Measuring Social-Emotional Growth in Students

This week’s article summary is Testing for Joy and Grit. 

Over the past few months there have been a number of published articles about whether or not schools should try to ‘measure’ student social-emotional growth and development. (As you’ll see in the article, the guru of grit in education, Angela Duckworth, is adamantly opposed to trying to objectively measure social-emotional growth in students.)

Most independent-private schools have always had a whole child focus, emphasizing social-emotional development. And even though we comment on students' character growth in our narrative progress reports,  we are rarely asked to provide aggregate ‘quantitative’ evidence.

As public schools are beginning to more formally include social-emotioinal lessons in their curriculum, they are also being asked to design quantitative assessments to justify this emphasis.

This has cause much debate, disagreement, and controversy: What are the most important social-emotional qualities?  Can they be measured with quantitative metrics? Can any measure of social-emotional growth ever be truly objective?

When I read articles like this, I am always thankful that I teach in an independent-private school where evidence of success isn’t based on quantitative metrics.

Yes, we have pressures like aggregate standardized test results and secondary school outplacement, yet by and large we are assessed more on to what extent the daily experience of our students is congruent with the our mission.

Joe

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The fifth graders in Jade Cooney’s classroom compete against a kitchen timer during lessons to see how long they can sustain good behavior — raising hands, disagreeing respectfully, and looking one another in the eye — without losing time to insults or side conversations. As reward for minutes without misconduct, they win prizes like 20 seconds to kick their feet up on their desks or to play rock-paper-scissors.

Starting this year, their school and schools in eight other California districts will test students on how well they have learned the kind of skills like self-control and conscientiousness that the games aim to cultivate — ones that might be described as everything you should have learned in kindergarten but are still reading self-help books to master in middle age.

A recent update to federal education law requires states to include at least one nonacademic measure in judging school performance. Other states are watching these districts as a potential model.

But the race to test for so-called social-emotional skills has raised alarms even among the biggest proponents of teaching them, who warn that the definitions are unclear and the tests faulty.

“I do not think we should be doing this; it is a bad idea,” said Angela Duckworth, who has done more than anyone to popularize social-emotional learning, making “grit” a buzzword in schools.

She resigned from the board of the group overseeing the California project, saying she could not support using the tests to evaluate school performance.

And there is little agreement on what skills matter: Self-control? Empathy? Perseverance? Joy?

“There are so many ways to do this wrong,” said Camille A. Farrington, a researcher at the University of Chicago. “In education, we have a great track record of finding the wrong way to do stuff.”

Schools began emphasizing social-emotional learning around 2011, after an analysis of 213 school-based programs teaching such skills found that they improved academic achievement by 11 percentile points. A book extolling efforts to teach social-emotional skills in schools such as the KIPP charter network and Riverdale Country School in New York, “How Children Succeed” by Paul Tough, appeared the next year.

Argument still rages about whether schools can or should emphasize these skills. Critics say the approach risks blaming the victim — if only students had more resilience, zest,” or enthusiasm. Groups that spent decades urging the country toward higher academic standards worry about returning to empty talk of self-esteem.

But teaching social-emotional skills is often seen as a way to move away from a narrow focus on test scores, and to consider instead the whole child.

It may seem contradictory, then, to test for those skills.

In education, however, the adage is “what’s measured gets treasured”; states give schools money to teach the subjects on which they will be judged.

Next year, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test of students in grades four, eight and 12 that is often referred to as the nation’s report card, will include questions about students’ social-emotional skills. A well-known international test, PISA, is moving toward the same.

The biggest concern about testing for social-emotional skills is that it typically relies on surveys asking students to evaluate recent behaviors or mind-sets, like how many days they remembered their homework, or if they consider themselves hard workers. This makes the testing highly susceptible to fakery and subjectivity.

Students might be tested on performance, as in the “marshmallow test,” in which children were told they could have a sweeter reward if they waited. Those who waited scored higher in self-control. But those tests are too time-consuming to use on a large group of students.

Transforming Education, a Boston-based group that is among the biggest proponents of teaching social-emotional skills, argues that they are so important that schools have to begin testing for them, even if perfect measures do not exist. The group worked with the school districts here — which count one million students in cities including Los Angeles and Oakland — to choose four measures to evaluate: growth mind-set, social awareness, self-efficacy, and self-management.

