An Introduction to Educator Agency
Amanda Girvin is not competitive by nature, but she knows the importance of a win. “I feel like one person’s win is everybody’s win,” she said as she sat in a student’s desk in her English classroom in Burlington, a city in Northern Kentucky’s Boone County.
Burlington’s history dates back to 1799, and the town still boasts many historic buildings (“Burlington” 2013).
Although Burlington is evolving, it has always been a gathering spot in a rural and agricultural community and is especially abustle around the courthouse, where you can shop antiques at Motley Home and grab a meal on the patio of Washington Square. Just five miles east of this courthouse sits Mrs. Girvin’s school, Camp Ernst Middle School. In her 23 years of teaching, she has had her fair share of wins here - and some tough times, too. “There were some hard years where I had to really retrace back to my why,” she said. She’d think back to her grandmother and mother who both held careers in education. “Education is the only path to choices. I want each of my students to have choices.”
Background
Mrs. Girvin‘s experience is not unique. Many teachers and administrators are leaving the professional altogether, according to Stephanie Hagerty, principal at Camp Ernst. There are many reasons for this, she says, including lack of professional respect, wages, stress and an overall feeling of helplessness. “Sometimes we feel like no matter what we do, we can’t help these kids, and that’s hard,” she said. She may be onto something there, according to Rebound: A Playbook for Rebuilding Agency, Accelerating Learning Recovery, and Rethinking Schools. This alarming trend may be in part a result of a decrease in teacher efficacy and agency.
Efficacy is “a person’s sense of being able to deal effectively with a particular task (Woolfolk, 2007, p. 332). Agency is the ability to engage in efforts to reach a goal, which can include impacting others. Both are important to a fulfilling career, agency seems to have been more compromised as a result of the pandemic (Fisher et al., 2021).
According to Rebound, when teachers exert energy and effort into the profession and see evidence of their students' learning, they make the connection between their efforts and the impact those efforts have on students. When teachers work hard and see outcomes, efficacy and agency grow. When teachers are not able to see the link between their efforts and evidence of student learning, efficacy and agency are reduced. This leads teachers to feel like their efforts don’t matter, and this - not necessarily how many hours they work - is when they begin to feel burnt out (Fisher et al., 2021) .
People are motivated by success. It is critical for teachers to recognize the link between their efforts and the positive impact it is having. However, because of the nature of teaching and learning, it can sometimes be difficult to see that link. John Hattie’s Visible Learning implores teachers to “know thy impact” because “understanding the impact that you have reinforces agency, allows you to make adjustments to increase your impact, and (allows you) to hold high expectations for yourself and your students” (Fisher et al., 2021).
What it looks like in Schools
How do we as teachers and administrators begin to do this? We begin by harvesting wins in the classroom. Wins - just like the ones Mrs. Girvin has been experiencing lately. “Sometimes you can just look around your classroom and know you are doing well,” she said. “But, the data is very important. The data speaks.” She used her own observations and the data to begin harvesting wins in her classroom. This means she identified some instructional practices she was doing that were directly linked to student success, and she began spending more time on those things. She began embedding success criteria into her lessons through using rubrics and showing students examples
of a well-written paper. “Because of that, the students began coming to me and telling me why they weren’t at mastery yet,” she said. “They began taking ownership and inspiring each other.” How did she know the effort she put into this strategy paid off? The students’ second quarter writing was better than ever. “They knocked it out of the park,” she said. Harvesting wins and spending time on things that work well also means letting go of expending effort and time on things that are not yielding results but may be done because it’s always been done that way. “Like high school students coloring maps,” Ms. Hagerty adds. “I can’t believe I spent so much time as a high school Social Studies teacher coloring maps. That gives you no understanding of the political boundaries..” she laughed.
Focusing on this may be a step towards teachers and administrators feeling more valuable in their roles in this post-pandemic world. “They definitely need more than cakes and cookies,” Hagerty said. “They need professional respect. They need feedback. They need to feel like their work matters." If teachers and administrators can harvest wins and expend their efforts more on the things that work for their students, they are more likely to know their impact and be more fulfilled in their career. We can move away from general praise and pats on the back and lean into analyzing which of our specific efforts are yielding the results we want to see for our students. I have heard many times the phrase, the students are doing well, so you must be doing something right. What is it exactly that we are doing right? What is working? If we can identify those things, we can have a bigger impact with more focused, less wasted effort.
One way to begin intentionally harvesting wins is to look at trends in our data. When the students are very successful on a skill, what instructional strategy was built into the lesson? Do I see a trend in a particular resource or medium? For example, ask yourself:
Do students seems to be more successful when I :
use video?
revisit routines for collaborative conversations before we share?
model my thinking as a first step?
go over the success criteria before the lesson?
give them feedback not attached to a grade?
give them feedback through an individual conference?
support the organization of their thinking through a graphic organizer?
Getting Started
Teachers and students have different strengths and needs, so there is not one list of things that will yield positive results in every classroom, every time, although using evidence based practices is a great place to start. Once we identify things that work well for us and our students, then we can make adjustments to eliminate things we are spending time on that aren’t showing results and increase the things we are spending time on that do show results. This will, in turn, make more visible the link between our efforts and our impact,
which increases efficacy and agency and will lead to more fulfillment in our careers. Consequently, our students will be led down a stronger path to success. As the eighth graders in Mrs. Girvin’s class illustrate their rear view mirrors with the things they want to leave behind as they move into high school and a new school year, I ask you, what things will you leave behind and what will you harvest as you grow into a better version of yourself with each new school year?
Until next time…keep growing the bluegrass.
Jess
References
Burlington Walking Tour.(2013). Boone county historic preservation review board.
Fisher, D., Frey, N., Smith, D. & Hattie, J. (2021). Rebound: a playbook for rebuilding agency, accelerating learning recovery, and rethinking schools. Corwin Press, Inc.
