Null“The main ingredient in all success is wise choices. That’s because the quality of our lives is determined by the quality of the choices we make on a daily basis.” Skip Downing, On Course, Strategies for Creating Success in College and in Life.

The Wise Choice Process


There are six questions in the Wise Choice Process:

  1. What’s my present situation?
  2. How would I like my situation to be?
  3. What are my possible choices?
  4. What is the likely outcome of each possible choice?
  5. Which choice(s) will I commit to doing?
  6. When and how will I evaluate my plan?

“You are about to learn a system that will empower you to take greater responsibility for creating your life as you want it…”   Skip Downing

Try it!  We all make choices everyday, both personal and professional, pick a choice in your day and work through the process. Want to share your process, add it to the comments below.

Many of the concepts in On Course can be used as is for teaching how to make choices, or they can be used within your subject matter.

Tom Gordon’s Story


My Wise Choices assignment was inspired by the Oncourse workshop during Summer of “13. In it, we considered The Case of the Late Paper in which a bright, hard-working student failed a course due to a series of choices made by her, her professor, and others. It occurred to me during the workshop’s assignment-building session that we actually were considering the historical process of how this failing grade came about. History is full of the wise and not-so-wise choices of countless individuals, nations, groups, etcetera. A light bulb began to glow.

I now have a Wise Choices assignment which I introduce by using The Case of the Late Paper and assigning levels of responsibility to the six different agents involved in the case. I then ask the students what “better” or “wiser” choices could have been made by each agent. Immediately after this, I introduce the assignment which calls for a one-page analysis of a historical conflict. The paper calls for the following:

  1. Identify the conflict, opposing agents and each agent’s goals (one paragraph).
  2. Identify the reasons each agent was pursuing their goals and the obstacles they faced (one paragraph).
  3. Identify the methods each agent employed in achieving their goals and the level of success/failure realized (one paragraph).
  4. Report additional (relevant) information from a scholarly outside source (one paragraph).
  5. Finish with a reasonable statement of what better or wiser choices could have been made by any or all agents to achieve (an ethically) better or (strategically) more successful outcome. I think there is great value in making the assignment personal up front by using “The Case of the Late Paper.”

It is the sort of case they can relate to. It helps them verbalize their own personal opposition to self-defeating choices, and it helps them to begin owning their own choices. Lastly, students can see that choices, both large and small, are the catalyst of the historical process.

A peculiar twist on this assignment is the self and peer-assessment process. Students submit these papers (anonymously) to a Moodle workshop. The workshop randomly assigns three papers to each student. It also has them assess their own. This exposes each student (ideally) to poor, good and excellent examples  by the time they’ve gone through this process with three different submissions. I have the option to insert myself (or not) as a fourth assessor (I was going to say fourth grader but it didn’t sound quite right). I normally only do this when a student does not have enough peer assessors. I actually pay more attention to grading each student’s assessments of the others. Guiding them through the assessment process helps them to make more incisive, thoughtful comments to help their classmates. Additionally, the assessment process helps put them into the professor’s frame of mind and helps them to anticipate what the professor is looking for. Finally, receiving numerous comments from peers helps reinforce that the instructions did make sense to others and tends to multiply the aha! moments in ways I could not have done by simply grading them myself.

Later in the semester, they will submit a final “Wise Choices” paper to me for a much higher score. They will have had much practice by this time and can write a much better analysis. This sets them up for success and caps off what has proven to be much-needed writing practice.

I’ve had to work through a few issues such as the ethics of students assigning grades to each other.  I can offer more detailed information for anyone interested in pursuing a similar assignment or the use of workshops.

My most common student complaint has been the limited amount of words allowed for the assignment. Students have grown so accustomed to padding their writing with really, really, unnecessary, superfluous, adjective-filled (you get the idea) verbiage that writing concisely comes with difficulty. I’ve addressed this issue by providing plenty of excellent examples. These prove that it can be done and done well.

The most common student praise for this assignment is that it helped to tighten up and improve their writing. I think the workshops may hold part of the answer to getting in plenty of writing practice without overtaxing the professor or student, though currently I find that grading their assessments is just as taxing as grading their assignments.

Feel free to use any or all of this in your own pedagogical adventures. I’d appreciate receiving your insights on this work-in-progress.