The districts tested 10,000 students in 2014, and nearly 500,000 students last year, surveying things like how many days the students had come to school prepared (self-management), and whether they believed it was more important to be talented or to work hard (growth mind-set).

Just two years ago in her classroom in a trailer here at Visitacion Valley Elementary School, Ms. Cooney struggled with the kind of management problems that often confront young teachers.

Her students were bouncing around the classroom, playing with their phones instead of paying attention, fighting out interfamily beefs. Even if they wanted to learn, they were not.

Ms. Cooney took a two-hour training session in a student-behavior program and began playing “good-behavior games.” They look like regular lessons, except that they begin with students identifying goals for good behavior, and end with her assessing what went right and wrong.

On a recent day, students took notes on their reading as Ms. Cooney moved with a kind of Zen bustle around the classroom, grading papers and consulting one-on-one while she watched for things she would compliment the class on later — keeping bodies still, focusing on the task — and quietly noted bad behavior.

For every 1,000 minutes of good behavior earned, the children win 15 extra minutes of recess.

“I’m really saving minutes that would be lost to transitions, settling disputes and behavior problems,” Ms. Cooney said. It can be exhausting, but not nearly as much as teaching before. As she said, “Would you rather put out fires, or prevent them?”

Social-emotional learning will count for 8 percent of a school’s overall performance score; no teacher will lose a job for failing to instill a growth mind-set.

Noah Bookman, the chief accountability officer for the districts, said he understood the concerns about testing. But, he said, “This work is so phenomenally important to the success of our kids in school and life. In some ways, we worry as much if not more about the possibility that these indicators remain on the back burner.”

What's Your Educational Philosophy?

This week’s article summary is What Is Your Educational Philosophy? 

Just as last week’s article on no-excuses discipline led me to reflect on my beliefs regarding classroom management on the traditional-progressive continuum, this week’s did the same with my ‘philosophy of education.’

As we have spent a good deal of time this year on SAIS accreditation looking at where we are as a school programmatically and pedagogically, we in essence have been identifying Trinity’s ‘philosophy of education.’

What struck me about the article below was less about its content and more about the process, i. e. that the author (a teacher and blogger) periodically re-assesses about what drives him as a teacher and how these values shape the experience he provides for in his students. 

I still remember stumbling mightily with the question “What’s your philosophy of education?”  in interviews as I sought my first teaching job (plus my undergraduate major was history and I had never taken an education course). 

Truth be told, as a 22-year old I had no idea there were different approaches, emphases, nuances to teaching. I could recall teachers I did and didn't liked, but until I taught for a few years and then began reflecting on the type of teacher I wanted to be, a philosophy of education escaped me. 

This article also made me reflect on how fortunate we are to be at Trinity where conversations about educational philosophy occur regularly and we have an ample PD budget so we can all learn about new ideas and research. 

As you read the article, think about the traditional-progressive continuum and the ways in which the author’s philosophy of education contains elements of both.

Joe

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Over the summer, teachers reflect on the year and often redesign and perfect their teaching strategies and plans. In essence, they get back to the basics of what they believe is the best way to inspire learning in their students -- in other words, they revisit and refine their philosophy of education.

A school district might ask a teacher or principal applying for a job about her/his philosophy of education. In this post, I've decide to share mine, and I am curious to see if any of my beliefs resonate with you:

Students need to learn: Students want and need to learn as much as they need food, clothing, and shelter. An educator's primary job is to fill that primal need for learning by creating engaging and relevant learning experiences every day. The greatest gift a teacher can give students is motivating them to experience repeated learning success.

Students need to be active participants in learning: Students learn best by doing, and active teaching encourages active learning. Teachers should treat students as active participants in the learning process, providing them with skills, such as: How to study, How to take notes, How to memorize, How to express themselves effectively. Also, students need to be encouraged to explore and research information beyond the confines of the classroom and textbook.

