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SOCIAL COGNITIVE THEORY: An Agentic Perspective

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SOCIAL COGNITIVE THEORY: An Agentic Perspective

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Research publication from Albert Bandura

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Promoting Student Agency in the Early Years

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Promoting Student Agency in the Early Years

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When test scores are the goal, then students only learn how to take tests. When student agency is the goal, then students learn how to learn.

The traditional "one size fits all" approach to learning has, understandably, left many students feeling disenfranchised. Agentic learning transforms students from passive recipients to active participants in the learning process. But giving students agency doesn't mean taking away a teacher's ability to teach. Student agency is about empowering educators too. Agentic learning focuses on fostering both student and teacher agency so that everyone involved has the power to act.

The three principal aspects to agentic learning are:

1. Initiative. Agency isn't simply about handing over control over to the learner. It's about creating an environment where students are actively involved in their own learning;

2. Interdependence. Students develop an awareness of how their decisions affect their learning, and;

3. Responsibility. A student learns that their decisions impact their fellow students.

Agentic learning provides students with multiple opportunities in how, when, and where they learn best. It's the ability and freedom to choose their own path and pace, so that they can master a subject or skill on their own terms.

Creating Agentic Classrooms

Student-centered learning is not about following a map. It's about following the compass of a student's unique needs. Students need to be recognized as active participants in their education who exhibit personal choice as they navigate their learning and progress through skills and competencies.

Students should have the opportunity to contribute to anything and everything that affects their learning environment: the design of the classroom, how a project is approached and delivered, as well as how skills are assessed. The collaboration between a teacher and student during the agentic journey builds trust and strengthens connection. A teacher and student can confer to agree on yearly learning goals, have students lead their own regular check-ins on how they are mastering new skills, and showcase their work by presenting and explaining it in front of an audience beyond the classroom.

Teachers should also provide scaffolding to guide students until they build the skills and confidence to guide themselves. For younger students, this could be through a morning greeting ritual with students deciding how they want to say hello. For older students, a teacher can have the class undergo the process of creating a driving question, using tools such as mind maps, or simply have students continually evaluate themselves-listing challenges, attributes and new skills learned-throughout the year.

A 2015 Harvard study- The Influence of Teaching Beyond Standardized Test Scores: Engagement, Mindsets, and Agency -cites ten practical ways of teaching agency:

Care: Being attentive and sensitive, yet not coddling in ways that undermine agency

Confer: Encouraging and respecting students' perspectives while remaining focused on instructional goals

Captivate: Striving to make lessons stimulating and relevant to the development of agency

Consolidate: Summarizing lessons to remind students what they have learned

Clarity: Taking regular steps to detect and respond to confusion in class

Clarify: Developing clearer explanations of how skills taught are useful in the exercise of effective agency and in real life

Instructing: Giving instructive feedback in ways that provide scaffolding for students to solve their own problems

Challenge: Pressing students to think deeply about their lessons with goals that require reasoning and agency in solving problems

Persistence: Requiring students to keep trying and searching for ways to succeed even when work is difficult

Management:Striving for respectful, orderly, on-task student behavior by teaching in ways that clarify, captivate, and challenge

Other techniques for bringing agentic learning to the classroom include:

Creating blended learning and competency-based learning environments that allow students the freedom to help forge their own path and place while demonstrating mastery;

Initiating project-based and interest-based learning where students can help shape their driving question, and;

Creating an advisory structure that provides continuous feedback on successful habits.

On Their Best Behavior

Being agentic means being aware of deep behavioral patterns. This requires both student and teacher to become partners in cultivating positive learning behaviors while curbing negative learning behaviors. This environment requires everyone to be a learner and everyone to be a teacher.

And it's more than just being a "good" student. Being a good student has typically meant complying with the status quo and working independently. Agentic students, however, must constantly question "why" and "how." They are deep learners who direct their own learning.

Making the Shift

For teachers, the shift to agentic learning can be a challenging one at first. The classroom-with its compliant "good" students and disengaged "bad" students-may not look all that different until these approaches are truly adopted and absorbed.

