Coaching for Agency, Not Assimilation
Instructional leaders build teacher agency in order to build student agency. Our role as coaches is not to help teachers just have a more well “managed” class or to have better structure in their lessons, but instead to create classrooms where students share power, make meaningful choices, and are drivers of their own learning process. We seek to build student agency, instead of trying to make classrooms where students are asked to conform to a narrow vision of what it means to be a student. I appreciate this definition of agency:
“Agency is the idea that people have the capacity to take action, craft and carry out plans, and make informed decisions based on a growing base of knowledge. In the social ecology of the classroom, agency is about connection to self, peers, adults, the community beyond the classroom, and ultimately the world. Agency doesn’t emerge in a vacuum, nor does it flourish in a traditional classroom where the teacher is positioned as a content expert dishing out knowledge. It emerges in a learning space where power is distributed, knowledge is democratized, diverse perspectives are welcomed, and children are intellectually and emotionally nourished.” - Street Data, Shane Safir & Jamila Dugan
The status quo of schooling asks students to assimilate to, or make themselves like, the schools’ dominant culture, which is frequently a white, middle-class culture. This means that students (particularly students of color, emergent bilingual students, and socioeconomically disadvantaged students) don’t feel like they can show up to school as their full selves, that they have to change who they are to be successful, and often why we hear “school just isn’t for me.”
I want to be clear that there's a difference between asking students to assimilate and engaging students in a school community. We do need norms and common agreements to make a learning space productive. However, school norms that ask students to change who they are or abandon their culture or language are harmful and oppressive. Instead, we aim to shape a school community that is co-created and co-facilitated with students.
In starting their work with teachers around student agency, it’s helpful to start with a space for teachers to reflect on their own experiences of assimilation and agency in school because teachers tend to teach in the way they were taught. Chris Emdin’s book Ratchedemics is a great tool for liberation in this conversation, especially for teachers of color.
Coaching for student agency is a powerful tool in creating classrooms where education is experienced as liberation, where students are at the center, and the well-being of all is prioritized.
In order to coach for agency, we have to start with what we are observing in classrooms and what data we are collecting.
Observing for Student Agency
In order to provide teachers feedback around and specific next steps for supporting student agency, look for evidence of the following:
Feedback: Is there evidence that students are providing feedback on the what, how and why of learning? You may hear phrases like, “Based on your feedback, …” or “Amani had a great idea…”
Roles: Do students have jobs that they do with little prompting, and that without them the class wouldn’t run as smoothly?
Choice: Are students offered meaningful, engaging choices about what and how
Contributions: Do students contribute their unique ideas, questions, connections from other classes, information from research or the news, or connections to music or movies? How are these contributions welcomed and engaged by the teacher?
Based on what you observe, coaches can choose from a number of strategies to support teachers in building student agency in their classes.
Strategies for Student Agency
These strategies are listed in order from the easiest to implement to the more complex that may require a culture shift in the classroom before successful implementation.
Student choice: Teachers can start building student agency by increasing the amount of choices students have in the classroom. Coaches can support teachers in providing choices in the types of activities students engage in, the content and examples they are learning about, and even in grouping or seating.
Student input on learning: In order to share power in the classroom and make learning as meaningful to students as possible, teachers can seek students’ input about how learning is going in their class. They can do this through simple surveys (I always included one with my unit exams), or more meaningfully through facilitating student dialogues like cogenerative dialogues. (See my previous post on Coaching for Listening to, not Lecturing, Students for more info.)
Student responsibility & leadership: One of the things my daughter talked about most when she was in second grade was the class job that she got to do for the month. Far from being just an elementary school thing, high school students appreciate knowing that they play an important role in how the class functions. Here coaches can support teachers around co-developing and using class jobs with their students. Consider other ways to build in student leadership, such as taking a question from the class “parking lot,” researching the answer, and presenting the information to the class the next day. Coaches can support building structures to value students' ideas, connections, and questions.
Co-teaching: A powerful (but more time-intensive) strategy to build student agency is co-teaching content with students, letting students explain content to their peers or facilitate activities in class. Check out Dr. Emdin’s book For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood… and the Rest of Y’all Too for step-by-step guidelines on how to set up co-teaching with students.
Let’s disrupt the status quo of classrooms and schools that ask students to assimilate, and instead work towards the powerful learning that happens when students have agency.