Learning is a physiological activity involving the whole body: The best way to engage a student is to have a solid classroom management plan and a well-planned lesson that is grounded in relevant, purposeful activities designed to enhance that student's knowledge and skills and leave her/ him wanting to learn more. Teachers should be strongly aligned with student-centered and student-directed learning that embraces exploration, discovery, experiential learning, and the production of academically rigorous products.

Students need timely feedback to improve: Teachers gather data on student performance to adjust the learning environment and instruction so that they can target students' learning needs. Teachers administer pretests to find a starting point for learning and post-tests to determine the students' increase in performance level as well as the teachers' effectiveness.

Students need structure and repetition to learn: A teacher should be able to organize a standards-based lesson sequence, successfully implement the plan, and then evaluate student learning. A teacher should be able to create an exciting learning environment that makes it difficult for students not to learn. A teacher should know how to include all students in learning at their own level, and a teacher should be able to inspire the students to push themselves to the next level.

Students need information, knowledge, and skills: Having access to knowledge resources is as important to a child's education as the actual curriculum content. Relevant and current information must be at the teachers' and students' fingertips to provide answers when the questions are still fresh. Information "on demand" is more valuable than information "just in case."

Students need tools and resources: Students should know how their taxon and locale memory systems work. Students should have skills and strategies to be able to work effectively in the different levels of the cognitive domain as defined by Bloom. Students should be aware of their own learning preferences, and teachers should assist with creating a plan to develop other learning skills. Educational tools are a means to an end. For example, technology used appropriately can greatly magnify the students' capacity to learn and the teachers' capacity to teach, inspire, and motivate.

No Excuses Discipline?

This week’s article summary is Beyond the Viral Video: Debate About No Excuses Discipline.

At the article attests, discipline in schools finds all of us (teachers, kids, parents) "pulled between two poles of a heated, high-stakes, and very personal debate.”

This topic has been prominent in our SAIS Self-Study discussions about what we need to focus on in the next few years.

While the video linked in the article (take the minute to watch it) made me bristle as a teacher, the article more importantly made me take stock of where I place myself on the traditional-progressive continuum with respect to school discipline.

First, I clearly want my students to over time develop intrinsic decision-making and control. While an optimist, I also understand that most of us develop these intrinsic habits and skills within extrinsic limits. As a kid, I’d like to say I did my homework because I knew it was helping me learn, but in reality the consequence of not doing my homework was my motivation.

Second, I want a classroom to reflect a growth-mindset approach, meaning mistakes and errors (be they academic or behavioral) are how we learn and grow. How terrifying for me as a kid would it have been if every decision I made (some of which were the wrong choice) seemed like a summative Final Exam. 

Third, I think of Sarah Morgan’s Teacher Feature article a few weeks ago on how paramount the need to belong is and that misbehavior is often more a manifestation of not feeling "wanted, appreciated, and loved.” 

I have spent my entire professional career in prestigious independent-private schools—hence, I can’t judge the merit of no-excuses discipline in the high-poverty schools featured in the article. 

Yet, from the article I can certainly—as we all can—reflect on what sort of discipline/behavioral system to we believe in and foster in our classrooms and schools. 

Joe

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Let’s examines school discipline policies in light of the much-discussed video of a New York City charter school teacher harshly reprimanding a first grader for an incorrect paper.

More than perhaps any other issue in education, the discipline question finds individual students, teachers, and parents pulled between two poles of a heated, high-stakes, and very personal debate.

On one side are those who argue that the “no excuses” approach adopted by many charter schools is the only way to keep students on task and solve racial and social-class inequities that are exacerbated by lax discipline. Strict teachers are nothing new, but the no-excuses approach evolved in the 1990s to address the challenge of chaotic classrooms and disrespectful students in high-poverty schools. The approach was partly inspired by the “broken window” approach to community policing, which held that “sweating the small stuff” (fixing broken windows and other symptoms of disorder) created a climate that discouraged more-serious crimes. The “small stuff” in schools includes messy desks, gum chewing, pen tapping, doodling, trash on the floor, untucked shirts, loud talking, laughing at classmates, whining, eye rolling, teeth sucking, loud yawning, noisy movement from class to class, and running in the hallways.

