From the APL&T
Dear Families
Nativity’s work with Student Agency
This year our teachers began working with Lee Crocket and his Future Focused Learning Program, with a focus on developing students’ agency across the school. Lee has worked with governments, education systems, international agencies, and corporations throughout the world to help people connect to their highest purpose and realise their wish for the future. At Nativity, we are providing learners with opportunities to develop student agency and their capacity to be thriving and capable learners and realise what their wish is for the future.
What is Student Agency?
Developing student agency motivates students to learn and empowers learners to take ownership of learning and provides meaningful contributions to their learning environment (OECD, 2019). With ownership and agency students’ motivation increases and they develop confidence, higher engagement, lifelong skills, capabilities, and self-efficacy. By developing agency, learners actively shape their own learning experiences through making decisions, setting goals, acting, and reflecting on their progress.
Learners at our school have been developing student agency in various ways beginning with unpacking the Achievement Standards from the Australian Curriculum in various curriculum areas. This week we see how student’s agency is developing in the Early Years classes.
Reception
Reception learners have unpacked the Math Achievement Standard by trying to understand what it means for them as learners.
As learners, the students provided the following comments;
• Why do we only need to subitise to 5??
• Why can’t we go higher?
• Why do we have to stop at 5.
• Yeah, I know all the dots on a dice without counting them, and that goes to 6!!!
So we added a star on the achievement standard which says subitise…’at least’ to 5!!!!
Reception learners displayed ways in which they could show how they had achieved this standard. By creating learning provocations students were able to be creative in showing their knowledge, they created ‘I can’ statements to share what they had learnt. As the students took agency – the learning was displayed in different ways. Some children shared their ‘I can’ statements others had a go at writing them and some drew their ideas. We frequently referred back to the Learning Intention we unpacked previously, and the children were able to come up with multiple ways that they could show their learning.
Year 1/2 D
Year 1/2D looked at the following provocation in Mathematics:
What do you notice about the numbers and the blocks?
Students manipulated blocks and placed them sequentially with the numerical representation of the number. They then had to write or say anything that they noticed about the numbers and blocks. The responses that the students had were in depth and displayed the thought that the students put into their learning, they certainly were thinking beyond the number.
The next step was unpacking the Achievement Standard and creating a Learning Intention: Recognise, represent and order numbers to at least 120, using physical and virtual materials, numerals, number lines and charts. By unpacking the learning intention students created more provocations led by the students. Below is an example of one provocation created by the students.
The number is 12. Tell me EVERYTHING that you can about the number 12.
12 is an even number
It has two digits (numerals)
It is related to 10
It is like counting 1,2
It is like 120 without the 0
It is a low number
It is the number before 13.
It is the last number before the teens started.
If you switch the numerals – it is 21.
It is the number after 11.
6 + 6 = 12 and all are even numbers
12 + 12 = 24 which is an even number
The discussion about “even” led to deeper consolidation of “even and odd” and an “experiment” to see whether the answer is even if two even numbers are added.
Year 1/2 W
Year 1/2 W have been unpacking part of the English Achievement standard, ‘understand how characters are developed’. They began by analysing the language and the students, with support, came up with their own achievement standard/learning intention.
After they discussed the characteristics (including emotions) they drew a character and wanted the background to reflect happiness (orange), blue (sad) and red (angry or dangerous) One student had mentioned how characters are represented by colour in the movie ‘Inside Out’ and they agreed as a class that they would like to use similar representation. The next step was to add vocabulary to describe their character and unpack the next parts narrative structure. Students were thoroughly engaged with describing characters, focusing on using adjectives to describe their creation. Some students even expanded their focus into synonyms.
The next step in the journey was to create settings. Learners were able to create texts where they described their setting, with some students using similes. Student agency was evident when students set their own writing minimum, they decided that they needed to use 6 descriptions. Students selected a variety of ways to illustrate their settings;
one student used a felt board to describe what he wanted initially and then described the setting orally and before he wrote.
As you can see there is a lot of learning occurring being directed by our students. Next time we will look into the learning occurring in other classes around the school. I would like to leave you with a thought…
“Every child has a different learning style and pace. Each child is unique, not only capable of learning but also capable of succeeding.” Robert John Meeham
Kind regards
Melinda James
