Empower Your Students – Give Them The Freedom To Choose!

Learning is a never ending process and especially when it comes to education, it is a long way to go for each student. While some students travel through with lots of interest and self motivation, some need a little bit of pushing around. While students fight their way to the end, a major task in the hands of the teacher remains to keep the students motivated and interested. To have a participative and an involved bunch of students is a blessing and the secret to getting this blessing lies in the hands of the teacher itself. The freedom of choice is a great tool that will not only get the students to participate, but will also add renewed vigor and energy to the lessons.
As the grading pattern changes at each level of education and the focus gets on assignments and research work, there arises the problem of molding the students to adapt to the system and to be excited and motivated to participate and perform. This can be achieved by one simple trick – by giving the students a choice and empower them to take charge of their own results. Allowing the students to pick a topic of their choice gives them a chance to be more interested and involved in what they will be doing. This would mean that they will decide for themselves what they want to do and how they wish to do it. Not just participation, this practice can even help the students develop better learning, thinking and execution skills.
The following is how giving a choice to the students in their assignments will help them:
- Ownership
Students take ownership of their own assignments and develop a sense of “mine”. This will ensure that the students pick what they feel they can do best and will not even give them a chance to complain if the assignments was too easy or too difficult.

- Discover Their Strengths
This will enable the students as well as the teacher to discover what are the strengths and areas of interest of each student. When given a choice, each student will select the assignment, he/she feels he/she will be able to do best and this can give a fair idea of their strengths and interests to both the parties.

- Added Learning
Giving the students a choice in assignments will ensure that the students pick what they like and because of this, the students will put extra efforts to make a good project and to present it well. In their efforts, the students will encounter multiple short lessons related to their topic and will develop many other skills along the way.
- Variety In Grading
A benefit of giving choice to students that comes to the teachers is the variety of assignments they will get to check and grade. Checking the same assignment made by the entire class can get boring, but with this little hack, the teacher too can enjoy grading different assignments.

- Brings Out Students’ Creativity
Giving the students a chance to choose their assignments empowers the students to bring out the creativity in them. Be it in choosing the topic, writing a narrative essay, method of doing the assignments, the presentation of merely the thought behind making the assignment- there is a lot of scope for creativity to spring up and flourish.

Teaching is not just a job, but a responsibility, of preparing the students for their tomorrows, of developing their minds and thoughts in a way that they can decide for themselves and of empowering each student to stand out in the crowd with their strengths. This wonderful teaching tool can serve this purpose and give the students a chance to prove their mettle to their teachers as well as other students, what they are worthy of. It is only when you leave the child, that he will learn to run. So is the case here – it is only when you will let your students choose that you will know what all they are capable of doing.