Fostering a Culture of Student Learning Ownership- Student Choice

One of the things that I honestly can say that I really struggle with as a teacher is the ability to give my students opportunities to feel like they are in charge or have a lot of ownership in their own learning choices.  In terms of how the content is provided I have tried to strive this year to do a better job incorporating more resources into our schoology page to allow them different opportunities to receive the content.  This week with my classes I attempted/am attempting to give the students some ownership or "choice" in what they do to demonstrate to me that they can reach the objective or leaning target for our lesson.

The first form of this that I attempted was to give my ELL students the opportunity to reflect on our questions for our unit by producing one of 2 products.  The students choice was that they could either write our their reflection to the questions from our unit summary or to incorporate resources and technology they could use Screencast-O-Matic to create a screencast of themselves answering the questions and giving their answers in spoken form.  All of my students choose to write out their answers which was fine but I was a little disappointed that I did not get the full experience of having the students choose different options. (see image of the assignment below)

The second form of giving students the choice in their products was In my Spanish class which I am actually giving tomorrow and Friday as we needed more practice time before I could get to it.  For this assignment the students will have the choice between either doing a paper and pencil assignment that demonstrates their understanding of the concept that we are going over or they will have the option to play a game as homework that I created through the website Quizizz.com where students will get to challenge each other and themselves to see if they know the right solution to the problem.  I am hopeful that this is a positive experience and I really look forward to seeing the students results. (See assignment below)

(Below you can see pictures of student doing either activity)

Overall I think that my attempts to give the students some choice in their learning and the products that they produce to demonstrate their learning has made me realize that at times I need to focus on letting go of some of the control of my students learning and allow them some more freedom to succeed on their own or with some of their own choices.  I will continue to try and make reasonable attempts to allow the students some control in their decision making moving forward and work on ways to allow students to grow in their understanding of the content