I recently wrote about this and only a few nights ago enjoyed a dinner-party conversation on the topic. Where active learning is concerned, I think we tend to get overly focussed on only choice/autonomy and relationships. We underestimate the foundational need for a baseline of structure to provide each student with the clarity, safety, and confidence boundaries necessary for learner autonomy to pay off within an active setting.
Agreed. Sometimes I think a car/driving analogy works well. We have roads, driving rules, licensing, etc. (i.e., driving structure) so that all of us can get where we are going faster and safer. No driving structure at all would make it really tough for us to get around, even in the best car (think Mad Max).
To be clear on my own suggestion, I think the baseline of structure has to do as much with motivation-initiative, regulating challenge, and assignment navigation as with behaviour and discipline.
Also, Csikszentmihalyi's ideas on "flow" have much to say on all this. He really gets a lot of things right, e.g., his views on the need for a challenge-skills match fit well with mainstream ideas re learners as self-regulators.
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