Agency, engagement and compliance; how they dance every day of our lives in the classroom and beyond.
Compliance: I comply every day, in and out of school. I didn't comply with a speed zone and got a nice wee fine for my trouble. I comply with school targets and the curriculum. I comply as a professional. Compliance is the balm that makes life run smoothly- most of the time.
Engagement: I am engaged almost 100% of the time at school, which is why I am tired at the end of the day. Engagement is being ON. I'm engaged giving feedback, planning, assessing, reflecting. I'm disengaged when I am tired or if what is in front of me seems irrelevant. Sometimes I'm engaged out of compliance. I have to be engaged when conferencing to give quality feedback despite feeling unwell because that's my job.
As for demonstrating agency... let me define a context for this first: Agency as the power to act within my locus of control.
I team-teach and because I work collaboratively with another I engage in collective agency. We are fortunate to be trusted to design learning how we feel best suits our learners, yet individually I don't have full agency anymore in the classroom. We do teach some things separately and in these areas, I have some agency on how I articulate the curriculum. I can choose one goal to pursue through my Teaching as Inquiry appraisal process within a framework that I must comply with, so although I have some agency, it can only be exercised within a predetermined framework.
I do have agency outside of this of course, which is why you'll find me blogging, tweeting, reading research and reflecting on learning outside of my school framework. I enjoy learning about learning, and this is what facilitates my agency to engage outside the formal school system I comply with every day. I love learning.
I've found that teacher agency in the macrocosm of the school environment is a pretty good indicator of how much student agency exists in the microcosm of the classroom (school culture and classroom culture are often aligned by the nature of professional compliance). I would like to see more about teachers being considered learners and how we foster agency for teachers as learners too. If our education systems are to be dynamic enough to cope with an ongoing change of learning design, then teacher agency is a must.
Why is developing agency in learning so essential? And, how do we do this?
I made this word cloud from an article on Learner Agency (link here) that explains it's context withing a learning framework
To me, this image speaks volumes:
Allow me to combine the terms student and teacher into Learning Designer. Why? Because a learner that has agency has the power to act in the design of their learning much like teachers -sometimes- do, and isn't that what we're aiming for? To me, this is the litmus test for compliance versus agency. Compliance is when a learner (or teacher) has no input in the design of learning and the locus of control is external.
Some students excel at learning as compliance: just tell me what to learn and how to pass/show me the rubric, and I'll do it. They are agents of compliance, not necessarily learning. Some teachers are brilliant at the delivery of this system too, but although they are the ones that have the full locus of control in the implementation - which often replicates a further up the chain compliance- they are only replicating a system they've not designed themselves (be it learner licenses or copied units from somewhere else). I know. I've been there.
Agency grows when:
- A learning designer is able to develop self-efficacy and can reflect on the effect their engagement has on the outcome because this learning outcome is set at an appropriate level of cognitive challenge (not too high, not too low). In a previous blog post, I covered the need to provide an adequate level of cognitive load (link here).
- A learning designer is able to have some internal locus of control over their learning pathways. For example, in our learning hub/classroom children choose their own writing goals from a curriculum based set of indicators and reflect on them. I teach to their goals plus expose them to higher ones (and they have no idea these are often well above their expected curriculum level).
- A learning designer has an adequate level of challenge and is able to learn-to-fail sometimes (growth mindset).
- A learning designer develops a love of learning because when your learning environment is not enough, love of learning will take you to where there is more.
In a recent Harvard University report (at a hefty 118 pages) on teaching and agency (full report link here), some of the key considerations for teachers' actions that help foster agency for learners are:
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| p 18, Exhibit 5- Implications for Teaching Across the 7Cs to Develop Agency |
The report also describes another important consideration when developing agency in the roles of emotional and behavioral engagement and motivational mindsets. These are described as goals that teachers need to aim to develop within the classroom environment. It is important that students experience success academically and behaviourally to help foster engagement in learning as agency cannot grow when a learner is disengaged or unmotivated.
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| (p.27 Exhibit 9 Classroom Engagement Goals and Agency) |
- While the report is very illuminating but long, I will summarise the recommendations by quoting the main findings of how teachers/learning designer can design learning to promote agency:
- Be attentive and sensitive, but avoid a tendency among sensitive teachers to coddle students in ways that may lower standards and undermine agency.
- Encourage and respect students’ perspectives and honor student voice but do so while remaining focused on Page 85 instructional goals; avoid extended discussions that have no apparent purpose and thereby fail to model self-discipline and cultivate agency.
- Strive to make lessons stimulating and relevant to the development of agency.
If some students seem unresponsive, do not assume too quickly that they are disinterested or disengaged. Some students—and especially those who struggle—purposefully hide their interest and their effort.
"Cognitive detour ahead >>>..."
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At this point, I will detour you and prompt you to watch the incomparable Dr. Welby Ings' TED talk because it illustrates this very last point. Scroll down to continue and come back if you wish, but don't miss it. We cannot ever assume to know a learner's potential- bell curve be damned! (link to my blog post on this here)- because by limiting a learner's potential it robs them AND us of our agency to learn.
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">>> Continued.."
- Regularly summarize lessons to remind students what they have learned and help them encode understanding in memory, even when they seem reticent or disinterested. Consolidation helps to solidify student learning.
- Take regular steps to detect and respond to confusion in class, but in ways that share responsibility (and agency) with students for doing the thinking. Strike a balance between keeping hope alive for struggling students, on the one hand, versus pressing them to take responsibility for their own learning, on the other hand.
- Strive to develop clearer explanations— especially for the material that students find most difficult. Also, related to both clarify and captivate, and consistent with the themes in this report, develop lucid explanations of how the skills and knowledge you teach are useful in the exercise of effective agency in real life.
- Give instructive feedback in ways that provide scaffolding for students to solve their own problems; through instructive feedback, you provide the type of support that enables students to develop and express agency by correcting their own work, solving their own problems, and building their own understandings.
- Press students to think deeply instead of superficially about their lessons; set and enforce learning goals that require students to use reasoning and exercise agency in solving problems. Expect some pushback from students who might prefer a less stressful approach. Try increasing captivation and care in combination with rigor in order to help mitigate the tension and make the experience more enjoyable.
- Consistently require students to keep trying and searching for ways to succeed even when work is difficult. Emphasize the importance of giving their best efforts to produce their best work as a matter of routine. Be confident that few things could be more important for helping your students to develop agency.
- Strive to achieve respectful, orderly, on-task student behavior in your class by teaching in ways that clarify, captivate, and challenge—in support of agency—instead of merely controlling students through intimidation or coercion.
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References:
Bandura, Albert. "Human agency in social cognitive theory." American psychologist 44.9 (1989): 1175. Retrieved from https://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Bandura/Bandura1989AP.pdf
Bandura, A. (2001). Social cognitive theory: An agentic perspective. Annual review of psychology, 52(1), 1-26.
CORE Education. Trend 1: Learner Agency. Retrieved from: http://www.core-ed.org/legacy/thought-leadership/ten-trends/ten-trends-2014/learning-agency?url=/thought-leadership/ten-trends/ten-trends-2014/learning-agency
Ferguson, R. F., Phillips, S. F., Rowley, J. F., & Friedlander, J. W. (2015). The Influence of Teaching Beyond Standardized Test Scores: Engagement, Mindsets, and Agency. Retrieved from The Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard University website: http://www. agi. harvard. edu/publications. php.
Ings, W. (2017). Disobedient Teaching- Surviving and creating change in education. Otago University Press.
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