Agency
Saturday 9 March 2019
IB approaches to learning are at the heart of student agency
I have just returned from chairing a multi-programme IB evaluation visit to the American International School of Mozambique (AISM), a school that prides itself on developing student agency.
Read this page alongside my page on Well-being and student leadership which provides more examples of what schools are doing.
Student agency refers to the level of control, autonomy, and power that a student experiences in their school. As we arrived on our first day the IB team were met by representatives of student leadership who led a welcome assembly in the grounds of their school, teachers in attendance but not organising this event nor taking a role within it. After we had all introduced ourselves an MYP 1 student asked to take the microphone to remind us all of our responsibility to all animate life – hundreds of small frogs had appeared on the grounds that day making it essential that we all watched where we were putting our feet. Here was a young student feeling empowered to speak out on an environmental issue close to his heart, inviting his fellow students, teachers and visitors to be responsible. Student agency in action. Later in the week I visited classrooms in which the teacher had carefully structured the learning experience, established the inquiry but then allowed students to work at their own pace on different aspects of the work. Within this learning environment students collaboratively helped each other whilst the teacher remained the facilitator and provocateur of learning.
My visit to AISM has encouraged me to reflect on the importance of student agency.
What is student agency?
Student agency is about learning through activities that are meaningful and relevant to the learners.
Agency is the capacity and propensity to take purposeful initiative—the opposite of helplessness. Young people with high levels of agency do not respond passively to their circumstances; they tend to seek meaning and act with purpose to achieve the conditions they desire in their own and others’ lives. (Getting Smart)
Student agency is a cluster of academic mindsets and learning strategies that have been demonstrated to advance learning and achievement. Academic mindsets are more evident in students who feel a sense of belonging in a certain subject, class or school; believe that they have the capacity to learn, and see value in their participation. Learning strategies include study skills, meta-cognition and goal-setting, competencies that help individuals persist when learning becomes challenging.(Raikes Foundation)
Who is doing the thinking in the classroom? This is student agency. (Trevor Mackenzie)
What does the IB say?
'Agency' and 'self-efficacy' are key words in the PYP From principles into practice. However, use of the term agency is increasingly being used throyghout all IB programmes.
The following text is taken from PYP, From Principles into Practice, The Learner.
"Throughout the PYP, a student is an agent for their own and others’ learning through the concept of learner agency. Learner agency is connected to a student’s belief in their ability to succeed (self-efficacy). Conceptualized by Bandura in social cognitive theory, agency “enable[s] people to play a part in their self-development, adaptation, and self-renewal with changing times” (Bandura 2001). PYP students with agency use their own initiative and will and take responsibility and ownership of their learning. They direct their learning with a strong sense of identity and self-belief, and in conjunction with others, thereby building a sense of community and awareness of the opinions, values and needs of others."
When teachers support student agency, they:
- notice, and reflect on the students’ existing capabilities, needs and interests in order to personalize learning
- actively listen to students’ opinions, wonderings, perspectives and aspirations to extend student thinking and action
- foster authenticity for students to explore their interests by giving them open-ended tasks
- offer opportunities for students to demonstrate creativity and take risks
- reflect on when students need help, and when not, by using assessment evidence to inform learning and teaching
- listen and respond to each student's activities to extend their thinking.
Students learn by doing. Teachers create opportunities for agency in the classroom by involving students in the following activities:
- Establishing a respectful and welcoming culture. Collaborate with students to create shared agreements about how to interact with others to create a culture of respect and trust where all students feel welcomed, significant and emotionally safe.
- Creating shared routines. Ask for students’ input into developing routines around arrival, transitions, communication signals, meetings, clean up and dismissal.
- Setting up the learning spaces. Ask students to help set up and arrange learning spaces that make them feel safe physically and where they can access learning materials, make choices and take risks.
- Making decisions about learning. Involve students in making decisions about what, why and how they learn—as co-collaborators in the learning community. Allow time to respond to students’ ideas about action.
- Communicating expectations. Clarify what knowledge, conceptual understandings, skills and dispositions the students are learning, and why.
Summary:
- Students have voice, choice and ownership for their own learning.
- When students’ have agency, the relationship between the teacher and students becomes a partnership.
- Students with a strong sense of self-efficacy bring a stronger sense of agency to the learning community.
- The learning community supports agency and fosters self-efficacy.
PYP, From Principles into Practice, The Learner.