It requires an understanding of learning behavior. It abandons traditional classroom rewards and disciplinary methods for motivating the classroom. And teachers must cultivate trust-in both themselves and their students-that learners can increase their autonomy while educators relax their control. It's a process that unfolds over time. For example, students may work on projects with unusual focus as their curiosity fully blossoms and they begin to learn for learning's sake. If so, a teacher should note what aspects of their educational approach may have contributed to this increase in student ownership. A teacher should reach out to students to see how their agentic journey is going. What is working? What could be improved? What are other ways that a student could take more control of their learning?

And if some students are resistant-such as students who typically do what they are told to get a passing grade-than a teacher must simply persevere: most will see not only improved student outcomes, but will also become more confident in themselves as educators.

A Tool Up Your Teaching

Think of agentic learning as another arrow in a teacher's pedagogical quiver. Design thinking, project-based learning, and inquiry are all inherently "agentic" in their approach as they encourage investigation, engagement and critical-thinking.

Education is about equipping children with the skills they need to succeed, both in college and in life. And when they can take more control over their learning, then true agency develops: giving students the ability to fuel their own lifelong curiosity and drive.

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The Power of Autonomy: Agentic Learning in the Classroom

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When test scores are the goal, then students only learn how to take tests. When student agency is the goal, then students learn how to learn. The traditional "one size fits all" approach to learning has, understandably, left many students feeling disenfranchised. Agentic learning transforms students from passive recipients to active participants in the learning process.

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Teaching and Agency, a Harvard Study on Middle School

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Teaching and Agency, a Harvard Study on Middle School

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Agency is the capacity and propensity to take purposeful initiative-the opposite of helplessness. Young people with high levels of agency do not respond passively to their circumstances; they tend to seek meaning and act with purpose to achieve the conditions they desire in their own and others' lives.
A new Harvard study , sponsored by the Raikes Foundation , suggests that student agency may be as important an outcome of schooling as basic skills.

The report, The Influence of Teaching Beyond Standardized Test Scores: Engagement, Mindsets, and Agency , relies on the Tripod survey of teaching. Over 300,000 students in grades six to nine in 14 states were surveyed during the 2013-14 school year.

Developed by Ron Ferguson 15 years ago, the Tripod construction appears more relevant to traditional teacher-centered classrooms than student-centered approaches. As a result, there are some limitations of an instrument designed for measuring agency in low agency environments. However, next generation Bay Area models including Summit Public Schools and Education for Change (EFC) find the survey useful.

"Where this report is effective is in pushing us to think about agency in the context of what grown-ups have to do to facilitate it," said Hae-Sin Thomas, CEO of EFC. "Tripod unfortunately is not a tool designed specifically to evaluate teacher practice specific to agency, but it's as good as it gets with respect to student surveys and student-centered teacher practice."

An important subset of Habits of Success ( discussed last week ), agency, the capacity and propensity to take purposeful action, is key to success in life.

Albert Bandura said:

Through agentic action, people devise ways of adapting flexibly to remarkably diverse geographic, climatic and social environments; they figure out ways to circumvent physical and environmental constraints, redesign and construct environments to their liking... By these inventive means, people improve their odds in the fitness survival game.

Hitlin and Elder suggest four overlapping conceptions of agency:

Existential agency: The capacity, or free will, for exerting influence on our environments.

Programmatic agency: Following rules and routines.

Identify agency: What we believe about ourselves and the ways that we wish to be perceived by others.

Life-course agency: Actions that we take to affect future outcomes.

10 Guidelines for Teaching

The Influence of Teaching report makes 10 suggestions for teaching.

More Than Teaching

The report logic map is shown below. It suggests that teachers and family assets play a major role in support agency development.

The central question explored by this report is, "How do distinct components of teaching influence the development and expression of agency-related factors in sixth to ninth grade classrooms?"

A more useful question, given advances in tools and schools in the last 15 years, would be, "How do distinct components of learner experience influence the development and expression of agency?" In particular, factors related to learning models, progressions, and environments appear critical to promoting or damaging agency.