On the other side of the debate are those who argue that no-excuses tactics are abusive, racist, and not an effective way to close the achievement gap in a number of ways:

The end doesn’t justify the means. Even if students make significant academic gains in no-excuses classrooms, the argument goes, harsh treatment by teachers and administrators leaves emotional scars. Most no-excuses schools advocate “warm-strict” – a balance of high expectations within nurturing relationships. But it’s clear that some educators get carried away and act in ways that can easily be experienced by students as abusive – for example, the New York City teacher in the video tears up a student’s incorrect paper in front of the class and raises her voice as she sends the girl away from the group. The real question, of course, is what happens downstream for students – how they do in subsequent grades, college, and life. Data are just beginning to be gathered on that.

No-excuses discipline doesn’t teach the habits of success. The absence of misbehavior doesn’t mean the presence of high levels of learning. Additionally, strict, controlling discipline during school hours doesn’t prepare students to handle themselves responsibly in less-structured environments. All the silence had prepared them only for situations with tight supervision and no social interaction. As soon as students find themselves a bit older, on the bus without their teachers, they often don’t have the tools to resolve conflicts without putting themselves in danger. And how could they? The school hadn’t taught them. The same argument is made about teaching very structured procedures in English and math classes. It might produce high scores on standardized tests, but students can fail to develop the independent thinking skills that are essential for success in college and life.

Here are arguments made by supporters of the no-excuses approach:

No-excuses consequences don’t have to hurt kids. If practiced with skill and within a day-to-day climate of warmth and high expectations, strict consequences can be very helpful to students. Taking the example of correcting students’ grammar and speech patterns, which might inhibit students from speaking, John King (founder of a successful Boston charter school) says, “If done well, you’re giving kids lots of opportunities to speak. You say the sentence back to them grammatically correctly, or you ask them a question.” The challenge for rapidly expanding charter networks is ensuring that balance of warmth and strictness in every classroom. “The more ‘replication’ schools emerge,” says Green, “the farther away each new school is from the good intentions of those who created the philosophy – and the higher the risk of teachers misinterpreting the idea and falling down the slippery slope toward a disconnected desire for control and compliance.”

No-excuses schools are capable of change, and they are changing. Schools are learning from early mistakes and fine-tuning their approach to discipline. There’s more staff training, close monitoring of classrooms, and clear statements by school leaders like this one from Stacy Birdsell-O’Toole to her teachers: “We are not a yelling school. We do not yell at kids. If I see you yell at a child, I’m going to pull you to the side, I’m going to have a talk with you, and then you’re going to go back and you’re going to be successful.”

To me, the no-excuses approach to teaching needs radical overhaul. The behavior first, learning second formula prescribed by broken-windows theory – and for that matter, by most American schools – can successfully build compliant, attentive students, at least in the short term. But it cannot produce students who think creatively, reason independently, and analyze critically. Students cannot just ‘track’ the teacher, follow every direction, and repeat right answers in choral back-and-forths; they also need to learn to track arguments, pay attention to their work, and evaluate evidence in order to agree or disagree respectfully. And they need to have ample opportunities to make mistakes, both behavioral and academic, no matter how uncomfortable that makes their teachers. I’m saying that educators need to embrace new, more complicated structures that feel messier in the short term but build more permanent learning in the long term.

Fostering Critical Thinking in Students

This week’s article summary is “Misunderstanding Critical Thinking” (no hyperlink available). 

As teachers, we strive for our students "to think deeply, to be empowered in their learning, to be engaged in their learning now and in the future, and to be critical and creative thinkers.”

When I taught humanities, I kept on my desk a list of verbs that spanned the gamut of Bloom’s Taxonomy—knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation—and used them in class discussions and on test questions. My hope was that the higher-thinking verbs would guide students to become deep, critical, and creative thinkers.

As the article below attests, there is much more nuance to (and a lot of misperceptions about) facilitating deep and critical student thought. 

I didn’t fall prey to all five of the misperceptions below (I was never guilty of misperception 2), but this article is a reminder of how much work and planning it takes to guide students to move from being consumers to true creators of content and ideas.

Joe

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Below are five common conceptual errors about critical thinking:

1. Critical thinking is only for high-achieving and gifted students: All students are capable of higher-level thinking. Critical thinking should not be limited to one group or one age level of students.

