The other day we were working on classroom schedules in the community of the Special Educator Academy. And someone commented that my schedule examples almost always have a choice time scheduled into the day. They asked why and what they looked like. And I realized I hadn’t talked about why I like choice time and why I think it’s important.
So let me start with a story.
When I was doing my internship, one of my assignments was counseling with adults with developmental disabilities. It was an interesting challenge given that most of my clients had difficulties with communication, so talk therapy (which I didn’t like much anyway) was not the way to go. I met my first client at camp and scheduled our first visit to start in the hospital cafeteria. I chose it because I thought eating would give us something to do.
But, once we got there, I thought we would never get to eat. All he could do was stand in the middle of the room and look at all the choices. He just couldn’t decide.
This guy loved going out and about in the community. He would walk for miles in our university town and stop in at local businesses. But I discovered in the cafeteria that when asked what he wanted, he didn’t know how to make a choice.
So, we spent the counseling sessions working on making choices. We started small with vending machines. Did you know that you can pretty much divide snack machines into two sections? Sweet stuff goes on top; salty stuff goes on the bottom. So you can start small by deciding between those 2 choices and go from there.
By the end of the semester, our final session was to go to Ben & Jerry’s ice cream shop. Now, I don’t know about you, but I have a hard time making a decision there. My client was able to make a decision from all the flavors with only one person having to go ahead of us in line. That was a huge step for him.
So why is this important?
It’s important because we make thousands of decisions every day. Imagine if every decision required minutes to hours of deliberation. It would be debilitating and you would never move to the next thing. That’s kind of how it was for him.
We make thousands of decisions every day. Imagine if we didn’t know how! Find out how choice time can help your students. #autismteacher
So today I thought I would share some reasons why I think including a choice time in your day is important. And I’ll be back next week to share how I implement them in the classroom.
5 Reasons Why Choice Time is Important
1
It's a skill
As you can tell from the story, being able to make a choice is a skill. And it’s a skill that many of our students don’t have. Sometimes they have difficulty knowing what the choices are. Other times, they are afraid of making a choice that someone will think is wrong. But for many choices, like about what you want to do, there obviously is not a wrong choice. So students need to be taught to make choices of what they like to do, eat, etc.
2
leisure skills
Students need to try new leisure activities to learn what other things they might like. For instance, some kids would choose computers everyday and never try anything else. So they would have no other interests if the computer was broken.
3
handle disappointment
Students need to understand that some choices they want aren’t available. For instance, if they want the computer and there is a student on each computer, it may no longer be an option. Choice time gives us a controlled situation to teach them to tolerate this disappointment.
4
advocating
Students need to learn to advocate for themselves. So learning to make choices is the first step in telling people what you want or need.
5
staff management
Choice time typically takes less staff supervision. And this has 2 components. One, the students get a type of break from staff being on top of them instructing. And two, it allows you to give your staff breaks during the day. For instance, I often schedule choice time during the middle of the day after lunch. This allows the zoning plan to fit in at least one lunch break for the staff.
So those are some reasons why I think choice time is worthwhile in the classroom. In the next post I’ll talk about how I implement it in the classroom and what it might look like.
In the meantime, if you found this to be a useful topic of discussion, you may enjoy our discussions in the community of the Special Educator Academy.
Until next time,
As the parent of an adult with autism – I agree that this is a tremendously important skill! We work so hard at teaching our students to follow directions that they can easily learn that someone will always tell them what to do and that their “voice” does not matter.
As an administrator at a school that specializes in working with individuals with DD, I would add that choice time can be academic in nature. Once you have used highly preferred things to teach how to make choices, consider allowing students to “choose” which task to do first or let students “choose” the order of the flexible pieces of their schedule.
Our time with students is finite – but teaching students to advocate for themselves is something that will have life-long benefits!
Thanks for adding that Irene!!