This week, I received a comment to my blog asking: What do you feel is the biggest difference between playlists and choice boards? Would you say a playlist is more data-driven and a choice board gives more variety in learning modalities? These are great questions! I have heard teachers use these terms interchangeably, yet there […]
Student agency, or a students’ ability to make key decisions about their learning experience, is an essential aspect of blended learning. Student agency requires that we design our lessons to offer students meaningful choices. These choices can help us universally design learning experiences that strive to remove barriers and invite students to decide how to […]
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On Saturday, I wrote a blog sharing an offline choice board teachers can use to blend offline activities into their online classes. On Twitter, Barbara McInnes suggested teachers add a wellness activity to their offline choice boards. I loved her suggestion and immediately started working on a choice board dedicated to health and wellness activities. […]
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Schools in California will not reopen this year. Teachers are scrambling to move their offline courses online to ensure that students continue learning for the remainder of the school year. Understandably, the focus is on online learning as that is a new and unfamiliar learning landscape for a lot of educators. I am fielding questions […]
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Choice boards are a fantastic tool for honoring learner variability and providing students with meaningful choices. Not every student enjoys the same task, so giving them options is critical to maximizing their motivation and focus in a lesson. Choice boards allow us to honor our students’ preferences, needs, and interests, making their learning experience more […]
My children love “would you rather” questions. Would you rather go to the beach or the snow? Would you rather eat a cookie or a brownie? Would you rather watch a movie or read a book? They enjoy being presented with two options and getting to choose one. In a workshop last week, I was […]
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This week I had the pleasure of training a group of elementary teachers on blended learning strategies. As a group, they wanted to focus on: Differentiation Student choice Assessment One of the strategies we discussed with the potential to weave these three areas of focus together is a choice board. There are several different approaches to designing a […]
In my previous blogs on MTSS, I have provided an overview of the Multi-Tiered System of Supports as it relates to instruction. I’ve highlighted how differentiated small group instruction can improve the effectiveness of Tier 1 instruction, reducing the need for Tier 2 support and Tier 3 intervention. I have also presented strategies teachers can […]
Every teacher has faced a similar challenge: delivering a whole-group lesson to the entire class and watching the mixed reactions on the students’ faces. Some grasp the concept immediately, while others struggle to comprehend it and clearly need additional support. Approximately 20% of students in a classroom will need more than Tier 1 core instruction […]
An increasing number of schools nationwide are shifting to more inclusive instruction, keeping students with special needs, individualized education plans (IEPs), and diverse learning profiles in mainstream classrooms. This shift toward inclusive classrooms is driven, in part, by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), a federal law that requires public schools to provide students […]
While working with a group on designing choice boards, a teacher expressed concern about maintaining the integrity of student work in an era of AI. She did not want students to rely on AI to produce the work for them. She worried that if students were self-pacing through a choice board while she pulled small […]
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Let’s start with a quick review of the playlist, or individual rotation, model for those who have not heard of it. A playlist is a sequence of learning activities designed to move students toward a desired result. Most playlists culminate in a performance task or artifact that demonstrates students’ ability to transfer or apply what […]