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.