Student agency
IB approaches to learning are at the heart of student agency
“Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself” – Chinese Proverb
"Agency is the capacity and propensity to take purposeful initiative—the opposite of helplessness." (IB)
Student agency refers to the level of control, autonomy, and power that a student experiences in their school.When we establish the right conditions and offer chances for students to assume control of their own learning, they exhibit higher levels of engagement and motivation. Granting them the options, the ability to express themselves, and a sense of ownership allows our students to acquire a deeper understanding.
Read this page alongside my page on Well-being and student leadership which provides more examples of what schools are doing.
As far as students go, there is compelling evidence that lack of autonomy (that is a command-and-control compliance culture) leads to poor outcomes in a whole host of areas:
...children in classrooms where the teachers endorsed more controlling strategies and attitudes reported lower levels of intrinsic motivation, perceived content confidence and self-esteem than students in classrooms with more autonomy-supportive teachers. When teachers were more controlling, students reported being less curious about schoolwork, preferring easier rather than challenging assignments, feeling less initiative in their approach to school, and less good about themselves both as students and in general. (Ryan and Deci, 2017 p151)
In this TedTalk Katherine Cadwell explores why student, and not teachers, need to lead in the classroom. She makes some interesting observations about:
- how the increased used of technology presents a challenge for critical thinking
- the importance of grounding lessons in questions, and not answers
- teachers stepping back, and turning the learning over to students - through the use of, e.g. harkness pedagogy
- key pedagogical principles: the one who does the work does the learning | new learning needs to be structured around a few key ideas | new learning has to be useful | interference must be reduced (i.e. students not looking at screens but engaging in the work of learning)
The use of SOLO taxonomy in the planning process allows leaners to be agentic as they are moving according to personalized different levels of understandings, for example, in each line of inquiry and they are encouraged to use higher thinking skills' level and take action in each line of inquiry not at the end of the unit of inquiry only.
SOLO stands for “structure of observed learning outcomes”. It is an illustrated model of learning that classifies depth of understanding into categories. According to these categories, students could understand at different levels.
Each of these levels of understanding has a name and a symbol:
- Pre-structural: student understands nothing.
- Unistructural: student understands something – represented by a single line.
- Multi-structural: student understands several relevant things – represented by three lines.
- Relational: students understand several relevant things that they see relate to each other – represented by three lines joined to each other
- Extended abstract: student understands a few related things they can apply in new situations about any topic.
SOLO taxonomy involves learners in their own differentiation and makes the process behind learning explicit. Teachers and students can use this tool together. Students can self-assess themselves based on how difficult they have found the learning and can also see what they need to do to understand the topic at the next level. The visual also shows them that they need to learn apparently disparate facts – only when they’ve done that can they link them all together in the next lesson.
SOLO taxonomy was first described by Kevin Collis and John Biggs in their 1982 book Evaluating the Quality of Learning: The SOLO Taxonomy.
Pam Hook’s HookED website includes information about SOLO taxonomy and free resources using SOLO.
Below I have included the many ways we can develop student agency in each of our classes. The ideas come from workshop participants. You could do a similar exercise with colleagues in your school.
Developing learners' agency and self-efficacy through:
- Establishing routines - Essential agreement: Creating essential agreement at the beginning of the academic year and dynamic reflections on it throughout the year to increase the sense of self-regulated and responsible learner, by participating in class roles and suggesting ways to resolve conflicts.
- Designing the learning environment: Learners are engaged to design and create their learning environment, by choosing the setup of the class, suggesting different centres that should be at a PYP classroom (inquiry centre, language centre, research centre, etc) along with choosing the resources they may use to inquire into different concepts.
- Checking-in their feelings (at the beginning of a session): In my classroom I tend to normalize and acknowledge the different feelings, and model identifying one’s emotions. One reason for this routine is to create safe environment where they are always included and empowered.
- Co-constructing the success criteria with the learner. Work with students to elicit the success criteria required for a specific task. For example, prior to starting to work on a specific task, we try to elicit from students how they think a successful product would look like, what knowledge/ skills/ learner profiles need to be demonstrated, and what specific features/ criteria need to be covered. These success criteria can be developed by the students into checklists that are aligned with the rubrics used to assess their products.
- Planning learning experiences based on learners' prior knowledge, needs, interests, and diverse backgrounds. Choice-based activities: this can be as simple as using choice boards for completing language tasks, such as achieving grammar or spelling learning objectives. Such activities that provide students with a range of options for completing an activity or assignment can help them to feel more invested in their learning.
