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Burt Home Learn More Standards Inspiration About the Author |
What inspired this project?
Even before the pandemic shutdown in March of 2020, I had been thinking about the concept of agency as a next step for our school. We are an International Baccalaureate (IB) school and in January of 2020, the IB officially launched the revised and enhanced primary years program for elementary schools around the world. One of the big revisions was a new focus on student agency. Encouraging student voice and ownership of learning, had long been part of our work as a school, but we were now tasked with thinking about how to encourage students to see themselves as agents and capable of using their skills and knowledge to not only own their learning but to take principled action as a result. Little did we know how important this would become a few months later. Even the IB couldn’t have predicted a world-wide pandemic, but as we’ve come to expect, they were right on target for what schools and students would need moving into the future.
After the months of distance learning when some of our students returned to in-person learning, we were presented with a serious concern. Students that had once been independent for the most part, were struggling to complete tasks and to share their thinking with the group. They seemed to have lost their confidence in their own abilities and relied heavily on parent support. They lacked stamina. With writing, for instance, some students were only able to keep at it for a few minutes, where previously they would write for 20-30 minutes easily. It certainly wasn’t every student that was affected, but there was a definite trend. As a staff we became very concerned and thought about what we could do to restore student confidence and grow their agency. This became the rationale for my action research to work together to see what we could do as teachers to promote agency in our classrooms and help students become confident, independent learners. |
Research
Design Process
Support and Next Steps
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This slide presentation is an overview of the research project shared with teacher participants showing the results of their work.
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