Is Agency the same as Personalized Learning?
There are two words that are trending in education right now: Agency and Personalized Learning. It’s rather funny that these ideas have been around since the 1960’s and are now emerging as shaping forces in our educational paradigms. However, I hear them used as if they are synonymous, but are they the same thing?
Is Agency the same as Personalized Learning?
This is a question that has been tumbling in my mind for a while. Ever since the PYP introduced the new branding symbol, I kept staring at the center of it and wondering how schools were really going to be “enhanced” by the updates? 
I also have been seeing a trend in which schools are starting to shift from a guided inquiry into an open inquiry approach, giving primary students, particularly ones in the upper grades, more say in the content of their learning. Although I have not directly visited those schools, I am given the impression that the children get to write their own units and learning is on their terms, in this way, the learning is quite personal and self-directed. I think these schools must be highly motivated to be innovative and deeply committed to this ambitious approach; from leadership to every member of staff, they focus their energy on creating a student self-directed learning approach. So is THIS personal learning? Personalized learning, by its definition, is to customize learning for each student’s strengths, needs, skills, and interests. So what can be more agentic than this?-As a student, I ultimately choose what I learn and when I learn it and teachers just coach me into my next steps.
So should we, as PYP schools be creating more personalized learning for students in order to enhance our student agency? Hmmm…..
A learning community that supports agency offers opportunities for students to develop important skills and dispositions, such as critical and creative thinking, perseverance, independence and confidence. These are vital to the learning process and the development of self-efficacy. The learning community further offers students multiple opportunities to experience the impact of their choices and opinions, which support their evolving perceptions of their identity. In return, students with a stronger sense of self-efficacy bring a stronger sense of agency to the learning community.
From The Learner – PYP, developed by the International Bacchaleurate
After reflecting on that, it seems to me that the answer is NO. Personalized Learning and Agency are not the same thing. Moreover, schools do not have to create “Studios” or “Learning Labs” in which teachers are supporting 20 different personal units of inquiry that the students have created in order for students to have agency. Of course, this is fabulous to have these structures and resources but to assume that this is the gold standard that all of our PYP schools should be doing would be missing the point of the enhancements. It’s about student empowerment, not individual inquiries or personalized learning tracks. So we don’t need a lot of tech and teachers in order to do this. How this looks may differ according to the context and budget considerations of that school. But to think that we need to recreate the wheel in order for us to cultivate student agency would build more barriers to getting started now in our classrooms. We need to think about learner agency as self-efficacy and not individualization. When you look at that excerpt, its the culture of the Learning Community is what creates learner agency, and this is more about developing competency and confidence and less about designing specialized learning spaces.
Agency is Self-directed Learning
The book, Empower: What Happens When Students Own Their Learning by John Spencer and AJ Juliani, to me is one of the best books out there that really 
articulates how student agency can happen in our classroom. When students have the motivation and skills to explore content, they can take action that goes above and beyond our expectations for them. They can develop self-direction. THIS is the GOLD STANDARD that we should be aspiring to.
Moreover, this book helps educators to cultivate the mindset necessary to relinquish control of classroom learning so that learners can become self-directed. It contained an important question in there that I think teachers should tape to their computers (or planning books) when they are sitting down to lesson plan:
What decisions am I making for students that they could make for themselves?
I know I found myself going to my class and asking the students “How might we….”
- show what we know about this concept
- explore this idea
- experience our learning differently
No bells or whistles were required. It was about bringing them into the planning of their learning and supporting their decisions. Sometimes students wanted to go off and do their own thing, but more often than not, it meant collaborating with peers. I think this is why we shouldn’t confuse personalized learning with agency, especially since we, as PYP educators, are social-constructivists. We shouldn’t create “learning islands” in our classrooms, rather learning hubs, in which we can connect with different people and resources because, in the real world, this is often what we do to solve problems. This is true ownership of learning. This is the essence of a true Learning Community. We need to work at getting REALLY GOOD at collaboration, so students know who and what can support them in their personal growth.
