Designing For Choice & Autonomy
Learning designers empathize and seek to understand, define challenges and decisions to be made, share and value all ideas, create prototypes for iterations of their work, test their iterations to determine what works and how to move the design forward, and value the learner as the center of design.
Many instructional frameworks, including Universal Design for Learning, promote student voice and choice in the learning environment. As instructional designers, the idea of sharing power and relinquishing some control might feel daunting. More important than simply providing choice is providing the RIGHT choices — those that move learners toward agency and autonomy and promote expert learning. In order to design those kinds of learning opportunities, educators and instructional designers must have an understanding of bounded autonomy and its key components: task, turf/space, technique, time, and team.
Instructional designers and educators must determine with each learning opportunity which of these components will be theirs to manage, and which components they will allow their learners to manage. In allowing learners to manage some of these components, we give them much needed practice in decision-making. The choices we give learners within bounded autonomy are intended to remove barriers to learning and to promote agency and expert learning.
We work with teachers and instructional designers who frequently express frustration or concern about students making choices based on what they like (working with friends) or on what is easy (making a poster vs. writing an essay). To build student competence and confidence in making choices, we must coach learners in how to make choices. In order to make good choices for themselves, learners must understand
Autonomy — What they control
Value — What they are interested in
Needs — What skills they most need to work on
Parameters — How much time they have, tools available to them, etc.
When we coach learners into using these four guides in their decision-making, we move them out of the loop of meaningless decisions that frequently move them away from their learning goals and into strategic, goal-directed choices.
Download the PDF version of Designing for Choice & Autonomy here and share it freely with your colleagues, PLCs, and online professional learning networks!
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