This week’s exercise for reflecting on deadlines comes from an active learning strategy called “forced choice exercises.”
In this practice, you present students with an activity or problem that requires them to make a choice. This activity involved ranking, for example. It can easily be transformed into a small group exercise in which students work together to come to consensus. In that practice, one might take the page and cut it into smaller strips of paper, each with one statement on it, asking students to move them around on a table to do their ranking.
A forced choice problem like this can prompt discussion about why students make the choices they make, and so it can be a way to prompt metacognition and critical thinking about their choices. Â It is often used in application exercises, in which students are asked to apply what they have been discussing in the classroom to some kind of situation or problem in a less familiar or real-world context. Such application activities are a hallmark of Team-Based Learning practice, which I discussed in more detail in a previous post.
If you would like to explore more about forced choice activities, I recommend this article “Constrained Choice Activities: A Simple Way to Improve Critical Thinking” by Jim Sibley, Bill Roberson, and Brian O’Dwyer.
