Welcome to edgy tips, a side project of the Cult of Pedagogy Podcast where I share

one quick idea to make your teaching better. This is Jennifer Gonzalez and I am your host.

This edgy tip is sponsored by CommonLit. Do teachers at your school already love CommonLit?

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fill out the form, mention Cult of Pedagogy in the questions for our team section and get $100

off for your school. They're excited to work with you and your team. Today's edgy tip is

avoid assignments that are too open-ended. Many of us in education talk about how important it is

to give students choice, to empower them to steer their own learning in a direction that's meaningful

to them. I believe this wholeheartedly. It drives me crazy to walk the halls of a school and see

26 nearly identical student art projects, or to hear that a teacher has assigned all four sections

of his history class the exact same topic for a research project. But there is another end

to this spectrum. While it's true that student choice has a lot of value, it's possible to give

them so much choice that it kind of backfires. When an assignment has little to no structure at all,

students often respond with confusion, not creativity. If you're in an art class for example,

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