15/11/16
Learner agency is embedded in The New Zealand Curriculum key competencies as “the capabilities that young people need for growing, working, and participating in their communities.
"The school curriculum should challenge students to use and develop the competencies across the range of learning areas and in increasingly complex and unfamiliar situations”
NZC, Ministry of Education, 2007, p. 38
The New Zealand Curriculum key competencies are about developing the dispositions and sense of agency that empower the individual, and help them better understand and negotiate the perspectives and values of others, contributing towards more productive and inclusive workplaces and societies.
“Students are given explicit instruction in learning strategies (such as goal setting, self-monitoring and deliberate practice) that enable them to take control of their learning, develop meta-cognitive skills, self-regulate, and develop self-efficacy and agency.”
ERO School Evaluation Indicators, domain 4
Students have a sense of agency when they feel in control of things that happen around them; when they feel that they can influence events. This is an important sense for learners to develop. They need to be active participants in their learning.
“One way of thinking of learner agency is when learners have the ‘power to act’. When learners move from being passive recipients to being much more active in the learning process, and actively involved in the decisions about the learning, then they have greater agency.”
Derek Wenmoth, CORE Education 10 Trends
Jean Garrity in her blog post, Ownership and Independence – The Keys to Learner Agency, states:
“Students must develop the capacity to engage strategically in their learning without waiting to be directed. They must take ownership of and responsibility for their learning. And, they must possess the skills to learn independently, without heavy dependence on external structures and direction.”
Students and teachers at Hampden Street School have been working towards their goal of building learner agency in their modern learning environment.
They talk about the positive impact that increased agency has had on their learning, engagement and results. Students talk about how they now have more responsibility and ownership of their learning.
Scott McKenzie (senior syndicate leader) and Don McLean (principal) of Hampden Street School explain how they use digital technologies to support learner agency.
“Our focus has been really: how do we reduce the reliance on the teacher and how do the students own their learning?"
Scott McKenzie
Deputy Principal Claire Amos talks about fostering learner agency at Hobsonville Point Secondary School. Claire says agency is about students owning their learning. She describes how a sense of ownership and students taking responsibility for their learning is incorporated into the culture of the school and into the programmes they offer.
“Our teachers are still very much there to lead the learning, we also see that we're in partnership with our students to co-construct the learning and to share the ownership of their learning with them. So I don't think we really see it as a power issue at all, we're in partnership with our students to help guide them through their learning journey.”
Claire Amos
Claire suggests 10 ways teachers might provide learner agency in their classroom or school.
Guiding questions Ngā pātai ārahi
What opportunities do you provide for students to:
Are all learners needs catered for?
This blog post by Edna Sackson explains how the design thinking model is an excellent way to approach the issue, forcing us to think about this from the learner’s point of view first.
Canadian teacher Shelley Wright outlines the power of student-driven learning in this TED Talk.
Continuum of Choice by Barbara Bray and Kathleen McClaskey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
