Enabling Constraints

Enabling Constraints: Opening Possibilities by Limiting Choices

 We don’t say, OK, now do whatever you want.

It is not a matter of everyone does the same thing or

Everyone does their own thing

Can you rephrase your teaching intentions as enabling constraints rather than prescriptions?

The intent is neither that students will simply reproduce established insights, nor merely produce  new interpretive possibilities

Rather, the goal is a creative mix: to investigate established knowledge  while engaging in a process of establishing knowledge.  The key is a structure that is simultaneously constraining and enabling-imposing rules that delimit possibilities and that allow choice at the same time.

Lynda Barry and Michael Ray Charles