PYP Coordinator Footnote
As a leader of learning at my school, I can’t begin to express how much misunderstanding there is out there about student agency. I know I have to be careful to tread lightly on pushing student agency without being more informed about how I can support my teachers in supporting their learners. We get into vigorous conversations about this term and often teachers feel that this means that we should “kill” teacher-directed lessons or if we help students manage their decision making, we are squashing their agency. It seems that many teachers equate agency with kids having a free-for-all in classroom learning. Or, on the other hand, we should be differentiating every lesson all the time. Yikes! These are extremes.
So, I think we need to be careful about how we approach this at our schools.
I’m wondering what other terms like “personalized learning” are getting confused with Agency at your schools. Please share so we discuss and debate, arriving at greater clarity and purpose when implementing the PYP enhancements at our schools.
Developing learners as leaders is my joy! I am committed and passionate International Baccaluearate (IB) educator who loves cracking jokes, jumping on trampolines and reading books. When I’m not playing Minecraft with my daughter, I work on empowering others in order to create a future that works for everyone.
Early in my teaching career, I taught in some tough schools with some really challenging students—students who had difficult home lives and had very little motivation or structure in their lives. I remember that my school district gave all new teachers the book, 
Those first comments became the fodder for discussion–Were “hearts” and emojis really helpful for growing ourselves as learners? And they also talked about how we presented our learning online. One student expressed a chronic sentiment: “Sometimes I can’t hear them speaking. I think people should listen to themselves before they post. ” As a teacher, I loved this observation which really has improved their presentation skills overall. As a result, students have naturally begun to articulate how they really wanted to engage better online.
This has also helped to spread mathematical thinking around. I can see students nudge one another and say “Hey did you so-and-so’s idea? Go check it out!’
Now we are at the stage in which we are encouraging and educating parents about how to make helpful comments and responses. It’s a bit hard to get them to “unlearn” some of the social media habits that we have as adults, so we get parent comments like “Love you boo-boo. Great work!” I hope that the students challenge their parents and ask them what they connected to in their post.
various ways that one might approach its answer. I want them to think, then reach for a book, a website, a magazine or ask someone so that their curiosity can be nourished by the support of other human beings. And then realize that they too have something to share, which makes them reach for the pencil or tap on a keyboard. I want their minds overcome by the desire to write.
I have to say that is incredibly hard to take the “man-made” out of our learning environment and so this idea will have to continue to grow and be refined. But when I think back to the original quote from the book Make Space, I want the next prototype to really support the value and love of our environment–what makes our Blue Planet worth appreciating and how can we still be “human”, with our deep desire towards progress and yet honor the other conscious living organisms and their plight to survive? In our IB programmes, we have a strong emphasis on how humans must negotiate our roles and responsibilities in sharing finite resources with other living things.
our families and close-knit members of our community, primarily in schools, churches, and other organizations that families participated in. In the past, they just had to manage the pressure and influences of a smaller group of people, but now that has really expanded to include so many ideas of pop culture. Nowadays the World Wide Web has the opportunity to expose students to a variety of ideas and theories, particularly on social media, in which ideas are narrowed into sound bites and memes; it’s easy for kids to get swept away by the flood of emotion and beliefs. I think it’s not so much finding our voice but hearing our voice in the midst of the deluge of ideologies and our culture’s status quo. They are being drawn into belonging to the larger world in which students might find themselves acting in ways in ways that are not really true to their nature. In other words, they don’t have the coping mechanisms to deal with this onslaught of energy and emotion that is bombarding them, in the physical world and in the virtual world that they experience in their on-screen life. So we must help them to calm their minds and begin to trust their intuition, instead of impulsive reactions. But in order to do that, students must begin to develop habits of mental hygiene, in which they are clearing up the debris left behind from an experience (on or off-screen) or a conversation with a teacher, family member or friend, and the resulting feeling from that interaction.