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.

Seminar Assessment Using Google Forms

 In a previous post (Trio Seminar), I outlined the near impossibility of hearing everything said in a seminar format in which more than one voice is talking. And, it is often vitally important that I make this tradeoff because higher levels of student engagement are worth the added challenge of assessing a wide-spread and multi-directional conversation.

While I often place myself dead center of the trio seminar circle, recording excerpts of conversation, visually documenting participation, collecting anecdotal evidence, I have no way of knowing--at least during this segment of the seminar--what depth of understanding and the frequency and range of contributions an individual is bringing to the discussion.

Google Forms to the Rescue (Again!)

A brief version used to collect quick peer assessments.

Because my students have access to Chromebooks, I am able to have them help me assess seminar contributions via a Google form.

Prior to using the form for peer assessment purposes, we calibrate our thinking about what high levels of performance in a seminar look like.

What is not displayed in the image is the pull-down list of names I use to have students select the name of who is being assessed. You could simply have a Name? text field instead, but I found that student misspellings, make data sorting difficult. Madison becomes Madeson becomes Madyson becomes Maddisson. The pull down list standardizes the data sorting and is well worth the effort to type in all the names. (This takes me no more than five minutes per class (and is a great job for a TA), and once done can be used over and over by making a copy of the Google form for the next seminar.)

During the seminar, both the students and I use the form to assess student performance, evidence of preparation, etc. And, once the seminar is complete, the students self-assess using the same form.

At the completion of the seminar, I can calculate student scores (with the data that is automatically sent to a Google Sheet), and review comments and contributions, to determine a student's seminar grade.

 Depending on the seminar goals (and time I have to do this), I will use a Google add-on (Save as Doc) to select the comments and scores for each student so that I post the link to their green sheet, which gives them the full range of the peer and teacher and self assessments from which they can formulate goals for growth in the next seminar.

If you have any questions, I'd be glad to help. Just send me a note.

Thanks for reading!
Steve

Performance Conversation To-Do List: A Google Forms solution

In a previous post I explained how we used the Performance Conversation (affectionately referred to as the Green Sheet) for the bulk of our work submissions and assessments. One of the most significant benefits of this forum that focuses on an oft-times extended conversation with the student about the assignment is that it creates an elevated desire for students to revise their work.

And while this is precisely what we want for a multitude of reasons, it does create a not-so-insignificant issue: keeping track of who needs what re-assessed.

Mr. M's Student To-Do List

Yes, from your Google Drive page you can see which students have recently updated their Green Sheets, but it gives you no indication of what precisely they updated. This is where another Google product can help solve the problem and shift the burden of notification and organization to the student.

Students, of course, do not need to individually notify me if they are submitting an assignment that is submitted on-time since my expectation is that I will be able to open their green sheet and find it hyperlinked and self-assessed. But, if they have been absent, if they need their work reassessed because they've revised, if they need a letter of recommendation, to send an email home, etc., they fill out the questions on the Google form. The form then sends the results to a Google sheet (my Student To-Do List), which I check regularly.

I proceed (usually) in order of submission which is date-stamped on the sheet.

And because the form sends the data to a spreadsheet, I'm able to sort by student name to track frequency of revisions, late work, number of letters of rec., etc.

This has helped me rid my desk of all those maddening scraps of paper and sticky notes that were the bane of my existence. 

Thanks for reading,
Steve

Performance Conversation: Changing the way work is submitted and assessed

"What we need," my wife, who is also an English teacher, said to me one day, "is a document where we could do everything: track student work, have students self-assess, provide feedback and assessments, and document standards growth." The next day, the Performance Conversation (a.k.a. the Green Sheet) was born.

The Green Sheet: as the year progresses, we add more rows for students to continue posting their work.

Because our district uses Chromebooks, Google docs tends to be our default for most things. The Green Sheet is no exception.


The Green Sheet is where students post all their work by hyperlinking it in column 2. For each assignment they are to fill out the Student Comments and Self-Assessments column. One of the strategies we often use to force/encourage self-assessment is to tell them that we will not grade their assignments until they are self-assessed.

But, we emphasize the proper name of this form even more than we do assessment of student work. Our hope was that this document would be a forum for student and teacher conversation about their work and their growth, and it has indeed become that. As you can see from the example below, students are quite eager to reflect in depth about their work, I think, because they know it is going to be read, because it is building upon their previous reflections which are often right above in a previous assignment's row, and because we have a genuine interest in seeing what the student thinks of his or her own work before we dive in to read/discuss/assess.

We all know the immense importance of conferencing with students--my wife and I are constantly conferencing with them--but even so, we can't get to everyone every day. The green sheet has helped fill this void. Students post works-in-progress and we are able to electronically-conference with them, thus freeing up some in-class time to work and conference with those students most in need.

Excerpt of a university-level Performance Conversation

Students are encouraged (and sometimes required if they are struggling a bit) to share their Performance Conversation with a parent/guardian, and we have had some parents take an active interest in their student's writing by joining in on the conversation in their Parent/Guardian column.

I also use the Green Sheet in the university courses I teach, and the college students like the flexibility it affords them, not to mention the ownership, accessibility, and the professor-student connections it fosters. Here is an in-use example from one of my recent college courses:
 
Over years, there have been a few changes and additions that I would encourage you to incorporate.

Because each kid needs their own copy of the document, you need to force them to make a copy. Google makes this really easy to do. When you get the shareable link, it'll look something like this:

 https://docs.google.com/documen/d/1PCY2XYoUvTvfJFsAP2ZriF6dnwBXRVGZFITwATzqTU/edit?usp=sharing 

If you delete everything highlighted in yellow and replace it with the word "copy" the students will be forced to make a copy of the document. They will then add their name to it before sharing it back to you.

It'll look like this: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PCYe2XYoUvTvfJFsAP2ZriF6dnwBXRVGZFITwATzqTU/copy

(In fact, if you follow that link, you will be able to make your own copy of the example green sheet. Feel free to use it/change it however you'd like.)

Another addition is the "Important Updates" link we've added to the top, which is our way of broadcasting reminders and updates to students without having to open each student document and update.

I also use a Google Sheets document with one sheet per class as my Green Sheets Master List, where I have my class list and hyperlinks to each student's green sheet. This allows me to quickly navigate to student work.

While we believe that One Note might be a better vehicle for this document, our district's use of Chromebooks makes Google Docs a more sensible choice at least for the near future.

Please feel free to contact me if you have further questions about this. I look forward to conversing with you.

Thanks for reading,
Steve

You might be interested in this article which addresses how to get notified when students resubmit work.