Learner Agency

The above infographic from the IB Primary Years Program gives us a basic introduction of learner agency. According to Bandura, agency enables people to play a part in their self-development, adaption, and self-renewal with changing times” (in Learner Agency, IB 2018). Agency is closely connected to self-efficacy, a belief in one’s own ability to succeed. When learners believe in themselves and have a strong sense of identity, they are more likely to exercise agency.

When learners are agentive, they take initiative, responsibility & ownership, express interest, monitor their learning and develop approaches to learning & dispositions. They also work collaboratively with teachers to make decisions together and create shared agreements & routines. It is important to understand that teachers can’t give learners agency, but can create opportunities in which learners can exercise agency. They can do this by actively respecting, listening to learner ideas and noticing learners’ capabilities, needs and interests.

One of the key considerations for schools and teachers in Wales (and everywhere?) is about achieving a balance of ‘learner choice & voice’ and teacher-planned curriculum expectations.

• How can we develop agency and a sense of ownership of learning, developing learner voice without ending up with learning based on Fortnite, YouTubers and Disney?
• How can we plan units and ‘cover the important content’ at the same time as giving learners opportunities to explore things that might interest them, but maybe aren’t really what we’re exploring right now?

Designing for Inquiry

When we are designing Units of Inquiry we need to ensure we develop inquiries that are sufficiently conceptual which really look into big ideas that frame the inquiry. When units are conceptual, they have much more generative potential. In this case, often some of the learner interests that start to emerge in the inquiry may not connect directly with the content, but it will connect at a conceptual level. Therefore we try and move away from the idea of inquiring into a topic, and instead have these rich conceptual understandings and questions. Framing an inquiry conceptually creates a bigger container for the interests and the questions that often emerge from learners. So the inquiry is guided by a key question, usually developed by the teacher(s) in the design phase. The question should capture the essence of the problem/investigation/field of interest. Generative potential means it is open and often provocative.  Simple, short, provocative questions to which there is no single answer are the best. (e.g. Why call Wales ‘home’?) The question acts as a large ‘funnel’ into which experience, thinking and understanding are gradually shifted. 

A common view is that as an inquiry teacher, you learn alongside or with your students. There is no doubt this is partially true, but it is vitally important that we try to spend time with a collaborative team really exploring the territory of the big conceptual idea and you feel that you’ve got a good understanding of it as adult learners. With regard to inquiry based learning, the best planning and designing is collaborative and discursive in nature. You might expect that if you had developed this understanding that you’d be overeager and would spend your time imparting all this knowledge. However, teachers who have planned collaboratively and understand the key concepts often feel more comfortable with a sense of; ‘my job is to help you figure this out and pose questions that might help you join the dots.’ Basically, the deeper understanding you have of the curriculum, the more potential you can often see in what might appear to be disconnected question. You have a greater awareness of ways of drawing a bridge between the curriculum and the child’s interest.

Divergent Inquiry

Thinking about pedagogy, we need to consider when we invite learners to pose questions. Often teachers break out the KWL and the Wonderwall right at the start of a unit, which might inadvertently be too early. Sometimes we need to have some shared experiences before we can expect the learners to know what it is they want to know.

After those shared experiences, as a way of processing them and sorting them out, we can generate questions (or review some of the questions we started with). The questions then actually become much more focused and relevant to our planned goals anyway. The provocations and initial experiences that we’re providing need to ensure we’re putting learners on the ‘desired pathway’.

When we design and plan for these initial experiences, we might aim get learners moving through a shared period of inquiry where we’re all on the same pathway. Then, when these new questions emerge, which might be a little more individualised or personalised, learners can move off on more divergent pathways. Yet we can be confident that the shared part of the inquiry has helped us cover the core content on the curriculum and then learners or groups of learners can go from there into a broader environment, yet we’re still connected by the key concept and question.

Developing an Inquiry ‘Stance’

Kathy Short and Kath Murdoch both explain how developing as an inquiry teacher is about bringing an inquiry ‘stance’ to everything we do. To our planning, to our professional learning and to our teaching. For many teachers, this involves an element of retraining ourselves to approach a conversation about learning differently. This requires not just training but a mindset shift and is definitely something that is built through support and practice.