Impact At The Core
Impact At The Core

Student agency

Our pedagogical approach emphasizes student agency, allowing learners to actively shape their education. Students have a voice and can make choices about what and how they learn, aligning with their interests and goals. Students’ agency involves shaping their own goals, making a plan about how to reach these goals, monitoring and reflecting choices and progress. 

We empower students to take an active role in their learning journey. Student agency emphasizes the importance of students making choices that align with their interests and goals, especially in courses and projects geared towards creating societal impact. Student agency in impact-driven education transforms learners from passive recipients of knowledge to active participants in the educational process, preparing them to be change-makers in their future careers. 

 

Why is it important?

In more traditional education teachers make choices for their students, which limits their agency. We foster the will and ability of our students to make a positive change. In impact education we want students to experience that they can influence what happens in the world. This approach fosters a sense of ownership and responsibility in students, encouraging them to engage deeply with real-world issues.

 

How

Some tips to give student agency:

  • Be clear that you expect student agency and clarify what that is. 
  • Co-create the learning space with the students. 
  • Support goal setting.
  • Offer choices.
  • Listen 
  • Value and model risk taking. 
  • Support internal attribution of success. 
  • Encourage thinking. 
  • Give time.
  • Give feedback.

For more detail see table below
 

How to stimulate student agency

 Tips 
Be clear that you expect student agency and clarify what that is. 
  • Communicate your expectation of student agency, explaining its meaning and how students should exercise it, such as setting their own learning goals and action plans.
  • Focus assessments on the learning process rather than the final product.
  • Clearly outline the course path for students, ensuring they understand and feel confident about upcoming activities, but avoid removing all challenges.
  • Prepare students for the inevitability of uncertainty throughout the course. 
  • Transition from teacher-led progress tracking to student-managed scheduling. Provide tools for students to track their progress and manage their learning pace. 
Co-create the learning space with the students
  • Use the first week for student introductions.
  • Involve students in organizing the classroom to ensure a safe, accessible, and engaging learning environment.
  • Allow students to participate in establishing classroom rules.
  • Develop shared routines with student input, covering arrival, transitions, communication, meetings, cleanup, and dismissal.
  • Foster a respectful and welcoming atmosphere by collaborating with students to create a culture of respect, trust, and emotional safety for everyone.
Support goal setting:
  • Communicate expectations. Give clear deadlines. Clarify what knowledge, conceptual understandings, skills and dispositions the students could learn in your course, and why.
  • Support the students when they set their personal goals and when they monitor their progress and evaluate. Offer help in doing so by offering examples of goals to strive for
  • Organize reflection concerning those goals.
Offer choices
  • Personalize learning by acknowledging students' abilities, needs, and interests.
  • Provide choice in how students pursue their goals.
  • Engage students through their interests and celebrate their cultural identities.
  • Encourage authenticity by assigning open-ended tasks.
  • Create a safe environment for exploration and risk-taking.
  • Move from uniform assignments to adaptive/selective ones, allowing students to personalize their learning path.
Listen
  • Take time to listen to student, 
Value and model risk taking
  • Normalize the struggle. Incorporate the power off YET (you can’t do this YET)
  • Turn mistakes into learning opportunities.
  • Tasks that are too easy or too difficult will squash motivation.
  • Help students understand that everyone has problems fears, failures, and self- doubt. Share stories about people like them who have overcome similar or even harsher circumstances.
  • Help learners seek alternate paths to success when they encounter a roadblock or a setback.
  • Offer opportunities for students to demonstrate creativity and take risks
Support internal attribution of success
  • Encourage learners to recognize their achievements or failures as a result of their own actions rather than external factors, empowering them to take control of their outcomes.
  • Normalize student success, treating it as an expected outcome rather than a rare or accidental occurrence.
  • Teach students the distinction between mere hard work and effective, strategic effort.
  • Convey to students that intelligence and talent are not fixed traits but can be developed and enhanced over time.
Encourage thinking
  • Pay close attention to what students think, question, and aspire to.
  • Encourage and address student-initiated questions and ask open-ended questions to guide without dominating the conversation. 
  • Integrate reflective practices
Give time
  • Allow time to respond to students’ ideas about action.
  • Use the first week to make them feel competent in contacting stakeholders
Give feedback
  • Use feedback that is specific, constructive, and task specific.
  • Concentrated on improvement rather than on a finite goal. 
  • Encourage peer feedback

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