2. It’s okay to have students review for a test by using the same critical-thinking questions that will appear on the test: With this approach, the test will assess only students’ ability to remember answers, not their ability to think through unfamiliar questions. Teachers need to integrate a variety of thinking questions throughout the curriculum (analyze scenarios, interpret graphics, evaluate quotes) and make sure students are seeing test questions for the first time.

3. Using higher-level verbs in assignments ensures that students will think critically: Unfortunately for novice teachers relying on commonly used critical thinking verb charts, things aren’t that simple. For example, in this task – Synthesize the passage and identify the main character – even though a higher-level verb is used, students won’t be doing any critical thinking. Another example of how explain can be used in a lower-level and higher-level task: (a) Explain who is the main character; (b) Explain what the main character fears the most and how he or she is resilient.

4. Higher-level thinking is best assessed through oral questioning: Students need time to process high-level questions. If students can produce a quick verbal answer when a question is fired at them in class, it’s probably a lower-level question. Better to let students ponder good questions and discuss them with a classmate before being asked to respond.

5. Any teacher can facilitate critical thinking: All teachers need PD on framing good critical thinking questions, modeling high-level thinking themselves, and revising their lesson tasks and assessments so they spur critical thinking. One of the best ways for teachers to improve their skills in this area is working with colleagues to create curriculum unit plans, assess student work, and focus on effective practices.

Importance of Recess

This week’s article summary is  More Recess Time, Please 

While most independent schools have daily recess in their schedules, recess has all but disappeared in many public schools. (If it doesn’t directly prepare kids for the high-stakes tests they take—which then are used to measure school success—take it out of the schedule!)

What’s particularly interesting to me is the correlation between high academic achievement and ample recess in countries like Finland, China, Korea, and Japan. 

Obviously there are multiples factors that contribute to the success of a country’s educational system and philosophy. However, most of us in our professional and personal lives understand the importance of periodic breaks and physical movement in optimizing our performance. (Whenever I attend a conference or workshop, I make sure I sit neat the back row because after about 30 minutes or so I need to stand up and move around to maintain my focus and concentration on the presenter.) 

The same obviously holds true for kids.

Joe

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The average amount of recess time in most U.S. schools is 26 minutes a day, including lunch and snack time.

Most Chinese schools have a 10-minute recess for every 40 minutes of instruction, plus an hour of lunch and nap or rest time.

Shanghai’s policy is that each elementary-level class lasts only 35 minutes, and recess takes up almost 40% of the school day. In middle and high schools there’s more instructional time, but recess also increases.

Korea, Taiwan, and Japan have similar policies to China’s.

In Finland, students have 75 minutes of recess a day, which includes a 15-minute break after every lesson.

These countries believe strongly in liberal amounts of recess time, for the following reasons:

It improves learning by promoting intellectual and emotional development, elevating students’ energy, and improving concentration.

It improves classroom management by “resetting” children’s emotional and cognitive timers. Recess may help students avoid cognitive overload and the temptation to create distractions during instruction. Educators in New Zealand noticed a decrease in bullying after adding more recess time.

It fosters social development. In the unstructured space of recess, students have to be able to initiate, negotiate, cooperate, share, and build relationships with one another--skills highly valued in the adult world but that often are quite different from work or play under adult supervision and control.

It promotes physical well-being, including building fitness in ways that aren’t included in structured physical education classes. 

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Dweck's Growth Mindset Revisited

This week’s article summary is Carol Dweck Revisits the 'Growth Mindset’. 

What I liked about this article is how Dweck's work and research has been misunderstood and misapplied resulting in consequences contrary to her recommendations (much like Frankenstein’s monster). 

Fostering a growth mindset in students is perhaps the most influential topic in education over the past 10 years. 

Yet as Dweck points out, many are missing some of the major points of her research.

First, a growth mindset is not just about effort. 

Dweck worries that a focus on effort, rather than on learning, can perpetuate the failed self-esteem movement where everyone is made to feel good about themselves regardless of achievement and progress. When teachers and parents over praise kids for ‘putting in the effort’, kids may conclude that effort is the goal. To Dweck, when effort still does not lead to learning, one needs to try a new strategy and to seek help and support in another manner.

