Providing Choice—A Risk Worth Taking for Teachers and Students

by Amy Bradley and Michael Alcock

Josh, the jester of every class for as long as we could remember, had never been on a plane before his Walkabout trip that he embarked on for six weeks during the last half of his senior year. He had never thought about traveling until befriending many of the Brazilian exchange students we hosted in January of that school year. When they told him that he could visit anytime, he didn't consider it a realistic option for many weeks. With support from his family and our staff, he came to see that he was capable of undertaking such an adventure, which included raising money and making detailed plans.

He eventually booked his flight, got his first passport, learned basic Portuguese, and departed in April of that school year. Watching Josh, who was known in our community for being bold and self-assured, shake nervously as he got in the security line that would lead him to Salvador, Brazil, proves that student choice carries risk. As the staff members held their collective breath until the day he returned home safely, we found that offering options to students also bears risk for the educators.

Choice at the Graham School is best exemplified by Walkabout, a program for our seniors to explore their interests, passions, and possible career options during the two quarters before graduation. Each of the four years has a central theme around which we build curriculums, and "risk" is appropriate for the graduation year, one that culminates in personal achievement and plans for the future. From the students' first year at Graham, we build opportunities for choice, at age-appropriate increments, scaffolding the skills and habits of mind that are necessary to increase the independence and self-direction that students need as they progress. Our experiential approach is rooted in this concept: As freshman, students learn about and become part of a community; as sophomores, they explore what it means to serve within and through that community; as juniors, they use their service experience to provide leadership to younger students; and as seniors, they risk it all, moving beyond their immediate community to explore new ones.

Authentic choices cannot exist without some degree of risk. To make one choice is to give up another—to sacrifice, with the benefit of experiencing new opportunities. Throughout this experiential process at Graham, students have many opportunities to practice making choices and taking risks in a supportive community. While students carry much responsibility, teachers and staff seek to engage in participatory action projects with them, much like Brian Schutlz's experience.

As a public school teacher in Chicago's Cabrini Green, Brian Schultz opened class with a basic prompt: Generate a list of problems affecting the community. In a matter of minutes, Schutlz's fifth graders had cited nearly 100 issues, most of which dealt with their heavily rundown school, and even speculated about the political, social, and cultural factors that might have contributed to its dilapidation. Faced with this challenge, one that had direct consequences for his learners—and for him—Schultz had a choice to make. He could change course and embrace this "emergent curriculum," or he could move on to the next phase of his lesson. Through collaborative inquiry and plenty of trial and error, Schultz and his students took a risk and transformed their classroom into a campaign to revive the school, and, in the process, the community (B. Schultz, 2008).

The Graham School mural project is a similar example of such collaborative efforts. Together, the students researched the history of Columbus murals, visiting the works on site and interviewing community members involved in their creation. Seeking to explore community through art, a class of freshman students and their teachers chose to study murals in various Columbus communities; and the students painted one of their own, culminating in a community unveiling party.

As part of a project where students chose to study murals in Columbus, students work together to create their own mural.

In order to successfully complete this project, students and teachers contributed resources to a broader, mutual investment, navigating obstacles on the way. They also reached beyond the immediate Graham community to forge partnerships, potentially risking their original plan to unforeseen compromises and adaptations, leaving themselves open to new opportunities.

The unexpected and advantageous result of encouraging students to take measured risks is that we, as a staff, learned that the risk is not just for the students. Offering choices to students opens us, as educators, to risk. Like Brian Schultz, we accept risk each time we ask an open-ended question and wait for verbal responses, because although we may have a direction in mind for a discussion, we know that the group dynamic could take us into a topic for which we have not fully prepared, and in that moment we are vulnerable; our plans could give way to student inquiries that lead into unproductive territory. Providing choice risks failure because when we, as teachers, make all the decisions for our students, lessons will proceed predictably in productive directions; however, when we remove the possibility of students choosing, and choosing wrongly, we fail to aid the students in becoming competent, thoughtful risk takers.