A useful complement to this report is exploring how new models, like NGLC grantees, promote agency through:

Blended learning environments where students have some ability to co-create path, pace, and place;

Competency-based learning environments where students show what they know and progress based on demonstrated mastery;

Project-based and interest-based learning where students have some ability to shape the driving question, the process, and the work product; and

Work and service learning experience that students select or create.

The report completely misses model-based factors which are becoming at least as important as teacher factors. The difference between a Summit or EFC secondary school and a big bad high school is everything. There are certainly differences in teacher quality, but it's one of a dozen model factors (e.g., mission, schedule, structure, advisory, technology blend, learning trajectories, and real world connections).

The report dumps a lot in teacher's laps but most of them are stuck in an obsolete low agency model that infantilizes teenagers rather than empowering them to own their learning.

Every high agency secondary school I have visited has had some kind of an advisory structure . The sustained relationship with a caring adult that sets the cultural tone, is part of a distributed guidance system, and provides continuous feedback on success habits is every bit as important as classroom instruction in developing student agency.

Agency development isn't just a product of quality teaching, it's the product of a quality system-one designed as a high agency environment.

Hae-Sin Thomas said, "It's definitely time to take this conversation around agency to a deeper level- what are the components of agency, how do we measure those components, how do we map those components to specific practices, conditions or attitudes and then how do we measure those specific to building agency."

For more see:
Stay in-the-know with all things EdTech and innovations in learning by Images from The Influence of Teaching Beyond Standardized Test Scores: Engagement, Mindsets, and Agency. signing up to receive the weekly Smart Update

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By Tom Vander Ark - Student agency may be as important an outcome of schooling as basic skills according to a new Harvard study.

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7 Things That Happen When Students Own Their Learning

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Proudly telling the world about #generationIB in our 50th anniversary year
By Rhonda Broussard
In the summer of 2006, I moved my family from Brooklyn, New York, to St. Louis, Missouri, and began searching for the right learning community for my children and myself. On the heels of teaching in Middle Years Programme (MYP) and Diploma Programme (DP), I found that most urban schools were expecting minority students from low socio-economic communities to consume knowledge and not inform it. I started my own inquiry into school design. What if we offered the most engaging, academically rigorous education to an intentionally diverse community and made it free for all students? What if all children had access to the same education as children of world leaders? If they all learned to be bilingual and see the world through different eyes? If they saw themselves as change agents in their communities now instead of waiting for others or older versions of themselves to take action?

When I founded St. Louis Language Immersion Schools (SLLIS), our vision was to create a total immersion, IB continuum school network of public schools. Our first three elementary schools, The Chinese School, The French School, and The Spanish School are authorized for the Primary Years Programme (PYP), and the secondary campus, The International School has begun their candidacy for MYP. All schools represent an intentional commitment to diversity: Title I, ethnic diversity that mirrors or exceeds that of our region, language and country of origin diversity, and family composition diversity.

We expect our school community to be one where students ask, "Why are we studying this? What does it have to do with my life? I'm seven, what can I do about it?"

And our teachers respond with relevant text-life connections and extend opportunities for age-appropriate action. Our grade two students are given their first action challenge as part of their unit on rights and privileges. Teachers ask what rights the students want to advocate for. Students identify rights, who they would need to lobby (siblings? classmates? teacher? parents? administrators?), and then embark on a campaign for change. When our second and third grade cohorts make sophisticated arguments for changing the uniform policy, adding multi-stream recycling, or using lockers, our adult community encourages them and engages in real-time conversations for change.
One of our first fifth grade exhibitions opened with a student from The Spanish School asking about fear. She began with a pie chart that revealed the most common fears: clowns, barking dogs, abandoned houses, and scary movies. Number one fear? Abandoned houses. Then she adeptly shifted to a map of GIS data depicting the number of abandoned houses in our city and shared her first conclusion: this means that people are afraid to visit my neighborhood, and residents, may be afraid to come home. She then linked the census track with the highest concentration of blighted property and correlated it to personal crime that revealed higher rates of crime in these neighborhoods as well. She continued with examples of the same phenomenon in other urban areas across the country. What can we do about it? Invest in neighborhoods with services-fill the vacant properties with schools, community centers, art projects, give people something to come home to, all in the name of reducing their fears about urban communities.