Second, she worries that because a growth mindset has become so popular that many  teachers and parents have jumped on the bandwagon without really thinking about how to develop it in kids. 

Third, Dweck believes that while many of us understand the importance of having a growth mindset, we still often fall prey to a fixed way of thinking. She provides a number of examples that can trigger fixed mindset responses. 

Think of the article as Growth Mindset 2.0.

Joe

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For many years, I secretly worked on my research. I say “secretly” because, once upon a time, researchers simply published their research in professional journals—and there it stayed.

I found that students’ mindsets—how they perceive their abilities—played a key role in their motivation: Students who believed their intelligence could be developed (a growth mindset) outperformed those who believed their intelligence was fixed (a fixed mindset).

And when students learned through a structured program that they could “grow their brains” and increase their intellectual abilities, they did better.

Finally, I found that having children focus on the process that leads to learning (like hard work or trying new strategies) could foster a growth mindset and its benefits.

Many educators have applied the mindset principles in spectacular ways with tremendously gratifying results. But as I’ve watched the growth mindset become more popular, I’ve become much wiser about how to implement it. This learning—the common pitfalls, the misunderstandings, and what to do about them—is what I’d like to share with you, so that we can maximize the benefits for our students.

A growth mindset isn’t just about effort. 

Perhaps the most common misconception is simply equating the growth mindset with effort. Certainly, effort is key for students’ achievement, but it’s not the only thing. Students need to try new strategies and seek input from others when they’re stuck. They need this repertoire of approaches—not just sheer effort—to learn and improve.

We also need to remember that effort is a means to an end to the goal of learning and improving. Too often nowadays, praise is given to students who are putting forth effort, but not learning, in order to make them feel good in the moment: “Great effort! You tried your best!”

The growth-mindset approach helps children feel good in the short and long terms, by helping them thrive on challenges and setbacks on their way to learning. When they’re stuck, teachers can appreciate their work so far, but add: “Let’s talk about what you’ve tried, and what you can try next.”

Recently, someone asked what keeps me up at night. It’s the fear that the mindset concepts, which grew up to counter the failed self-esteem movement, will be used to perpetuate that movement. In other words, if you want to make students feel good, even if they’re not learning, just praise their effort! Want to hide learning gaps from them? Just tell them, “Everyone is smart!” The growth mindset was intended to help close achievement gaps, not hide them. It is about telling the truth about a student’s current achievement and then, together, doing something about it, helping him or her become smarter.

Recent research found that there were teachers who endorsed a growth mindset and even said the words “growth mindset” in their classes, but did not follow through in their classroom practices. In these cases, their students tended to endorse more of a fixed mindset about their ability.

I have also found many parents who endorse a growth mindset, but react to their children’s mistakes as though they are problematic or harmful, rather than helpful. In these cases, their children develop more of a fixed mindset about their intelligence.

How can we help educators adopt a deeper, true growth mindset, one that will show in their classroom practices? 

You may be surprised by my answer: Let’s legitimize the fixed mindset. Let’s acknowledge that (1) we’re all a mixture of fixed and growth mindsets, (2) we will probably always be, and (3) if we want to move closer to a growth mindset in our thoughts and practices, we need to stay in touch with our fixed-mindset thoughts and deeds.

If we “ban” the fixed mindset, we will surely create false growth-mindsets.  But if we watch carefully for our fixed-mindset triggers, we can begin the true journey to a growth mindset.

Watch for a fixed-mindset reaction when you face challenges. Do you feel overly anxious, or does a voice in your head warn you away? Watch for it when you face a setback in your teaching, or when students aren’t listening or learning. Do you feel incompetent or defeated? Do you look for an excuse? Watch to see whether criticism brings out your fixed mindset. Do you become defensive, angry, or crushed instead of interested in learning from the feedback? Watch what happens when you see a colleague who’s better than you at something you value. Do you feel envious and threatened, or do you feel eager to learn? Accept those thoughts and feelings and work with and through them. 

My colleagues and I are taking a growth-mindset stance toward our message to educators. Maybe we originally put too much emphasis on sheer effort. Maybe we made the development of a growth mindset sound too easy. Maybe we talked too much about people having one mindset or the other, rather than portraying people as mixtures. We are on a growth-mindset journey, too.