For example, we recently screened a promotional video in class about a nonprofit group that advocates peace through education. This was meant to introduce our unit novel (Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin), in which the group's founder recounts his experience building schools for girls in Central Asia. Our original intention was to offer students a model social action project they could collectively undertake and, eventually, use to guide individual capstone projects. After the video, we asked for reactions; and an outspoken sophomore, Stephanie, raised her hand in exasperation. "I get what they're going for here, and I even support it," she said. "But what about improving education right here, at the Graham School?"

It was an essential question, and as it turned out, the question preempted our plans for the remaining three months. Several students added support, and suddenly eight new ideas were on the table. The room's energy was palpable. A choice had to be made: Do we encourage these ideas, and let students begin to develop them now, or do we press on and force them to follow our schedule and fit our vision? (We could've also simply ended the discussion earlier and ignored choice altogether.) Both options were satisfactory, and each carried significant risk. We could risk the students' high level of engagement to stick with our plan, or we could risk our plan to modify it in favor of an approach that is guided by student choice. We went with Stephanie's choice of focus, requiring some adjustments to our schedule but gaining an elevated sense of ownership of the project among the members of the class.

In such moments, teaching becomes a deeply reciprocal process by which we decide to learn not just from but with the students, embracing the risks that accompany students developing as independent thinkers and informed risk takers (K. Schultz, 2003). Moreover, when we offer choice, we model risk taking for them and demonstrate problem-solving skills, such as how to thoughtfully navigate uncertainty and address unforeseen obstacles.

Further, it is often in the midst of these vulnerable moments when we allow students to reroute a discussion or introduce a new idea that emergent curriculums begin, and in our experience there is no doubt that the "most desirable curriculums come from students" (B. Schultz, 2008). Our willingness to listen and take risks with students is what leads to authentic choices, because everyone has some stake in the outcome; it's a collaborative partnership. We risk our comfort and emotional indolence together to "cross boundaries of difference" and learn from and about one another—"not to erase the boundaries but to understand and use them as a resource" (K. Schultz, 2003).

Josh came back to Graham safely in May of that year and declared himself a seasoned traveler, capable of moving independently through international airports and negotiating different cultures. He has returned to our school to speak to seniors, who are preparing for Walkabout and life after high school, about how his choice to travel to an unfamiliar place opened his eyes to possibilities for his life. On his own, he planned another six-month trip to Brazil a year after graduation, a trip that changed his perspective about world cultures and how he wants to spread the goodwill that greeted him in Brazil in his own neighborhood in Columbus by becoming a firefighter or emergency medical technician in order to help people.

We watched Josh transform from an aimless adolescent, who would jeopardize graduation to get a laugh, to an adult with vision, one capable of focused planning for his future. His choice to explore another country and its culture, with the guidance of the many educators who supported him, engendered in him the confidence and independence that could only come from an "authentic quest with real components, challenges, and obstacles" (B. Schultz, 2008). An environment without risk fails to prepare students for life outside the classroom, a world of risk taking. Allowing students to experience measured risks, in a supportive community, models the real-world paradigm where choices naturally entail risk.

References

Schultz, Brian D. (2008). Spectacular things happen along the way: Lessons from an urban classroom. New York: Teacher College Press.

Schultz, Katherine. (2003). Listening: A framework for teaching across differences. New York: Teachers College Press.

Amy Bradley is a language arts teacher and experiential advisor at the Graham School, a local public charter high school. She is in her tenth year of teaching at the secondary level and has a master's degree in education. During the last five years, she has enjoyed serving as a mentor teacher to several student teachers and student observers from The Ohio State University and other local teacher education programs. Amy has also developed and edited the 21st Century Skills Curriculum for the Center for Experiential Learning, Leadership and Technology.

Michael Alcock is a student teacher at the Graham School. He is currently completing his M.Ed. in integrated language arts at The Ohio State University and pursuing his Ohio teaching license; he hopes to eventually earn a Ph.D. in adolescent, post-secondary, and community literacies. He previously worked as an ESL after-school communities tutor for Columbus State Community College's Center for Workforce Development and has volunteered extensively with the Open Shelter of Columbus.

Return to top