Imagine a classroom with 10 students.Day The grader designs procedures to ensure that everyone's perspectives are considered and sets deadlines for their work on social research projects. or 3road name Grade-level classrooms where students agree on reading goals with their teachers and track their growth in journals. As my colleague and coauthor, Capono Chiotti, says, every child deserves to feel like Jason Bourne in his own action movie at school, not just a character in a movie directed by a teacher.
In many schools, teachers select all topics for study, determine groups for collaborative work, set outcomes for students to achieve, and manage all documentation and assessment of student work. Educators talk about the value of student choice and student agency, but they generally think of it as a limited set of options that teachers design and control.
I hope you will go further to further develop your students. Main characters It’s about owning your own education. When students own their own learning, they can build skills in a safe environment and work toward goals that feel relevant to them. This tends to improve the quality of student work because students are more interested in what they are learning. It also tends to address harmful biases that teachers unknowingly bring into the classroom.
No matter what teaching methods educators use, here are three ways to increase student agency in the classroom.
When we model less and value every student's ideas more, magical things happen.
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Ensure that every student feels valued and respected for who they are and what ideas they bring to the classroom.
When we model less and value all students’ ideas more, magical things happen. For example, introverted and neurodevelopmental learners often feel less supported in classrooms where ideas are generated through hand-raising and more traditional participatory approaches, and they often feel restricted by teachers who control the direction of learning or provide only teacher-defined options. To access these students’ best ideas, we need to create more time for reflection, invite students to contribute ideas in a variety of public and private forms, and create a sense of safety and community that encourages intellectual risk-taking. For example, when students have opportunities to write in journals before sharing their ideas, or when they have opportunities to generate ideas and questions in small groups, as in a World Café, Or Chalk Talk Using methods, educators can improve more effectively. every Students' voices and ideas.
For all students to succeed, teachers must also avoid making assumptions about which student’s voice is most consistently heard. I don’t believe teachers intentionally ignore certain students, but I have certainly observed implicit bias in classrooms over the past 30 years in education, and research supports this assertion. Learn to recognize and dismantle these biases. every When students feel recognized for their talents and potential, it helps ensure meaningful experiences for all children.
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Empower students to manage more of the processes themselves to help them succeed in group activities.
Grouping students for collaborative work can help bring out the best in all children. While teachers should ensure that students experience diverse peers and learn to work together across differences, opportunities for students to choose their own teams can help motivate everyone and create a safer environment. Consider the introvert who became more upset and withdrawn whenever her groupmates ignored her. While some adversity is part of the learning process and managing frustration is an essential skill in our time, feeling unsafe or unheard is unlikely to foster meaningful growth.
Strategies such as interest-based affinity mappingallowing students to generate their own ideas and form groups based on common interests. Students will still struggle with collaboration, but starting from a common ground can increase productivity and make all perspectives at the table more valuable. Likewise, opportunities for students to design team agreements and set goals for working together can help ensure that all students feel safe and engaged during group work. By shifting conflict resolution and goal setting to students, teachers can foster skills such as autonomy and self-regulation instead of relying on teacher-controlled discipline. Students only involve the teacher when they have failed to solve a problem on their own, which student-centered educators call the “three before me” strategy.
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Ensure that all students are recognized and involved in documenting their growth and assessing their learning..
I am a huge fan of student-led documentation in all learning processes, perhaps because I have experienced it so much in my own teaching. Especially in project-based classrooms, where students are learning along slightly different paths, teachers who track all their work as the sole documenter miss the opportunity to empower students as leaders of their own learning.
In student-led documentation, students learn to track their progress, set goals for improvement, work together to solve problems, and curate their best work to demonstrate growth. Using tools like student portfolios and student-led conferences, students develop metacognitive habits that allow them to articulate what they are learning—needs, successes, and next steps for improvement. Australian educator Guy Claxton We call language “learnish”.
This practice can also ensure that teachers do not miss the nuances of individual contributions. In a meta-analysis of 20 studies,Researchers have found that teachers’ implicit biases consistently influence assessments. Even if the final assessment comes from the teacher, self-assessment can foster growth and help students develop the ability to assert their own needs. The goal is not to let students run free or ignore standards, but to put students at the center of their own education and give them a role in defining what success looks like.
Educators’ assumption that students can have insights or creative solutions can often limit who we listen to and what we strive for in the classroom. The more we design with student protagonists at the heart of our work, the more opportunities we can create for students to be surprised, to discover great ideas, solutions, and deep work that we never imagined. theirs, It's not something we made exactly as we were told to make it.
Educators who emphasize student agency ensure that all learners from all backgrounds thrive and succeed, even if that success is as diverse as the students themselves. They also believe that the diversity of the classroom—different thinkers, experiences, cultures, and identities—helps all students develop a richer, more multidimensional understanding of their subjects and themselves.