By Simon Clarke | Posted: Tuesday August 29, 2017
What is this "Student Agency " all about?
One of the big projects our teaching team is developing is that of student agency. This is sometimes known as learner agency, student voice or agentic learning.
Whatever the term, they all generally mean putting the learner more in charge of their learning. Core Ed, a professional development company, explain it well with the comment below and the video above. Even though the video is 3 years old, it is still highly relevant today.
"Learner Agency is about shifting the ownership of learning from teachers to students, enabling students to have the understanding, ability, and opportunity to be part of the learning design and to take action to intervene in the learning process, to affect outcomes and become powerful lifelong learners."*
Why is this important?
When children take ownership of their learning by understanding what they need to work on, set their own goals and effectively evaluate their progress they are more likely to learn the concepts and information expected of them. This doesn't mean the teacher is no longer responsible for teaching the students, far from it. They now also have a greater responsibility to teach the students what they don't know and then help them learn it.
It is also a vitally important life skill in this ever changing world. I have spoken at length in the past about the future work force and it is evident that people will need to be prepared to show those skills of "student agency". People will need to be able to learn new skills within a job as technology changes or as Linkdin has recently predicted, having one job for life will be less likely in the future and people may have several career changes and therefore need to be able to drive their own learning.
What are we doing?
As mentioned, we have a number of projects currently taking place in the school. The senior students are doing a lot of work through the Google Drive called Workspace. This enables the learning process to be very clear to the students (and to parents). You can see what the goals are, resources to help your child learn, your child's work in relation to these goals and feedback from teachers.
The middles have been doing similar work through their workshop programme where children are given some say in what they need to learn about and opt into workshops being run by teachers, while the juniors have been leading the school in developing a goal system. We are currently trialing it in mathematics.
Every student in the school has their current math goal that they are working on. These can be found by logging into their google drive and going to their WOW folder. This space also contains some highlights of the work that your child has been doing at school.
A tip sheet is attached below to help parents login. Your child should know what their password is.
We will be completing a formal survey towards the end of the year on some of these initiatives but we always welcome any feedback.
*http://core-ed.org/assets/PDFs/Ten-Trends-6July2017.pdf