Student Agency - Why bother
Why do we bother? It is far easier for a teacher to stand at the front of a class and teach everyone the same lesson.
Many countries overseas do this, you might remember this from your schooling or from TV programmes.
However, this doesn’t happen in NZ. Teachers are experts at differentiating,
giving all children the right opportunities and access at just the right level and right type of learning.
They are also great at building trusting learning relationships so our students believe and show confidence
that they are capable learners. In most NZ classes teachers are covering between 2 to 3 curriculum levels,
sometimes more.
In their book, Putting Students First, Jones, Avery, and DiMartino (2020) note that
“Students taking ownership of and responsibility for their own learning is nearly universally
accepted as a desirable and positive trait. When students have a say in what and how they
engage with content, learning deepens and carries over into new applications and areas.”
“In our response to the myriad challenges the global COVID-19 pandemic has posed,
addressing the need for greater student agency and student engagement must now
be a key focus of school leaders and educators. We must rethink learning designs that
support students anytime, anyplace, and at any pace.
We must re-imagine what agency and engagement can look like in contemporary practices.”
From Aurora institute student agency
“Understanding learners’ experiences during the lockdown period has provided us valuable
insights into what we can be doing—as teachers and as a system—to design conditions
for learning that is more conducive to developing learner agency. In doing so, we must
acknowledge that the whole context of the lockdown was sub-optimal, in the sense that
it was an emergency response, rather than a planned and deliberate redesign.
As a consequence, many learners had negative experiences, influenced by a lack of resources,
support, and/or the skills necessary to work independently and out of reach of their peers.
We’ve heard complaints from parents that the online experience did not work for their children.
We heard from the students themselves that they did not participate except in minimal
ways, and we heard the frustrations teachers expressed that students were not responding,
connecting, or doing the expected work.”
However, it has worked for many children. And we know that many of our learners at Waitati school, they have continued to learn and do well.
“If we wish to see every learner have the positive experiences described above,
we must spend more time considering how we design the learning to enable these outcomes.
For example, we cannot simply imagine that all learners will have the level of self-managing skills required,
so we must ensure we use the appropriate sorts of scaffolding activities and support to help
them develop these skills. Similarly, we must plan to reduce the amount of teacher-directed activity that may impede the development of such skills.”
Why? Because the world has changed from when we went to school.
The skills needed to work in a digital environment are different from the world of pen and paper.
The skills needed to solve the ‘wicked problems of our world, like climate change, pollution etc,
include innovation, collaboration, creativity, and coding.
“The world is changing, in fact, it was already changing long before the pandemic came along.
Technology that enables us to work effectively from anywhere such as video conferencing
and cloud-based platforms have been around for a while but the biggest acceleration of change
caused by the pandemic was in attitudes. With these new technologies, the most in-demand skills for
the future are rapidly evolving. For those with corporate careers,
the pandemic was one giant experiment in remote working:
Can workers be trusted to work efficiently and effectively when not being monitored?
The answer is a resounding “yes!”.” Marc Benioff, Salesforce CEO, in an interview with Yahoo Finance.
Can our students be trusted to work efficiently and effectively when not being monitored? I would say yes they can. We don’t dump children into learning by themselves, we guide them. We support them by giving them the skills needed. Such as teaching them to timetable what they need to do, so they can plan their day. They can make choices about how long they will need for a task taking into account the flow needed. We can teach them how to find the information that they need. We give them graphic organizers to extend their management of learning,, and we can use deep thinking strategies to help them think critically. We use design thinking principles to help them innovate, and we give them real-world problems to apply their skill. The most significant thing we do is trust them as learners. We give them opportunities to be responsible and agenic.
The role of devices in student agency - It is not that we want to give a child a device and leave them to it. Through Covid, we have needed to pivot from our classroom teaching to online learning. We now call this Hybrid learning. We do both at the same time. We provide learning for our students at school at the same time as the students at home.
“Skills gaps continue to be high as in-demand skills across jobs change in the next five years.
The top skills and skill groups that employers see as rising in prominence in the lead-up to 2025
include groups such as critical thinking and analysis as well as problem-solving,
and skills in self-management such as active learning, resilience, stress tolerance, and flexibility.
On average, companies estimate that around 40% of workers will require reskilling of six months or less
and 94% of business leaders report that they expect employees to pick up new skills on the job,
a sharp uptake from 65% in 2018.” From https://hospitalityinsights.ehl.edu/most-in-demand-skills-future.
You can see from this that learning to learn, being agenic will be a necessary work skill.
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