Yes! This was exactly the type of reflection and attention that will prepare our urban student population for greater access and attainment of post-secondary studies and career paths.

When we talk about the success of IB World Schools in improving excellence and equity for a diverse population, let's remember that this goes beyond performance metrics. What are the ways in our schools and classrooms where low-income and/or minority students are expected to lead purposefully? Where they are confidently challenging the text, their peers, their teachers, themselves? Where they are marrying analysis and action? Let's share the stories of students who are changing their world because of inquiry-based learning. The agency and advocacy that students develop in PYP schools is an essential step in bridging the equity gap. Rhonda Broussard (@broussardrhonda)is the founder and former President of the St. Louis Language Immersion Schools. She is a professional inquirer who has founded a network of IB schools and a language education non-profit, conducted language and culture research in Cameroon, France, and Martinique, held National Board certification, and has taught in secondary schools across the US.

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Developing student agency improves equity and access

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Proudly telling the world about #generationIB in our 50th anniversary year By Rhonda Broussard In the summer of 2006, I moved my family from Brooklyn, New York, to St. Louis, Missouri, and began searching for the right learning community for my children and myself.

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Good habits are at least as important as basic skills when it comes to success in college and work. The ability to apply creative know how in new situations is at least as important as historical and technical knowledge.
Habits of Success

Academic behaviors

Self-direction and perseverance

Positive mindsets

Learning strategies

Social skills and responsibilities

Creative Know How: The 4Cs (creativity, communication, critical thinking, and collaboration) advanced by and EdLeader21 sit in the Creative Know How section.

Wayfinding Abilities: These abilities include surveying the landscape, identifying opportunities, goal setting, finding and using resources to make good decisions.

Content: English, math, social studies, science, interdisciplinary knowledge and career and technical skills.

Where to Start?

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff (@ ) told that key to being a great leader today is running a multi-stakeholder dialog. Perhaps more than any other sector, school and system heads must be conversation leaders.

To move past a test prep culture, leaders in El Paso held dozens of community conversations (like the one pictured below at Henderson Middle School) about what graduates should know and be able to do.

Paul Goren, Evanston/Skokie superintendent, , "As we engaged in the strategic planning process, we were committed to listening to the community's voice. What came from the voice of over 2,000 who participated was a clarion call to embrace not only academics, but also social emotional learning."

NGLC suggests starting with three big questions (see MyWays toolbox for more):

How well are we defining and articulating what success looks like for students attending our school?

How well does our design for learning and the organization of our school directly support students' attainment of that richer, deeper definition of success?

How do we gauge students' progress in developing those competencies?

Defining what graduate profile is just the first challenge; teaching and modeling those outcomes is second, measuring what matters is the third challenge.

Measuring Habits of Success

The goals of social emotional learning (SEL) programs, according to leading advocate are to:

promote students' self-awareness, self-management, social-awareness, relationship, and responsible decision-making skills; and

improve student attitudes and beliefs about self, others, and school.

Social emotional learning is a subset of habits of success with a dose of wayfinding . Some prefer to call these competencies Success Skills (anything is better than noncognitive variables ).

Goren, who led programs at CASEL before becoming Evanston/Skokie superintendent, said, " SEL competencies are teachable and can be part of the routines of any school or district."

A recent from the Rennie Center for Education Research & Policy and illustrates how schools can cultivate empathy, cooperation, flexibility, and good decision-making. Many interviewed school districts use surveys to assess SEL outcomes-some focus on the effects of teaching, some use an SEL rubric, others monitor character strengths.

