Importance of Offering Choices to Students

Hey, y'all. It's Ayo here with some strategies to help you survive and thrive in sped. And today, we're talking about choice making. I want you to think for a second how many choices you made before you started your workday today. You chose what time to wake up, what to wear, how many times you hit the snooze button. If you were gonna bring things to work, you got those things ready. You might had to pack a lunch. If you got onto your social media, you were probably making a few choices there too. You made hundreds of choices today before you even got started. But for our students with disabilities, sometimes those choices just are not available. They don't decide what time to wake up. They don't decide what to wear. They don't decide if they're going to go to school or not. Other people are making choices for them. So when it comes to us in the classroom, we wanna do three essential things to make sure our students have choice. Alright. Strategy number one, allow the student to control something. You might have an activity that you want the student to do. Let them choose what color marker to use, what color paper they wanna work on, maybe even what activity to do first. They're not choosing to work or not to work because we all know what we would pick. But if they can make those small choices in their day, it gives a sense of control and purpose to the things going on around them. Strategy number two is to make sure that you're teaching a student what choice looks like. You might ask a student to make a choice and they choose, but you know they didn't want that anyway, so you change it up. But that doesn't give a good and clear outline of how choice making works. So when you offer choice, you might decide that you need to talk through it a little bit. I don't know if I want ice cream or cookies. Personally, I'd like both. But if I eat the ice cream, how will I feel later? Or if if I eat the cookie, how will I feel later? These are the things that we do, this self talk process, so that we know what choices to make. And we need to model that behavior for our students so they know how to make choices. And then the third thing when it comes to choice making is to make sure a student has an actual means of communicating their choice. Are you using a communication system? And that can be a yes, no, a core board, a com board. Really, it can be anything as long as a student can actually express the choices that they're making. Alright, y'all. Those are the three essential strategies to incorporate choice making in your classroom and empower your students as they go through their day. This is Ayo reminding you to stay strong and teach on.