True participation

Earlier this week, I read the MindShift article "Are we taking our students' work seriously enough?" and the first paragraph really struck me, especially the phrase, "participatory projects had a distinct air of tokenism." Basically, the paragraph continues, we provide students with moments to participate, but those opportunities do not transform the class or the work on the class in meaningful ways.

The article moves to Hart's Ladder of Participation, which can be seen at this site. Basically, the higher

Hart's Ladder of Participation Image from:
http://www.whydev.org/moving-beyond-tokenism-to-make-youth-participation-a-reality/ 

up the ladder, the more participatory the students. We have to move almost half-way up to ladder to reach any sense of true participation at all.

Admittedly, Hart's work typically does not apply to schools. The MindShift article does discuss how some schools thinking on higher rungs of the ladder produced pretty amazing results.

Within the educational setting, I think we have many opportunities to take the students seriously, and in online learning I think we have the same potential. Here are some of the things I'm thinking about in this vein, but I am nowhere near finished:

Class Norm Creation
I know that class time is precious, but taking the time to co-create the norms of the classroom environment shows students that you take them seriously. This can happen at any age:

Norm creation is not the same as rule creation, and here is an example of some norms I hope to co-create with students in an upcoming Creative Writing class for the process of Peer Review.

Valuing Different Approaches to Knowledge Construction
I never want my students to feel that their participation does not matter to the working of the course or the work of the course. Using the UDL guidelines help with my lesson design, mainly because the guidelines remind me about the importance of honoring multiple pathways to representation, expression, and engagement. Specifically, I want to incorporate more:

Student Goal-Setting -

Within the context of the course, I want to work with students one-on-one to help them create their goals and then support them as they achieve them. I don't think they necessarily have to follow the SMART format, but I like what SMART stands for. Either way, I want them to be an integral part of the process.

Meaningful Choice - 
I want to provide my students with opportunities to make choices that matter in the course. Asking them to choose between a Power Point and a Prezi does not matter as much as choosing how they learn and how they provide evidence of learning. I've learned that the more I open up the opportunities, the more invested the students become in the learning experience. I get a lot less of this:

Instead, I get more pieces like this from the Please Understand Me Project I did with tenth graders. Granted, several entries are not stellar, but many of them provided the students with choice, voice, and a meaningful topic.

Providing an authentic audience - 

The affirmation design quality in Schlechty's thinking is about an authentic audience. Instead of creating an artificial audience or only making the audience the class or the teacher. The students need to hear affirmation from us, but they also need to hear it from the people who matter to them. We need to help that happen as often as possible. Schlechty talks about affirmation briefly here.