Effects of Teaching. School climate surveys with partial SEL coverage include TELL Massachusetts Survey and , which was incorporated into the Gates Foundation sponsored Measures of Effective Teaching project. Tripod attempts to measure the impact of teaching in seven areas:

1. Care. Teachers who care are emotionally supportive and interested in students.

2. Confer. Teachers who confer talk with students as well as welcome and respect student perspectives.

3. Captivate. Teachers who captivate make learning interesting and relevant.

4. Clarify. Teachers who clarify explain things clearly, provide informative feedback, and clear up confusion in order to make lessons understandable

5. Consolidate. Teachers who consolidate summarize and integrate learning.

6. Challenge. Teachers who challenge students press them to think rigorously and to persist when experiencing difficulty.

7. Classroom Management. Effective classroom management entails developing a respectful, cooperative classroom climate with on-task behavior.

Tripod, developed 15 years ago, focuses on traditional practices and environments rather than blended and student-centered learning but, in according to a California system head, "it is a powerful tool because it is entirely student voice evaluating teacher practice."

SEL Surveys. The Rennie notes that "In Eugene, Oregon; Austin, Texas; the California CORE districts; and Fall River, Massachusetts, students take surveys that include various SEL indicators. These districts also survey other stakeholders like parents and teachers about topics such as school climate and student performance. Although data is self-reported, and therefore cannot independently measure growth, respondents cite them as a key window into SEL progress."

Austin Independent School District has a SEL implementation rubric for evaluating schools. Principals and a district SEL coach routinely observe teachers and provide written descriptive feedback. walk-throughs include observations of climate including SEL.

SEL Rubrics. Summit Public Schools uses a rubric (framework below) to assess emotional intelligence. Students self-assess using the Likert Scale (1=Strongly Disagree; 5=Strongly Agree). Mentors also assess students using the scale. These assessments are put next to each other and become the foundation of a mentoring conversation.

Mayerson Academy developed the Thriving Learning Communities program to implement a character strengths approach that improves engagement, learning, and college/career preparation. Piloted in more than 40 Cincinnati schools, the program uses the app to promote and track development of character strengths.

National school network Big Picture Learning is developing an app based on the work of Dr. William Sedlacek , who identifies eight noncognitive competencies associated with college degree attainment.

Other habits. In addition to emotional intelligence, Summit measures self-direction, use of learning strategies, and mindset.

Self-directed learning

Challenge seeking, persistence, strategy shifting, appropriate help-seeking, response to setbacks

Back-end data analysis in partnership with SRI to identify productive (and unproductive) learning patterns algorithmically and trigger immediate interventions.

Learning strategies

Time management, note taking, test taking, reading comprehension

Badge based on demonstrated use of strategy across contexts; clearly explain "why", "how", and "when" to use the strategy.

Academic mindset

Academic belonging, growth mindset, self-efficacy, belief in value of work

Carnegie Foundation academic mindsets survey administered 3-4 times per year

Character Development. Some schools prefer character strengths to habits of success.

Penn prof Angela Duckworth founded Character Labs . Their Growth Card app supports feedback and goal setting on character strengths. At most KIPP schools you'll see evidence of the seven character strengths.

Grant-Beacon Middle School has a well implemented character development program focused on dispositions and academic success skills. Five traits are visually evident everywhere including the theater (below) in English and Spanish. A comprehensive observation and feedback system is built into and provides real time data on CPA (character point average) as well as GPA.

DSST Public Schools is "a values-driven organization and a deliberately integrated community, serving students from all walks of life." The Denver school network embeds six Core Values in everything they do: respect, responsibility, integrity, courage, curiosity, and doing your best. They are evident on every campus (see below).

"Character starts with the adults," said DSST CEO Bill Kurtz . That means core value commitments, modeling, 360 degree evaluations, and celebrations.

Educational Enterprises (EEI) is another school network focused on character development. The premise of their Character Project is that "Character can be achieved not only through personal experience, but also vicariously through engagement with powerful narratives of struggle and growth.

Implementation

Rather than viewed as an add on, the EEI Character Project is designed to embedded in all components of the school: educational programming, school culture, extracurricular activities, and teacher training.