Student Agency and Empowerment

This week’s article summary is Developing a Sense of Agency and it builds upon what I spoke about at  Wednesday’s faculty meeting. 

As part of our ongoing enhancement of our program and pedagogy (so critical to SAIS accreditation),  we need to continuously revisit how well we are balancing traditional and progressive elements of education to develop the following in our students:

• Foundational knowledge base: Proficiency in basic skills and exposure to wide base on general knowledge
• Solid character base: Strong emotional intelligence (agency and communion)
• Engagement, curiosity, and confidence towards continued learning: Comfort solving and creating by themselves and with other

The article below focuses on how one teacher had dealt with the practical question of whether kids should miss recess as a punishment for not completing school work. I have had many conversations with other teachers about this topic—some were adamant that no matter what, kids needed and deserved recess (the more progressive extreme) while others believed strongly that losing recess was an appropriate consequence for not completing school or homework (a more traditional extreme).

In this particular situation, the teacher found that balance of traditional and progressive through student agency and empowerment in real-life problem-based learning. 

The fair and practical solution developed (and owned by the students) had an extrinsic structure that provided accountability (a more traditional quality) while allowing for the development of intrinsic habits and choice (a more progressive quality). 

Clearly, not all solutions in school can find this 'sweet spot’ balance, yet that needs to remain our goal.

Joe

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An experienced teacher who was new to my school came to me with a dilemma. A parent of one of his students had voiced her very strong feeling that recess was a necessity for all students. This teacher, however, had used recess as leverage for his students completing their work: those who had, earned recess, while those hadn’t, used recess time to complete their assignments.

This practice had “worked” for him for many years, and he was having difficulty imagining how to manage his classroom without it. Although I believed that recess was a necessity and not something to be earned, I refrained from telling him what to do, because I respected his autonomy as a teacher for managing his classroom. I did, however, recommend an approach that had always “worked” for me: Share the problem with the students; work with them on understanding it and developing a solution to it. We discussed some ways to structure the discussion and he said he would give it try.

A week later he came to me with a smile on his face. His students had reached consensus on a solution to his dilemma: All students would get a certain amount of guaranteed recess time, but those who hadn’t finished their work would get 10 minutes less. He was amazed at how the students weighed the pros and cons of each solution and the manner in which they reached consensus on what to do. He also reported that they agreed to try this for two weeks and then meet again to evaluate how it worked.

As the school year progressed he reported that all his students consistently completed their work more than any other class he ever had. For the very few times a student didn’t complete the assigned work, there were no complaints or protests about missing the extra recess time. He also reported that he continued to share all classroom problems with his students and how he no longer felt that he had to control his class the way he had in previous years.

What he discovered and what he had allowed his students to experience was a sense of agency for designing their learning environment.

This result shouldn’t be a surprise; it only reveals something most teachers already know. Students love to help. Most problems are eagerly embraced.

Students’ desire to help and solve meaningful problems is too often an untapped resource hidden by the assumption that the teacher needs to always be in control of the classroom. 

When educators shift the paradigm from controlling to empowering, students experience the type of learning needed for success beyond school and throughout their lives; they will develop a strong sense of agency.

Although it is important for students to feel that they can meet their goals and solve their problems, agency extends the concept beyond individual needs to the world itself.

Students, who experience what it is like to change their classroom and their school, will be the people who will believe that world is not a given and will begin to change it for the better.

Conversely, education that is not guided by developing a sense of agency in students remains stuck in a perpetual tug of war where learning is dependent upon teaching and teaching is dependent upon controlling students.

Education, therefore, should be the process for instilling a sense of agency in every student and helping them gain the confidence for doing whatever it takes to improve their life, their community and ultimately the world.

Although this concept of student agency should radically change the vision and mission of education, it can begin to grow in every student in any classroom, without new programs or curricula. It can start with the simple act of a teacher turning to students and saying: “Here is a problem we are having and I need your help with it.”

Educators who ask instead of tell, invite instead of direct, involve instead of instruct, are really flipping the switch of teaching and learning toward agency. Students are waiting to be asked and given these opportunities even though they don’t know that they are.