Student Agency

Students who have been empowered to act with agency about their learning are more engaged, motivated, and often more likely to struggle through the tough patches or try things in different ways.

Students who have made important decisions about what, how and when they will undertake their learning and demonstrate their mastery also have to take greater responsibility for their actions. Teachers engage as mentors and models who can provide feedback about how the students choices can be supported or modified to achieve greater success.

Promoting student agency can also create respectful and trusting relationships between learners and their teachers as they co-construct a learning pathway that achieves the desired outcomes.

You may find the continuum below useful for supporting you to evaluate where your students are at now, and where they are after you have trialed a few strategies for your sprint.

​Resources

• Putting Students in Charge of Their Learning: Giving students choices and the means to assess their progress fosters metacognition and independence Beth Pandolpho

• Learning to Choose, Choosing to Learn Mike Anderson

• Tips From Dr. Marzano: The Highly Engaged Classroom

• 5 Ways to Give Your Students More Voice and Choice, gives meaningful, concrete ways teachers can begin to co-create the learning experience with students (Blog post on Edutopia)

• Learner Interest Matters: Strategies for Empowering Student Choice, sage advice on how to support students to design personal learning products that are rigorous and meaningful (Blog post on Edutopia)

• Are You Ready to Be a Change-Agent for Agency?, Susan Lucille Davis shares with inspiration and practical steps to grant students the freedom to learn (Blog post on Getting Smart)

• Meaningful Student Involvement: Guide to Students as Partners in School Change, a guidebook on how to involve students as researchers, planners, teachers, evaluators, decision makers, and advocates (Report and guidebook from the Soundout site)

• Student Choice Leads to Student Voice, a teacher, Joshua Black, writes about the impact of student choice in the classroom and tangible examples about how he and his colleagues have facilitated student choice (Blog post on Edutopia)

Questions to Guide Observation

• Do students have choice in the classroom?

• How are students influencing the direction of their learning?

• If so, what types of choices are available to students? Are choices more operational or instructional in nature?

• When/how does the teacher create space for student choice?

• When students make choices in the classroom, how do they make those choices? Do they reflect on their data, goals, areas of growth, etc. before making a decision?

• If students make a choice that’s not appropriate for their needs and learning progression, does the teacher intervene? If so, how?​