My Coaches' Couch: Recommendations: The Power of Choice

Recently, I met with a teacher and reflected on a mostly-successful lesson. She felt, however, that there were things she could be doing to enhance student engagement. She sensed that her pacing was somehow off, but couldn’t quite figure out the culprit. After listening and prompting, I asked, “Can I offer a suggestion?”

When teachers are coming up empty in their search for a more effective approach, coaches’ recommendations play a helpful role. Previous posts have discussed the importance of making recommendations that are specific in order to increase their effectiveness. Another way to get more uptake on your recommendations is to offer choice.

Offering choice develops feelings of power and efficacy. These are important aspects to consider if our coaching seeks to gradually increase teachers’ responsibility. Being asked to make a decision rather than being told what to do is an encouraging approach that exhibits trust in the teacher’s ability.

Another benefit of offering choice is that it usually increases motivation.* For example, when a teacher chooses among options presented for enhancing class discussion, she is more vested in making her self-selected option work.

Choice is likely to be motivating when the options offered meet teachers’ needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness.** Offering choices that are relevant to teachers’ own goals enhances autonomy. For example, If a teacher is focused on a goal of increasing students’ reading fluency, recommendations for readers’ theatre or choral reading of poetry would likely be well-received; a recommendation related to comprehension might not be.

Offering choices that are within the teacher’s ability to implement enhances competence. For a novice teacher, recommendations regarding differentiation through tiering might be viewed as overwhelming because the teacher does not feel capable of implementing them successfully. Suggestions to differentiated by providing open-ended tasks might be a more comfortable option.

Offering choices that are congruent with teachers’ instructional philosophy ensures relatedness. If a teacher values constructivist approaches to learning, she will be likely to appreciate suggestions for designing hands-on learning experiences but less-likely to implement recommendations that suggest a more teacher-directed approach.

Offering choice among recommendations that align with teachers’ autonomy, competence, and philosophy increases the likelihood that teachers will put the suggestions into practice. Having choice will be motivating and empowering, and successful implementation (because recommendations are within a teacher’s range of competence) will further enhance efficacy.

Because it’s difficult to consider all of these factors instantaneously and come up with more than one option that fits the criteria, it helps to plan ahead for a coaching conversation that will provide choice among two or more recommendations. The GIR conferencing guide, below, provides a template for planning for these choices.

If making recommendations is in your game plan for an upcoming coaching conversation, pause now to think about how you’ll take the factors mentioned above into consideration as you provide suggestions and offer choice in the collaborative quest for improved instruction.

* Malone, M. R. & Lepper, M. R. (1983). Making learning fun. In R. E. Snow & J. F. Marshall (Eds.), Aptitude, learning, and instruction: Cognitive and affective process analyses (Vol. 3, pp. 223-253). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

**Katz, I. & Assor, A. (2007). When choice motivates and when it does not. Educational Psychological Review, 19, 429-442.