My Reaction to Student Involvement
I was really glad that my students were getting involved with my inquiry project. I thought that they also provided useful suggestions for ways to increase autonomy in an effective way. Throughout the semester, I used several of these recommendations to plan my lessons and teach my classes. In the rest of this paper, I will discuss what happened when students were given the opportunity to exercise autonomy. I found several generalizations that occurred when students were given autonomy. I will mainly focus on three projects where the students played a large role and were given increased choice. I will describe these projects in detail and then go through several samples of student work to demonstrate how the students learned in this environment. Moreover, I will discuss some of the students’ reactions to the increased choice and whether they appreciated having this freedom. Finally, I will end with a discussion of the ongoing inquiry that this project has presented.