Big Picture incorporate habits of success into learner experience and the 10 Expectations All Students Should Have of their School including internships, personalized learning, authentic assessments, and advisory relationships.

An advisory structure is a critical focal point for promoting habits of success. Through an advisory system, each student has an adult who knows them and helps them navigate high school so that they leave with a meaningful, personalized plan and are prepared for postsecondary options. Advisory is a key component of a distributed student guidance strategy that includes regular meetings between an advisor and a group of students and has a clear focus on habits of success.

While things like creativity, innovation, effort, commitment to others may be seem hard to measure, sometimes it's as simple as changing focus and rewards. In addition to traditional achievement awards, teachers, advisors, coaches, can recognize innovative ideas, service to others, giving full effort, and overcoming obstacles.

When implementing success skills, leading schools suggest six tips:

Hold community conversations about what grads should know and be able to do;

Work in phases, don't try to do everything at once;

Communicate expectations clearly, everywhere, every day;

Don't jump to accountability with immature measures; and

Model what matters-in instruction, discipline, extracurriculars, and recognitions.

For more, see:
Stay in-the-know with all things EdTech and innovations in learning by signing up to receive the weekly Smart Update . This post includes mentions of a Getting Smart partner. For a full list of partners, affiliate organizations and all other disclosures please see our Partner page

Tom Vander Ark is author of Better Together, Smart Parents, Smart Cities, Getting Smart and The Power of Place. He is co-founder of Getting Smart and Learn Capital and serves on the boards of Education Board Partners, 4.0 Schools, Digital Learning Institute, Latinx Education Collaborative, Mastery Transcript Consortium and eduInnovation. Follow Tom on Twitter, @tvanderark.

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Building Habits of Success and Measuring What Matters

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Good habits are at least as important as basic skills when it comes to success in college and work. The ability to apply creative know how in new situations is at least as important as historical and technical knowledge.

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By: Anna Perry, Kim Carter, Chris Liang-Vergara, Eric Tucker , Sean Talamas, and Elliot Luscombe

COVID-19 is creating unprecedented challenges and demanding more of students, who must play an even greater role in managing their own education as they navigate in-person, hybrid, and virtual learning in varying measures throughout the year. To succeed, students will need to authentically know who they are, what they value, and where they want to go. They'll need to leverage resources to navigate obstacles and create positive change in their education and life, investigate their interests, reaffirm their identities, drive their own learning, and grow self-motivation and resiliency.

In short, students will need opportunities to develop and cultivate a strong sense of identity and agency.

As educators, we must strive to support our students in this process. In collaboration with World Class Education (WorldClassEdu), Brooklyn Laboratory Charter Schools (LAB) asked leading educators and thinkers how schools and teachers can support students in this process: How can we help students develop their identity and agency to shift the locus of control and successfully navigate complex life and learning transitions?

Here, we provide an overview of responses from experts in sociology, psychology, special education, educational equity, social justice, and student-centered education. You can access the entirety of the contributions in our Back to School Learner Identity and Agency.

Dr. Anindya Kundu: Fostering Social and Cultural Capital

Dr. Anindya Kundu, a sociologist of education, defines agency as "a person's capacity to leverage resources to navigate obstacles and create positive change in their life" (Kundu, The Power of Student Agency, 2020). Dr. Kundu emphasizes two resources students need in order to foster a healthy sense of agency: social and cultural capital.

To help students foster social capital-which includes mentors, networks, and help-seeking behavior-educators can proactively encourage students to ask for help. For students from underprivileged backgrounds, who may fear they'll get in trouble approaching adults and others in positions of authority, it's important to make sure these sources of social capital are safe.

To help students cultivate access to cultural capital-the mentors and teachers who understand and affirm a student's background and identity-educators can start by recognizing and paying attention to forms of giftedness that aren't always appreciated in traditional education settings. Dr. Kundu shares the example of a student named J. Stud, whose teacher noticed his talent for writing rap lyrics. She arranged for J. Stud to record one of his songs in a real studio, where he ended up securing an internship.

