Going Against the Norm: The Use of Student-Designed Assignments

In most classrooms, assignments are teacher-designed and used to assess what students learned. However, if students are included in designing their own assignments, their work has the potential to more closely reflect their individual learning preferences and interests. During my student teaching in a fifth grade classroom, I conducted a self-study on the use of student-designed assignments in an effort to better understand my students as individuals and as learners, and to promote student autonomy. At the end of a history unit on European explorers, students generated an assignment on one of the explorers in the format of their choice, such as a song or rap, poster, slide presentation, movie, scrapbook, or sculpture. Field notes and students’ work samples showed that students chose a project format that met their individual learning needs and interests. Students’ enthusiastic responses to the assignment showed that they valued getting to choose their own project