Emphasizing and Assessing Student Agency

One of the truisms of teaching is that you get what you emphasize. As a teacher, if you want X, you emphasize X. If you want students to use dialogue in their narratives, you emphasize it. If you want them to show their work in math or science, you emphasize it. If you want them to verify the credibility of sources for a history project, you emphasize it.

With the movement toward personalized learning, student agency is increasingly entering our professional conversations. So, it follows that if we want students to move more toward agents of their own learning, they could probably benefit from a heightened metacognitive awareness of their agency.On most days, students rate their own student agency, but we routinely use this form for peer and teacher assessments as well. Some days, students are partnered up, and at the end of class they peer assess for agency.

Out of several definitions of student agency being used in the professional literature, our PLC began building our own understanding using this one from The Knewton Blog because of its clarity and action-oriented phrasing:

Student agency refers to the level of control, autonomy, and power that a student experiences in an educational situation. Student agency can be manifested in the choice of learning environment, subject matter, approach, and/or pace.
  

Aversion to Agency

 
Interestingly enough, most of our high school students find this an agreeable idea, but they are confounded or even resistant when it comes to actually taking charge of their learning. In short, it takes too much work to chart their own course. Add to that, they are genuinely concerned about deviating from what they've become accustomed to doing, which is working toward their teacher's goals and not their own.


We use a Google form (at right) to help students grow not only more knowledgeable about student agency, but also more comfortable in thinking about the role that agency plays in their learning. (Notice the more student-friendly agency definition we use on this form).

The data we gather from this form allows us to think tangibly about progress-or lack of progress--toward students taking increasing ownership of their learning.

We routinely sort the data on the Google Sheet (where the data from this form gets sent) to review with students the trends in their agency assessments.

Improvements we're thinking about incorporating are for each student to maintain their own Google form and own Google sheet and then have them share their sheet with us. This would shift the responsibility for this data to the students and would allow them to sort, work with ways to present the data, and I believe, would help them further heighten their awareness of their agency. A problem this would create is that peers and the teacher couldn't assess a student unless the form was shared with us, creating some issues with multiple documents (and for the teacher with one for each student per class). That said, students could hyperlink their agency assessment form to their green sheet, which would allow access as well as commentary.

 Like everything, this is a work in progress. But, we noticed significant shifts this year in student perceptions and awareness of their agency and its relationship to what we hope has been meaningful learning for them.

I'd love to hear your thoughts about this topic. Please consider sharing this with others.

Update: I just read this very thorough article from Zahner History that could help streamline the information-sharing fix we want to incorporate.
  Thanks for reading,
Steve  


You might also be interested in these other posts about using Google Sheets: Seminar Assessment Using Google Sheets, Teacher To-Do List.

Mastering Messiness: Rethinking Project Criteria

As we enter the homestretch of our school year, many of us are undoubtedly ending our courses with some form of project. Whether it is the culmination of a year-long social justice research project (as is the case with our students), a scientific inquiry, or a literary or historical study, our students are creating a product to demonstrate their learning.

For most students, their primary concern is the product itself. And, rightly so since our grading criteria often emphasize elements of the product's parameters (length, number of research sources, professionalism of the presentation, etc.).

Mastering Messiness is the Key to Growth

But as teachers, we often care much less about the product itself than about the journey the students took to create the product. It matters less that the student had five sources for her research, and matters more about her knowing how to inquire deeply, how to mine meaning from these sources, how to synthesize, refine claims as new information transforms her thinking. It matters that she desires disequilibrium because she knows this is the launching point for profound thinking and creating.

And for her own growth.

Process Over Product
If a student is committed to her project, the grade will be largely irrelevant; she'll know its worth regardless of any grade we assign to it. It'll mean something so far beyond any letter grade or number on a 4-point scale.

So, what if we shifted our emphasis away from the product itself to more greatly emphasize the attitudes and approaches that will not only help them create this project, but the many others they will undoubtedly be required to complete over their academic and work careers?

 Here are the Indicators of an Excellent Project that I use to assess my students approaches to their products:

• Messiness (disequilibrium defines the initial efforts; dynamic and wide-ranging thinking progressing toward unity)

• Intrepidness (an embracing of intellectual risks, an eagerness to think creatively, a willingness to take skills risks; innovative)

• Intimacy (devotion to the project; an embracing of complexities/nuances/depth)

• Clarity (effective/authorial delivery in your chosen form; you move us)

Yes, it takes some convincing for students to want to get messy (and it needs to be explicitly said that we're not talking about crumpled papers shoved into a binder--not that kind of messy). In fact, messiness is the indicator they are most unsettled by. But, messiness is the single most important indicator because it is the most realistic starting point for any profound and transformative work.

Ask kids about the cellphones they can't seem to remove from their hands. Ask them how many cellphone iterations, how many failures, approximations it took before tech companies were able to produce the one they're currently holding. I tell them about the brick of a cellphone my father used to carry around when he worked for the phone company years ago. For its time, it was quite advanced, but when I tell them that he had to carry the phone's giant battery in a separate case, they understand that our first attempts are only starting points for further refinement.

Authorial Attitudes
And when these mindsets are emphasized over the product, the students start asking the right kind of questions. Just today, several students wanted conferences because they sensed their early thinking wasn't "messy" enough. Ironically, perhaps, when they're in these messy conceptual situations where there are a million different directions they could go, they begin to feel more in control. They begin to evaluate, to inquire further, to prioritize, gain traction and ultimately, they begin to work their way out with a more intimate understanding of what their project is really about.

They can now write, produce, create, dance, act, debate, present with authority that comes only from having struggled toward ownership, toward growth, and toward meaning.

Thanks so much for reading. I'd love to hear your thoughts about how you encourage students to own their work.

You might also be interested in these posts that talk about authorial voice and control in writing: Writing Control,  Idea Control.