- Dialogue around learning: I arrange a weekly meeting with my students, (we used to call it circle time or circle meeting because we gather in a circle till one of my students decided to call it “the knights of the rounded table”) in this meeting we discuss everything and anything they want. They share their thinking about their learning, suggest new activities, ask me, and ask each other questions and find answers, share search results of previously asked questions, and write down more questions and ideas to be discussed in the next meeting.
- How we speak - teacher’s language in class and feedback: We consider to a very big extent how we provide timely feedback in a constructive way that develops their self-efficacy and giving the students the space to make mistakes and wrong choices (as every progress is acknowledged). Moreover, the verbal praise given too is always considered to be specific with described actions.
- Inquiry-based approaches used in teaching and learning process which are the core of the IB philosophy. Students are encouraged to pursue topics that interest them.
- Action: Encouraging learners to act towards local or global concerns they inquire about to be internationally minded learner.
- Using (Harvard Project Zero) thinking routines: thinking routines are a great way of developing metacognition.
- Reflection and goal setting: Encouraging students to reflect on their learning and set personal goals can help them to develop a sense of purpose and motivation.
- Portfolio reflections: learning outcomes and student-led conferences where learners lead their learning process and reflect their understandings throughout a specific unit of inquiry.
- IB demonstrations of learning (i.e., PYP Exhibitions, MYP Personal Project, DP Extended Essay): PYP8 Exhibition is a great example. Under the transdisciplinary theme “How we organize ourselves” Learners were asked to choose an SDG of their choice and design a product (Creating a Business as they were inquiring into Entrepreneurship) that will help in solving the problem. Learners were given unlimited freedom in choosing their SDG, and their product they were also encouraged to take responsibility for the project from beginning to end. Students were given the opportunity to build their self-efficacy throughout the project by setting goals, making decisions, and acting.
- A student-led (parent-teacher) conference: Where learners present their learning and progress to their parents and other stakeholders. Students oversee selecting learning artifacts and evidence, reflecting on their progress, and presenting their work to others.
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 problem
- Require persistence
- Accept open walls – learning happens through rich experiences both within and beyond the school walls
However, student agency is not students 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
Resources
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.
Foster studentg agency through QUEST framework: an excellent blog by Alison Ya-Wen Yang
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 provides a 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 student agency that can be found HERE.
Nick Alchin, Giving students choices - but which ones? and Autonomous cars and autonomous students: Not the same autonomy at all.
In the blog Debunk Student Agency, Alison Ya-Wen Yang explores what student agency is and isn't, and how teachers could create environments that foster student agency.
Maximising student agency, Zeiser, Scholz & Cirks, 2018: identifies 17 teacher practices to develop student agency.
The following infographic is from Cindy Blackburn.
This graphic is a reflection arising out of a training session - which concept resonates with you?
Learner identity and agency guidebook: downloadable HERE. This Guidebook unpacks how to develop student identity and agency to provide more equitable and inclusive learning environments for all students. It aggregates the leading research, thinking, and strategies from experts in sociology, psychology, special education, educational equity, social justice, and student-centered education to support educators in this work.
The BEST Self-Direction Toolkit is a collection of resources for teachers to use in the classroom for instruction and assessment that focuses on self-direction. The toolkit includes the self-direction rubric, self-direction activities and targeted resources for teachers. All tools are designed by teachers and tested in the classroom. It’s for educators looking to increase student agency in their classrooms and schools. Building and district leadership will also find the research and additional resources in the toolkit helpful as they implement student-centered practices in their schools.
Edutopia have produced a helpful video exploring what student agency looks like in the classroom - you may find this a helpful video to use with colleagues. Click HERE.
Harvard Project Zero have a great site dedicated to Agency by Design (AbD), which investigates the promises, practices, and pedagogies of maker-centered learning experiences. Maker-centered learning offers learners multiple ways to think critically and engage with the designed world. The site contains a Framework, Thinking Routines + Tools + Practices. “There is a contemporary resurgence of interest in the power of making things—in contrast with merely consuming them—and the theme of making is increasingly finding its way into national and global conversations about economics, entrepreneurship and education. While maker-centered learning is not a new concept, recent and emerging trends suggest a new kind of hands-on pedagogy—a responsive and flexible pedagogy that encourages community and collaboration (a do-it-together mentality), distributed teaching and learning, and the crossing and blurring of disciplinary boundaries. Explore Agency by Design’s framework for maker-centered learning.”
