1. Heacox Chapter 7 What Do Students Need?
Choices

2. Choices
Offering choices is an important way to motivate students and get them interested in a project. You deserve choices as much as your students do. Use what appeals to you and seems best for helping your students learn.

3. This chapter presents four strategies for providing student choice within tiered assignments:
Pathways Plans
Project Menus
Challenge Centers
Spin-offs
…choose what appeals to you!

4. Pathway Plans They provide a format for:
keeping track of students skill development
presenting a choice of tiered, alternative activities to students who demonstrate proficiency in a particular skill.

5. Instructional Looping helps you manage your pathway assignments.

6. First Step: Preassessment
Beginning of the year or unit-by-unit or skill-by-skill by:
Pencil-and-paper pretest
Skills checklists
Portfolios
Daily assessment
(Decide what standard you will consider mastery or proficiency)

7. Creating Pathways Plans
Create an individual planner for you and your students to check off when they have mastered a skill.
List alternative activities that students can choose from when they loop out of skills instruction.
Be sure to tier the activities according to challenge level or by complexity.
Be sure to refer to Bloom’s Taxonomy (page106) when developing this project menu or alternative activities.

8. Managing Procedures for Pathways Plans
1. You may have students check off or cross out
the skills they master on their pathway plan.
2. Students move to appropriate activity for the class
period.
3. All students are responsible for their daily work.
4. Students who are looped out for more than one day
should pick more complex projects.
5. Ask students who have looped out to rejoin the group
when you move to a new skill.

9. Managing Procedures for Pathways Plans (cont.)
6. Have materials needed at work stations.
7. You may give students a file in which to keep their plans and work-in-progress.
8. As work is completed, students turn it in for grading.
9. Since some may never test out you may want to choose a pathways project during one class period.

10. Guidelines for Project Menus
When creating your project menu, consider coding the projects.
Intervene when you want to ensure that a student chooses an appropriately differentiated task.
It’s helpful to use workcards to provide more specific directions for particular projects.

11. Challenge Centers
These provide a differentiated twist on a frequently used management strategy: learning centers or stations.
Stress new concepts, new content, or the application of skills.
Provide Challenge Center Days to select curriculum-enrichment activities.
Another way to present alternative activities for instructional looping.
For warm-ups, giving you time to get a flexible group underway.
For cool-downs, to engage students in worthwhile activities when they complete their assigned work early.

12. Guidelines for Challenge Centers
1. Develop activities that relate to your
essential and unit questions.
2. Design activities with the level of
challenge or complexity in mind.
3. Use a variety of materials and activities that respond
to a wide range of reading levels, learning
preferences, levels of challenge and complexity, and
student interests.
4. Decide which activities will be done individually and
which may be done with a partner or small group.

13. Guidelines for Challenge Centers (cont.)
5. Include short-term and multiple-session projects.
6. Provide step-by-step procedures.
7. Design evaluation checklists for projects.
8. Provide needed materials and/or resources.
9. Have the students keep a work log to record the work
they accomplish each day.
10. Provide examples, samples, or models.
11. Organize work cards, evaluation checklists, and
materials so that students can work independently.

14. Spin-Offs Spin-offs are projects based on student interests.
You provide:
*The general topic
*Direction about content, process, and
product as you wish

15. 3 Different Ways of Structuring Spin-Offs
1. Teacher-Directed Spin-off: You require certain content or key ideas be included.
2. Spin-off with Required Product: Students choose their specific topic and the content or key ideas they’ll include, while you assign the product that students will produce.
3. Student-directed Spin-offs: Students choose their own specific topic, content, and product. You supply a general topic from the curriculum.

16. Guidelines for Spin-offs
These projects are to extend and enrich the curriculum.
Allow class time.
Help students narrow their topics, if necessary.
Provide a format to record the resources they use.
They must decide on their specific topic and how and where they will gather information.
They must decide how they will show what they have learned using the Project Planner and Checklist on Pg. 116.
Have them complete a Worklog form.
Develop an evaluation checklist that reflects your criteria. This can also be used for a self-evaluation.
You may also wish to have students complete a self-reflection.