Near the end of January Derek Wenmoth and I facilitated a 2 day Retreat as part of our Refresh, Reconnect, Refocus (RRR) programme for 18 secondary and primary APDPs from across Aotearoa/NZ. As with our last year’s Principal RRR Retreat the feedback has been extremely positive:
Realistic and relevant, inspiring and helpful, a collaboration that flows and makes sense.
The best two facilitators I've had the pleasure of working with!
This week Derek and I completed our first round of 1-on-1 remote hui with each of the participants to support them to focus on their plans captured in their Experimental Design Canvas while dealing with the inevitable tsunami of operational matters APDPs have to deal with, especially at the start of the year.
The common words to describe how they were feeling a couple of weeks in and looking forward to our contact again in 3 weeks time were;
Energised, Optimistic, Connected, Proud, Relieved, Organised and Ready
It was at the Retreat that Derek shared a new book he had just come across, The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better by Dr Rebecca Winthrop, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, and journalist Jenny Anderson.
He used a cool matrix similar to this one here to explain the 4 modes of student engagement:
It was a real moment of clarity for me.
I have been doing a lot of work in schools helping them develop an appropriate pedagogical model for their school contexts. They have each settled on their own core values and beliefs about learning which has led to the agreement on a set of principles, or guidelines for action, that result in a set of teaching practices being agreed upon. In all cases, the particular sets of values and beliefs point to each school having a clear desire to develop Learner Agency as the central driver of their pedagogy.
At that point we make use of Derek’s co-authored Agency By Design to begin the process of identifying the practices we need to have at the core of our pedagogy which will bring their core values and beliefs to light.
But it was the pivotal role Agency plays in lifting engagement from the Achiever to the Explorer mode that provided the clarity.
The authors argue that students can be Passengers who cruise along doing the bare minimum as a result of not being engaged AND having no sense of agency or influence over what is being learned. They can be Resistors who have no engagement with the learning but use the agency or influence they have to push back and to make clear they are not engaged.
We might believe the Achiever mode would be the desired state. These students certainly work hard and gain very good results, but this is usually at the cost of fear of failure and high levels of anxiety.
It is the Explorer mode we should be aiming for where students are engaged BECAUSE OF the agency and influence they have in what they are learning. When young people are driven by internal curiosity rather than just external expectations, they investigate the questions they care about and persist to achieve their goals.
I have referred to this matrix in 2 school workshops since and it has helped to build buy-in for the pedagogical approaches the schools are implementing. Also, at one of my RRR 1-on1s last week a participant described how she had used it when workshopping with her staff to create buy-in for their new approach to Writing.
I haven’t read the book yet (it is on order) but there’s a good discussion with one of the authors on Afternoons with Jesse Mulligan (RNZ) which gives more insight.
The good news is that the authors promise that the book outlines some easy and simple adjustments teachers can make to their practice to increase the level of agency and move more learners into the Explorer mode.
While listening to the interview I couldn’t help but reflect on our journey to open Hobsonville Point Secondary School and our determination to focus on Innovate by personalising learning, Engage through powerful partnerships and Inspire through deep challenge and inquiry. This required us to be serious about Learner Agency.
This determination meant we had to combat a level of negativity from others in the sector and from media (The School With No Rules, NZH etc), and work hard to win the confidence of parents who thought they would be happy for their kids to be Achievers and not Explorers.
The easiest to convince were the kids, because they were the ones being engaged because they had influence! (I’m sure the glasses I’m looking back through have some tint of rose! Not all, obviously, were deeply engaged, but I had never experienced such a consistently high level of engagement before.)
Supporting schools to develop an appropriate pedagogical model for their context which has the intention of providing the most opportunities to move their students into Explorer mode is what I am focusing on in all of the schools I am working with.
We follow a fairly straight forward model that results in teams, and eventually, the whole staff co-constructing the deeply held beliefs about learning that will drive agreed practices.
Along the way there is a strong focus on student voice and involving them in stages of co-construction.
Get in touch if you think this is something your school may be interested in.
Finally, reflecting on the title for this post and the reference to Teacher Agency:
When we make minor changes to our practice, based on collectively held beliefs about what makes for deep learning, and when we invite students into that process, we feel powerful in our belief to make a difference and to move more students into Explorer mode. The ability to commit to that is Teacher Agency.
Best wishes