Q.E.D. Foundation: The Importance of Emotion in Learner-Centered Education

At Q.E.D. Foundation, Executive Director Kim Carter and her colleagues are focused on a learner-centered approachto education, which recognizes that learning is responsive to the individual learner's needs and strengths. Without the freedom to investigate their own interests in school, students might struggle to remain fully engaged and motivated. Standard curricula can prevent students from deep learning that fosters the development of their sense of identity, agency, and self-motivation skills that will be useful throughout their lives.

Q.E.D. has developed a set of tools to remain connected to their students remotely and sow the seeds of agency and self-advocacy. For example, to create space for emotion and help students remain emotionally connected to school, Q.E.D. has created an "end-of-day portal" as a standard part of its English curriculum. At the end of every day, students are expected to journal. They can write about whatever they like, and Q.E.D. hopes they use the portal as a means to advocate for themselves: to complain, negotiate, challenge, and celebrate. Q.E.D. has set a target of getting 80 percent of students to submit journals, which the writing faculty can access to acknowledge and comment on specific points made by their students. In this way, the faculty and students are forging bonds of mutual trust and understanding.

National Center for Learning Disabilities: Cultivating Self-Advocacy by Students with Disabilities

At the National Center for Learning Disabilities (NCLD), Director of Innovation Ace Parsi asks: "How can a student who comes from a position without privilege learn to advocate for themselves to a person who has privilege?"

NCLD concludes that self-advocacy consists of four components:

1. Knowledge of yourself and your needs

2. Knowledge of your rights

3. Communication of your needs and rights to those in power

4. Advocating for the rights of your group

The struggles of marginalized students are exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, racialized violence, and the economic downturn. In a traditional classroom setting, these students might get by by "faking it," which Parsi said is a sign the educational system must change. Instead, the system should provide avenues for these students to understand and communicate their needs. Parsi and his colleagues recommend schools apply a set of guidelines called Universal Design for Learning (UDL) from . These ensure flexibility in how students access material, engage with it, and show what they've learned.

The Center for Black Educator Development: Ensure Equity in Recruiting, Training, Hiring Diverse Educators

To cultivate stronger student identity, students must be able to see their lived experience reflected in their educators, says Sharif El-Mekki, CEO of The Center for Black Educator Development (CBED), whose mission is to ensure equity in the recruiting, training, hiring, and retention of quality educators who reflect the cultural background and share the socio-political interests of the students they serve.

El-Mekki and his colleagues are creating a workforce of diverse Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) educators through a four-part program that focuses on the pathways to teaching, professional learning, culturally informed pedagogy and policy changes. As part of its educator training, CBED targets 5 professional learning outcomes:

1. Achievement: What are the skills and competencies I need to meet that are aligned to my work and role?

2. Cultural Competence: What is my history and my current experience? What is the history and current experience of those around me?

3. Critical Consciousness: What is structural inequality and oppression? How have I and others contributed to it?

4. Servant Leadership: How do I act as an individual and as part of a collective to enact social justice for those who have experienced structural inequality and oppression?

5. Healing Practices: How do I bring restoration to those who have been oppressed, even when I have contributed to the oppression? How do I pursue and receive my own healing?

These core competencies are beneficial to Black students and all students because they help educators acknowledge and lift up student identity.

Equity x Innovation (eXi): Student-Led Solutions

Within the same lens of racial identity and agency, Dr. Temple Lovelace, an associate professor of special education at Duquesne University, has devoted herself to providing opportunities for youth to organize and redesign inequitable programs, policies, practices, and spaces in their schools and communities. She and her team developed a teacher-powered, youth-led model called Education Uncontained, which follows three key steps: First, there's a learning exchange, in which students and teachers engage together around issues of equity, relationships, school structures, and activism. The next step is dedicated to exploration and design, where students take the lead in designing and prototyping a project identified and defined by students. The final step is implementation: when students pilot, roll-out, and then promote the project.

