Supporting Student Agency

Description: 

Embracing agency means that students are empowered by their own voices and their own choices in their learning experiences. Embracing agency requires a shift in instructional practices that allow students to contribute their strengths, cultures, ideas, interests, and experiences to their own learning. It is vitally important for educators to understand that while in many settings students use their agency effectively on their own, in the classroom teacher support and guidance are essential.

Agency demands movement away from the mindset that test scores provide the only data that matter and toward a vision of student data that consider what happens in the classroom each day. Student agency is not a dismissal of learning standards or assessments or the quantitative data that they yield, rather, it is a shift in perspective about the level of importance these standards and assessments have in thinking and discussions about what and how well students are learning. With agency, quantitative data is part of the picture, but it does not represent the totality of what a student knows. Agency recognizes power of possibility within each learner. It is about helping learners recognize that what they bring to the classroom is an important part of their educational experience.

This engaging program involves educators in rich dialogue and authentic practice about how to embrace and activate student agency within their schools and classrooms.  Through videos, individual and small group work, case studies, literature reviews, and meaningful discussions, participants will learn the following:

• The research connected to student agency.
• The power of agency to increase student engagement, deepen student learning, and improve student achievement.
• The mindset shift required to embrace agency in the classroom.
• Multiple assessment practices that enhance student agency.
• The key practices that are specific to inviting and sustaining student agency.