Looking Toward Semester 2 – Developing Learner Agency

The semester is quickly winding down with some of the busiest days ahead of us. While working diligently to get through these last few weeks, many of us are starting to think ahead and plan for next semester. While you are starting to make those plans for next semester, I want to plant a seed in your mind to try something different.

One of the big pushes in progressive education today is to give learners more agency. As stated here, agency can be defined as, “the capability of individual human beings to make choices and act on these choices in a way that makes a difference in their lives.” In the context of education, this basically means educators should give students more choice about what they want to learn, how they want to learn it, and how they present their learning. In other words, student interests and passions should be at the center of learning. This process typically develops more intrinsic motivation for and emotional connection with learning. With this in mind, I would like you to consider and I would like to help you develop a learning opportunity in the second semester where student interests are truly at the center of learning.

How can you do this? There are a variety of ways.

• Turn an entire unit into a project-based learning (PBL) unit. In authentic PBL practice, students define the learning. They generate the topic/question to be investigated, based on their personal interests and passions, and then they go through a process of inquiry, reflection, and creation. The teacher works more as a coach in the process (guide-on-the-side vs. sage-on-the-stage). Be careful to differentiate between doing projects and PBL. See the infographic below.
  
• Similarly, weave a 20% time project throughout the semester, and then have the final product count as your 20% exam grade. You can read an overview of the 20% time project I did for a few years in a Psychology class I taught. Like in a PBL unit, the teacher works as a coach in the 20% time process.
• A comparable approach is to create “disrupt time” in your curriculum. This was a hot topic at the Learning 2 conference. Disrupt time can have a have a long-term focus like the 20% time approach or it can be shorter instances where students dive into topics/questions about which they are passionate, disrupting the traditional teacher-driven curricular processes. The teacher’s role will vary, depending on how you structure your disrupt time, but in any instance, it will definitely be more coach-like. Watch this L2 Talk by former SSIS teacher, Lori Uemura, about her use of “disrupt time.”

In all of these instances, formative and summative learning products can and will vary, depending on the subject-area, context of learning, and the time allotted. The key thing regardless how big or small you go is to let the learner decide how they will present their learning. This could have a wide-open nature to it or you could give students a range of choices.

Technology will be a great friend in the process of developing learner agency. It can support most if not all of the formative process tasks. It can promote more creation rather than consumption of content in the learning process, and the final products of learning look awesome when created and/or published in a technology-based product. Review my “Going Beyond the Essay” post for a little more detail on this.

If you have some questions about this or would like to explore some ideas/possibilities for the second semester, please let me know.

For additional reads on learner agency, please read this article and this article.