Ryan Higbea has created this summative infographic:
In her article ‘Attaining Equity Through Agency: Creating the Future We All Hope For’ Mona Stuart, makes the case for focusing on developing student agency: “I believe we have a systematic issue that is rooted at the foundation of our current educational model which was created in the industrial era. The industrial education system was designed with the intent of sorting and selecting human beings into classes for the purpose of employment. The sort and select ethos, created at the turn of the 20th century, is still a driver in virtually every aspect of schooling. Examples of these practices are abundant and range from grading practices based on the evaluation of specific skills which can include grade point average, rankings, percentile rank, etc., to the enrollment structures of schools where students are batched by birthdate as if they are Toyota cars, to the architecture of schools where students are housed in buildings that resemble factories to be held captive for the time specified in the schedule, the list could go on and on. Let's face it, schools were designed to prepare a generation for the industrial workplace where some would be leaders, others would be managers, and the rest would be taught to follow directions and be compliant to the rules as they labored and toiled for the school, I mean company….It created a system that made schools look like factories on steroids. Has there ever been a more contradictory approach to human development?”
At its heart agency is about the student taking control over their own learning in both cognitive and affective ways. The affective skills at the heart of the IB approaches to learning (metacognition, self-management) are central to a learner’s expression of agency. They are at the heart of developing as life-long learners.
If we are to develop student agency we need to recognise that students’ are not empty vessels waiting to be filled. Instead, they come with a wealth of experiences, interests and passions that need to be recognised and built upon (an essential aspect of the IB’s definition of differentiation). There is a danger to think that learning only takes place or primarily takes place at school, whereas in fact it takes place everywhere and all the time. As Mona Stuart says “learning takes place within the mind of the learner and everywhere that mind travels so does learning. Agency empowers the learner to build meaning by connecting new knowledge and understandings to their prior understandings.” We must help our students by making connections between the academic disciplines we are immersing them in and their relevance to their world and understandings.
In his article ‘Are we teaching for activism or compliance?’ Adrian Von Wrede-Jervis (October 2019) provides a model of education that focuses on living out the mission of the IB “to develop internationally minded people who recognize their common humanity and shared guardianship of the planet. Central to this aim is international-mindedness.” It seeks to articulate what that call actually means, using four inspirations:
- To Think in a way that leads to Global understanding
- To Act in a way that leads to Global engagement
- To Become such that we pursue Global values
- To Care for causes that arise from Global awareness
I like this model because it provides the reason (the WHY?) for students to take charge of their own learning - to become agentic.
Top Tips
- Focus on the learning (not the teaching)
- Recognise that education is done with the learner (not to the learner)
- Value prior knowledge
- Make relevant connections
- Encourage inquiry
- Nurture trans-disciplinary thinking
- Make learning coherent - show big picture
- Customize | personalize -allowing students to go at their own pace
- Respect student perspectives whilst keeping focused on instructional goals
- Set learning goals that require students to use reasoning and exercise agency in solving problems
- Require persistance
- Accept open walls – learning happens through rich experiences both within and beyond the school walls
However, student agency is not studens just doing what they want (or nothing)! Agency has to be carefully facilitated and structured by teachers.
Here is a useful checklist from teachthought on 10 Ways To Give Students More Control Of Their Education, TeachThought Staff, February 24, 2019
A straightforward introduction to student agency can be found HERE.
10 Tips for Developing Student Agency, Tom Vander Ark, December 22, 2015 provides some great suggestions for how teachers can develop student agency. It is based on a Harvard study report The Influence of Teaching Beyond Standardized Test Scores: Engagement, Mindsets and Agency, which was sponsored by the Raikes Foundation.
Ten Trends 2017: Learner Agency - a good article about the importance of agency.
Victorian State Government (2018). Amplify: Empowering students through voice, ownership and agency. Melbourne. Department of Education and Training. This is a very good document on leadership for agency for students, teachers and leaders.
Building a culture of agency, WhatEdSaid, August 2018 providea a very helpful list of reflective questions.
Written from a PYP perspective this article from Studio 5 at ISHCMC provides a helpful provocation on how to establish student agency from the first week of the school year. What could an agency-supportive first week of school look like?
There is a wealth of guidance in this OECD publication on Student Agency which takes into consideration socio-economic contexts, culture and co-agency. The OECD have produced a good range of videos on srudent agency that can be found HERE.
The following infographic is from Cindy Blackburn.
This graphic is a reflection arising out of a training session - which concept resonates with you?