In this model, teacher-powered, student-led, real-world projects can help students feel represented and foster agency. This process can create novel solutions in this time of uncertainty and the new challenges of COVID-19.

Character Lab: Building Learner Identity and Agency Through Character

Angela Duckworth, the University of Pennsylvania researcher and author of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, co-founded the nonprofit Character Lab to help educators understand the conditions that support social, emotional, academic, and physical well-being for young people. Character Lab believes that character-the strengths of heart, will, and mind that we use to help ourselves and others-is a critical component of student agency.

Character Lab has developed a series of that teachers can use to help students strengthen their character. Each Playbook, authored by leading scientists, contains definitions of different traits, with tips on how to begin conversations with students, and additional resources and supports to help implement changes. The Playbooks contain lessons on everything from how to cultivate purpose-how to make a meaningful contribution to the world-to how to cultivate curiosity and build self-control.

The Montessori Method: Cultivating Agency in Young Students

Often, discussions about building agency focus on older students, but educators like Anna Perry, executive director of Seton Montessori Institute and Schools, have discovered the importance of cultivating the inherent agency of even the youngest of learners. In Montessori classrooms, children become self-regulated through concentration on stimulating self-chosen tasks, or "works," that they can pursue.

Montessori educators have developed a set of three approaches to foster agency in young students. Through mixed-age groups, teachers look at each student as an individual, and peers are empowered to become one another's guides. Through individualized education, teachers focus on what individuals students (rather than the cohort or the label) need to learn and grow. Through the concept of "independence, situated within interdependence," students learn responsibility for themselves while maintaining respect for others.

A Strong Foundation for a Challenging School Year

This may be the most challenging year school communities have ever experienced. As educators, we need to equip students with a strong foundation to face the many uncertainties and changes they'll need to overcome. A strong sense of identity and greater agency will help all students, especially those who tend to be most marginalized by education systems.

As educators, we should be asking ourselves how we can ensure that students can access the resources and tools they need. How can we help them achieve a strong sense of self and cultivate in them the strength and agency to advocate for themselves and ask for what they need?

As the Q.E.D. Foundation's Carter says, "The best antidote to hopelessness is being able to take some action." We hope the Back to School Learner Identity and Agency serves as a foundation to take actionable steps that help improve learning experiences for all students and deliver a more equitable educational experience during this unprecedented time.

For more, see:
Anna Perry is Executive Director of Kim Carter is Executive Director of Chris Liang-Vergara is Founder & Partner of Sean Talamas is Executive Director of Character Lab, a nonprofit organization that connects researchers with educators to create greater knowledge about the conditions that lead to social, emotional, academic, and physical well-being for young people throughout the country. Elliot Luscombe is Director of Strategic Partnerships at Character Lab. Stay in-the-know with innovations in learning by signing up for the weekly Smart Update. World Class Edu , an organization dedicated to spreading the joy of learning to every person in the world through collaboration, innovation, and equity. Follow Chris on Twitter at @LiangVergara Q.E.D. Foundation , an organization of adults and youth working together to create and sustain student-centered learning communities. Find Kim on Twitter at @KimQED Seton Montessori Institute , a professional school and research organization that prepares new educators and provides continuing education to Montessori professionals in the United States and throughout the world.

Eric Tucker is the co-founder and Executive Director of Brooklyn Laboratory Charter Schools. He has served as a teacher and instructional leader in Providence and Chicago. He is former Director at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the co-founder and Executive Director of the National Association for Urban Debate Leagues. Eric co-edited The Sage Handbook of Measurement.

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How Schools Can Help Cultivate Learner Identity and Agency | Getting Smart

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By: Anna Perry, Kim Carter, Chris Liang-Vergara, Eric Tucker , Sean Talamas, and Elliot Luscombe COVID-19 is creating unprecedented challenges and demanding more of students, who must play an even greater role in managing their own education as they navigate in-person, hybrid, and virtual learning in varying measures throughout the year.

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Academic Motivation: Concepts, Strategies, and Counseling Approaches

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Academic Motivation: Concepts, Strategies, and Counseling Approaches