Tag Archives: studentvoice

More on Student/Learner Agency

eLearning, ,

In a follow up to a previous post, my old colleagues at CORE Education via their 2014 10 Trends and their EdTalks portal, have shared two valuable resources re learner agency.

The first features Derek Wenmoth giving a great overview of learner agency. This extended my thinking and made me reconsider the scope of learner agency beyond just the student and their self-regulated ‘power to act’.

Ten Trends 2014: Agency from EDtalks on Vimeo.

In particular, that agency is interdependent and has a dimension of social connectedness. i.e. It is:

…not just about a learner in isolation doing their own thing and what suits them. Learners must develop an awareness that there are consequences for the decisions they make and actions they take, and will take account of that in the way(s) they exercise their agency in learning.
Every decision a learner makes, and action she or he takes, will impact on the thinking, behaviour or decisions of others – and vice versa. You can’t just act selfishly and call that acting with agency.

I had not considered these areas within the domain of agency. I had only really considered agency from the learner as an individual – thanks for prompting me to make these connections! Thanks for the new word too – agentic.

A second resource via the 10 Trends site is Motivation, Engagement, and Student Voice, with the Executive Summary being a quick and easy read. The graphic on page 3 captured simply the degrees of student voice in school activities – an easy starting point for professional discussion and review. Where would you place our school on this continuum? Where would you place your classroom? What changes would you need to make in your practice to move from Expression to Partnership? From Participation to Leadership?

A challenge for me from this report was the discussion based around students having the ability to disengage with digital distractions.

Recent research has shown that the “noise” of myriad digital distractions threatens productivity and cognitive complexity in learning.
Recent brain research reveals that our brains are indeed capable of doing many things simultaneously as long as those things do not require much complexity and the costs for making errors is low… …In short, multitasking hinders the deepest forms of engagement our brains need to learn complex things.

Challenging because of my firm beliefs around the effective use of technologies in teaching and learning. It would seem as though technology is taking the blame here for students being unable to develop their own self-regulatory competencies. Surely though, students have been distracted from their learning long before the prevalent use of technology in schools? The key for me is that there is still a need for the deliberate teaching and/or supporting of students to develop these skills and awarenesses but not, I would suggest through strategies such as “…outside restrictions via teacher (and parent) monitoring”.

I think that a read of the full report may shed some more light on this area.

A good connection though was the the discussion around “…helping students to experience their own minds in this way is one of the most powerful contributions we can make to their development and learning.”I can see some parallel threads of thinking here from another current read, Quiet Leadership by David Rock, who asks, “How can I best help you with your thinking?”

So what/now what? Currently as a staff and community we are heading into some deep thinking about our core beliefs and approaches to teaching and learners i.e. those foundation principals that drive a school’s curriculum design and approaches to making our students develop the knowledge, skills and competencies for life-long learning. To me, learner agency, and everything that is required to scaffold students to get there, is one core belief/approach that will enable our students. These resources will be a great starting point for discussion and direction.

#learneragency #studentagency #studentvoice

Draw Me a Picture – Reflecting on Literacy PLD

literacy, Student Agency, Student Voice, , , , ,

This year Kumeroa-Hopelands School is involved in range of literacy PLD opportunities working alongside Papatawa, Makuri, Ballance and Mangatainoka schools and our facilitators from CPL.

I am leading this development within our school and as such attend all sessions and bring back to school any new learnings and lead staff through any associated inquiry into our current practice.

The first sessions focused on how well we know our learners with a particular focus for us at KHS on our underachieving writers. To help facilitate these conversations with our students we were first asked to visualise and draw what writing looked like in our class. If you were a fly on the wall, looking down on writing in your classroom…

  1. What would you see?
  2. What people interactions would there be?
  3. What tools would you see being used?
  4. Where would the data trails be leading from and to?

Taking this back to school, how would the teachers visualise their writing teaching? How would the students? Would they ‘look’ the same? Here are a couple of examples of teachers drawing their writing ‘time’.

Some common characteristics of their visualisations:

  1. Cyclical in nature
  2. Teacher modeling and sharing of examples/exemplars
  3. Writing is planned by students with opportunities to discuss ideas as a group, with the teacher, among students
  4. Feedback/feed forward from teacher and peers
  5. Sharing of writing (reading to class, traditional publishing, online) is part of the process

All in all these characteristics form a positive snapshot of writing processes and include some essential elements for effective teaching. Do the students agree? Are there similarities? Here are a few:

Characteristics of the student pictures:

  1. Conferencing an questioning with/to teacher
  2. Use of technology to share exemplars/examples of writing, search for information and to print/publish writing
  3. Using dictionaries to help edit writing
  4. Learning talk amongst students

So similarities between student and teacher pictures. Teachers are much more complex and students simplistic, no real surprises there. Great to seeing the interactions betwen students talking about an helping each other with their writing. What would the purest in me like to have seen more of? Self-assessing, some stronger reference to success criteria and more effective use of technology for sharing to name a few.

So where next?

  1. This approach to unpacking perceptions and perspectives of teaching and learning was new to me but really worthwhile. There are many other contexts you could use it in to show people, systems, interactions, relationships, tools and data. For example with teachers:
  2. Draw me a picture of what success for Maori looks like in your class.
  3. Visualise your elearning classroom.
  4. What would I see if you drew a picture of your community engagement?
  5. This process has also reinforced to me that importance of a school having an agreed upon ‘What an effective writing classroom looks like’ set of criteria that guides teachers and sets up common beliefs and practices across the school. KHS’s version of this is up for review this term. Timely.
  6. The most important outcome though is the value of knowing our learners and small wake up call in terms of how well we really know them. The concept is not new, it is at the heart of Ka Hikitia and integral to the deeper notions of student voice… but do we do it well enough and often enough? With teaching as inquiry kick started with the What are our learners needs? question this process actively gets teachers, through their students, to start digging deeper.

#writing #writtenlanguage #learnermaps #teachingasinquiry #studentvoice #studentagency