions like I always do, but they don't have to respond to those directly. The response will be very open. They can choose instead to respond to someone else's views. Everybody will read each other's responses. They'll have to post a couple of responses—and post a couple of responses to responses—as part of the class. That's going to get them trading ideas about the literature we read in class."

Not every program lends itself to choice, of course, but even then there are opportunities. "One of the projects that we seventh grade science teachers do," says Lynnette Stephens, "involves competing in the National Engineers Week Future-City Competition to develop future cities using the computer software on SimCity, and there really are certain requirements that the kids have to follow. At the end of the project, there is a place for reflection and enrichment. In essence, we tell our students, 'Okay, you've done this project. Show us what you've learned,' and there we offer the kids choices. We might say to them, for instance, if you establish a future city on the moon, how would you prevent all these environmental problems on the moon that we have had on earth? Show us what you've learned by PowerPoint, develop a web page, etc., and talk about this new colony you've established and how you are going to prevent these environmental problems from happening.' That's kind of a little twist. They don't have a whole lot of choice in development of the project, but in the end they have a choice in showing us what they learned."

It is fairly easy to see how choice fits with social studies, language arts, and science. But mathematics? Just how does choice figure into math class? It does fit—in a number of ways. Eighth grade math teacher Julie Ison describes a project her classes worked on that involved graphing. Working with Excel, the students went to a few websites (preselected by the teacher) and picked data about whatever they were interested in—flavors of ice cream, baseball statistics, basketball statistics, whatever they wanted. They sucked in all the information, put it in Excel, manipulated it, made graphs out of it, and figured out what graphs went with that data, what graphs didn't go with that data. I think they did a really nice job. And they liked it because it was what they picked."

Coach Debbie Camp remembers with a chuckle what most of the kids said—they loved doing it because it was a break from math!

Julie Ison also relates how she uses choice when she assigns homework: "I often give my students a choice: They can do the evens or the odds. And there are times when I will say, you can do this one problem or these five others. The kids think that if they do the one problem, they are getting away with less work and effort. Actually, that 'one' problem will be a multipart problem that will require them to apply mathematical reasoning along with a number of mathematical skills."

So far the teachers have talked about choice in terms of curriculum, but choice can also, surprisingly, come into play in relation to discipline. In her first years of teaching, Julie, like just about every other teacher, would confront students sitting near each other who either were having too good a time socializing or were fighting. In either case, she would separate them by sending one to another part of the classroom. Not anymore. Now she says, "One of you needs to move. You decide." It is less stressful to her and focuses the students on what they need to do to regain control. And if students require more serious discipline, Julie again usually offers them choices: "They could be two 'bad' choices; for example, one of them might be to go to the principal's office and the other to stay in a specific teacher's room. But if they have a choice, they'll pick one; they take ownership."

Debbie Camp sums up choice nicely: "When you give students choice, it opens up a lot of avenues. When they are given the option to decide what they're going to do, whatever the product is, it's theirs—giving them ownership and responsibility for their own learning." Building on Debbie's statement, Principal Smathers adds, "Giving choice is about empowering students. It makes them feel that they are part of the process, not powerless; that's the kind of feeling that motivates everyone."

Paul Smathers has been an administrator with South-Western City Schools for the last ten years and has been the principal of Finland Middle School for the last four years. He has worked for South-Western City Schools his entire career, beginning as an intervention specialist.

Debbie Camp is the 21st century learning coach at Finland Middle School. She is a retired elementary teacher who taught for thirty years with South-Western City Schools as a teacher of the gifted and talented and as a district-wide educational technology teacher.

David Hampson teaches seventh grade social studies at Finland Middle School. He currently leads the eighth grade trip to Washington, D.C., and has taught for five years.

Barry Alcock is a national board certified teacher in early adolescent English and language arts. He teaches eighth grade language arts at Finland Middle School, where he is in his fifteenth year. He has previously taught high school English in a small town and middle school language arts in an urban district. Periodically he teaches courses in adolescent literature, reading methods, writing methods, and social foundations of education to graduate students at Capital University.

Julie Ison teaches eighth grade mathematics at Finland Middle School. This is her thirtieth year of teaching at Finland and is as entertained by her students today as she was her very first year. She has a master's degree in early middle childhood from OSU.

Lynnette Stephens teaches seventh grade science at Finland Middle School. She has a master's degree in technology integration and has taught for fifteen years.


Finland Middle School was one of the recipients of the eTech Ohio American Recovery and Reinvestment Act Title II-D Competitive Grant that will provide new 21st century technology opportunities for the students at FMS. As grant participants, Debbie, Paul, David, Barry, Julie, and Lynnette have been involved in extensive professional development and coursework, sharing ideas and collaborating while developing a plan that will enhance instruction and improve available technology at FMS.

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