Choice Menus: Quality or Mere Quantity?
Choice menus are a method to offer, yes, choice to students through a variety of tasks. As a beginning teacher, this seemed like an essential tool for differentiation. But, after a decade or so, I’ve developed a new perspective: choice menus led me to emphasize quantity over quality.
Choice isn’t Differentiation
“Student Choice” was one of my biggest misconceptions as a new teacher. Just because I offer students a choice doesn’t mean there’s differentiated instruction. If my class reads about Saturn and then I let them choose to create a poem, a presentation, or a 3D model, there is no differentiated instruction happening.
Some students are just making a different product.
But everyone used the same resource, had the same information, and were asked the same questions.
Differentiation Means Thinking Differently About A Topic
If I’m really differentiating, my more advanced students will be working with more advanced resources, I’ll be asking them more sophisticated questions. Most importantly, those students are thinking about the topic differently from other students.
In a differentiated task, my questions will prompt higher-level thinking.
Now, choice isn’t bad. You aren’t harming students when you give them choice (although you may be annoying them!). But choice is not differentiation.
And “choice” creates so much more work for teachers when teachers desperately need less work. (I also wrote a whole article about why choice is overrated.)
Nine Tasks is a Ridiculous Amount of Work
Now, it takes a lot of work to create one high-quality task for advanced students. You’ll need to plan for:
- questions that prompt analysis, evaluation, and synthesis.
- thoughtful scaffolding so students can reach those levels of thinking
- clear modeling by the teacher so kids can see how to do the task
- an exemplar to analyze and a non-example to critique
- appropriately advanced resources (books, videos, experts) to support the thinking (which are also accessible to students)
- a culminating product that shows off students’ thinking without being mere fluff
- oh and it all needs to fit into our schedule!
That. Is. Not. Easy.
I could rarely pull this off for a single task.
So why (why why why) did I think I could create nine tasks to fill up a choice menu!? Even now, after many years in the field, there’s no way I could create nine great tasks for one topic. Why did I add so much work to my plate?
Menus Leave Kids Confused
My choice boards always led to confused kids and frustrated Mr. Byrds. Why? Well, take a look at this menu I made back in 2009:
That was all I gave students to go on. No additional instructions. No modeling. No samples. Just a couple of sentences per box. It’s no surprise that the work they produced was nowhere near their potential.
I certainly didn’t test my soup and actually try these tasks myself. I was giving my class nine rough drafts. I didn’t teach them how to do these tasks. But, of course, how could I possibly have had the time to explain each choice.
Do you see the problem with offering choice? The more choices I offer, the lower the quality of each choice. I have limited energy. It’s better to spend that energy developing one great task.
I’ve actually re-written two of these tasks:
Buffet or Fine-Dining?
With my nine-task menus, I created a buffet-style experience for my students. Nothing was that great, but there sure was a lot of it! Nowadays, I want each task I give students to be like a dish at a fine-dining restaurant. I want to do fewer things but do them better.
PS: Now, if I carefully taught students how to work through, say, three of those tasks throughout the first half of the year, I could allow students to choose from those tasks in the second half of the year. We’d work up to choice through careful teaching, rather than dumping nine underdeveloped tasks on my class all at once.