Choice boards are one of the activities I wish existed when I was in school.
Back then, I never tested well. I thrived on essays where I could basically talk my way into convincing my teacher I knew what was going on. Though projects were preferable to tests, I loathed group work.
So, as a teacher, I seize any opportunity to offer my students choice boards, especially for assessment at the end of a novel or short story unit.
Here’s why.
Choice Boards: Why Use Them?
Choice boards are a versatile and universal yet personalized way to assess your students’ learning.
They’re versatile because you can pretty much cater a choice board activity to any text: an entire novel or just a portion of it; poetry; short stories; drama. The list goes on.
Once you have a strong foundation like this one, you can tailor it any way you see fit. And I love that choice boards suit whatever timeframe you’re dealing with. You can definitely use them in a pinch, quickly assessing students’ learning of a shorter text. Or, if you have the time, develop choice boards into an end-of-unit assessment; give students plenty of time to really invest in their work.
Choice boards are universal yet personalized. From a teacher’s standpoint, they highlight any learner’s strengths; you don’t have to worry about what once plagued me as a student sweating over tests.
And what makes choice boards personalized is the voice and choice present within the assignment; you’ll be shocked to engage even your most reluctant learners.
What Do Choice Boards Look Like?
If you want to put together your own choice board activity, start with just a single piece of paper, double-sided. On the front side, offer plenty of creative and innovative choices with clear-cut instructions.
For example, if you want students to advertise a text, like Romeo and Juliet, be explicit with your length expectations (3-5 sentences) and what techniques you want them to use; in my case, I want them to employ rhetoric. This is just one way I try to offer variety with choice boards. If a student doesn’t feel confident about ethos, logos, or pathos, there are a dozen or so other choices to show what they know.
The idea is to present students with at least a half dozen creative yet rigorous choices. From there, have them choose just enough to demonstrate understanding. For example, if you have a list of twelve choices, require them to pick eight, at least.
So on your opening page, offer a host of options keeping in mind your goals and your students’ hopes. Your goals should include assessing student knowledge of a text. My choice boards include a versatile range of literary devices like setting, theme, symbolism, and dialogue, just to name a few.
And keep in mind your students’ hopes; they’ll want you to put in some effort and creativity as you offer them clever choices. To reference another choice board, I love what students can do if they choose the dialogue box.
The back page of your choice board should then be the space students will use to show what they know. It can be nice and easy on the back of your directions. Or, if you plan to develop the choice board into a more formal assessment, have students create their boards on card stock or poster paper.
The final reason I absolutely adore choice boards is the originality required. Specifically, students cannot rely solely on artificial intelligence to complete the task. Sure, they could look up the major characters of The Catcher in the Rye, but they’re going to have to dig more deeply than that to “Talk It Out” and imagine a conversation between Holden and Allie that never happened.
The Dreaded Substitute Debacle: How Choice Boards Can Help
I don’t need to tell you about the substitute teacher shortage, nor do you need to be reminded that it’s often more work to prepare a day home from school than it is to tough it out and teach.
I do, however, want to offer you a lifeline when it comes to missing a day in your classroom, whether you plan for it or not. This emergency substitute plan choice board can help you out in a lot of ways.
Prep It and Forget It
First off, these emergency plans are a lifesaver because you can pair them with just about any fictional text. Again, that might be a short story, a novel, or even a poem or play. If you miss school in the middle of one of these units, you need nothing other than the choice board activity to be ready to go.
But if you are in the middle of, say, an argumentative writing unit and have nothing fictional to use, these plans still work. Simply give yourself a bit of a heads up and find a poem or short story that resonates with your students, no matter what time of year. For me, that’s definitely a story like “Harrison Bergeron” or a poem like “Helen.”
For me, that means putting together a folder in August that includes a handful of shorter literary texts and enough copies of the choice board activity to get me through them. Easy peasy.
Set the Tone with Choice Boards
Another reason I love to use choice boards when I’m not at school is their consistency and familiarity. If you employ choice boards consistently enough in the classroom. (I suggest starting the year off with one, especially if your district includes summer reading assignments.) Lay the foundation for what choice boards are, why they’re important, and how interesting they can be.
You can also help set the tone with choice board expectations. Again, I suggest starting early and staying strong. If a student submits a choice board using nothing but a Number Two pencil and you required color, return the paper and discuss with the student what you expect in terms of quality. Likewise with the content students include on their choice boards. If your directions outlined a three-sentence response and a student writes barely one, address it early on.
If you set the consistency and tone of choice boards early in the school year, you can rest assured that students will know what to do if your substitute plans include this task. I guarantee if you’ve put in the hard work upfront, it’ll pay off in dividends later on when it comes to quality and classroom management.
And that’ll surely have a domino-effect: you leave a high-quality substitute activity; students know what your expectations are and use their time wisely to get it done. The substitute has little to no issues with student behavior; that substitute looks forward to working in your classroom again!
Student Examples: Choice Boards
My first year teaching high school English, I took over for my predecessor at the beginning of January. The students I inherited had had either a long-term substitute or day-to-day teacher coverages for two months.
On the one hand, kids were thankful to have a consistent face teaching them each day. But on the other, they grew accustomed to and kind of liked the lack of structure and lower expectations. Heck, I don’t even blame them most of the time.
Admittedly, my first weeks were a breeze. After more than eight years at the middle level, I was finally living my dream in high school! I knew a lot of kids already having taught them just two years prior when they were in eighth grade. And the classroom management side of things was worlds different at the high school than what I trained for at the middle level.
Then, in February, I got pneumonia and had to take almost two weeks off from school. Behavior aside, my absence was a train-wreck. I was in a whole new world when it came to substitute plans and student expectations. When I taught at the middle school, the expectation was to over-prepare a rigorous, concurrent lesson.
At the high school, kids saw a teacher absence as a free day. They were downright indignant that I actually collected and graded their work when I was out.
Looking back, my students and I probably should have met in the middle. I should have eased up a bit when it came to the workload I gave them. But they also should have known better than to think it was a free day.
When I next had a day away from my classroom, I didn’t have pneumonia, for one, but it was also a planned absence. And I was going to be ready.
We had just started our Romanticism Literature unit. While it wasn’t ideal that I missed a day early in the unit, our first text, “How Much Land Does a Man Need” by Tolstoy was relatively manageable if students were going to tackle a text independently.
So I ran copies of the story and enough handouts of my choice board activity for each student. My directions were clear and, thanks to our train-wreck in February, students knew not to test me this time around. Students were given the full 84-minute period to first read the story and then begin their choice board activity, which could be finished for homework.
The results astounded me. Firstly, nearly every student completed the work. And secondly, the quality of the choice boards was phenomenal. Students proved they understood the story on both a comprehension level and a deeper, thematic level, too. Here are some of my favorite choice boards from that day.
Final Thoughts
So whether you’re in the thick of an intense novel unit like The Great Gatsby or To Kill a Mockingbird, or you’re teaching a drama like Oedipus Rex, choice boards can be a game changer in your classroom.
They’re versatile; they’re timeless; they’re universal and yet they’re personalized. I’m so thankful I stumbled upon this great idea, and I hope you’ll find them useful, too!
