Decision learning Creating a context in which children make decisions about their own learning

As Douglas Barnes says, we have the responsibility to control children – there is no way round it. Teachers who are themselves creative, or ‘makers’, as he puts it, can let children be makers too. Not just sometimes, but often. What I call ‘decision learning’ is a strategy in which teachers create, plan and organise an environment so that children decide what they will do with their time. They work together to ask and answer questions and to pursue ideas of interest. We can offer such choice. We can set up conditions in which children make their own understanding as they raise questions, discuss what to do and what they are doing, and enlist group involvement in decision making and problem solving.