Student Agency

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To empower students to own their learning so they believe they are successful by being active and contributing citizens.

In Term 4 of last year, we visited all nine schools within our Community of Learning. The aim of these visits was to collect student voice around seven aspects of Student Agency, more specifically what students would do, see, hear and feel if they were highly agentic learners. We have collated this student voice and have also developed, alongside this, a Student Agency Rubric, in collaboration with teachers from across the MKA.

We are currently working with the Year 5-6 teachers at Mangere Central School, who are using this information to both inform teacher planning and provide students with a visual reflective tool so that students are able to monitor their own levels of Student Agency in different curriculum areas. This work shows real promise and we would welcome the opportunity to meet with other MKA schools and discuss how this information and CoL resource could be useful to increase/support Student Agency in your kura.

Why would it be useful?

• It is targeted at our students in particular (Mangere Kahui Ako)

• It is a measure to see if staff are planning opportunities to increase student agency

• It is a good platform for sharing understanding/effective practise

• It provides a common understanding of student agency across the schools so students hear common language used in their educational journey.

Session 5 was focused around the elements of Choice and Voice.

We have been exploring the work of John Spencer around Student Agency. He talks at length about making the shift from Student Engagement to Student Empowerment. Wanting students to be creative, critical thinkers. For them to rewrite the rules as life-long learners and critical thinking citizens. Having a mindset of self-direction and student ownership and that it begins by empowering students with voice and choice.

Using the vast and varied knowledge of our PLC Participants we continued to share ideas towards the development of our MKA Rubric

In any single classroom students will sit at different levels on the Student Agency Spectrum and they will move up and down this spectrum as they discover and develop agentic strategies in their learning.

Our first activity of this 3rd PLC session was based around our understandings of what Highly Agentic Learners look like in our schools. For this activity we asked participants to think about a student that they teach who displays qualities that they would associate with a highly agentic learner. These qualities were recorded and discussed amongst the group.