Stonefields School (TLIF 3-022) - Developing learner agency through collaborative inquiry into innovative learning design Publications
Publication Details
Project Reference: Stonefields School (TLIF 3-022): The purpose of this project was to spread effective teacher practice across the school while exploring new pedagogies that grow student agency and foster deep learning. It also used collaborative inquiry to grow shared understandings across the school about the design of rich curriculum learning experiences that achieve these goals.
Author(s): (Inquiry Team) led by Jana Benson and Bob Miller
Date Published: April 2020
Overview
Learner agency is critical to the New Zealand Curriculum vision of fostering confident, connected, actively involved, lifelong learners. Stonefields School can point to a record of success in fostering the competencies this requires. However, as with all schools there is variability, both in teacher practice and in student outcomes. This is particularly the case when teachers are new to the school and/or the New Zealand Curriculum.
Looking back at the past, when learners might have been taught in a very structured, “I’m going to give you all of my knowledge and you’re going to learn what I have to know”, then those learners are limited by what the teacher is able to give them. What we’re trying to do is give them the potential to be unlimited. (Bob Miller)
I also think we are learning about learner agency so we can be comfortable now in taking risks now in our learning. (Student)
The project gave both members of the school community and its partners in Te Roopu Pourewa Community of Learning new insights into learner agency. Learning conversations changed for school leaders, teachers, and learners. Learners have become increasingly articulate about how they understand agency and what it means for their learning. Teachers have also grown their understandings of what learner agency is, the importance of deliberately scaffolding agency through the learning design, and the value of incorporating learners’ own perceptions of their agency into data analysis and learning design.
The inquiry story
Initially, the inquiry most directly involved a group of teachers in the school’s three hubs for students in years 4–6. Over time, it expanded so that in the second year, it included teachers from across the school. Schools in Te Roopu Pourewa also participated in the learning journey, learning from and contributing to its evolution. This included the establishment of a Learner Agency Working Group and its members’ participation in the TLIF project’s professional learning working groups.
What was the focus?
Stonefields School and its partners in Te Roopu Pourewa Community of Learning share the belief that learner agency is critical to equipping students as lifelong learners. They understand this to mean that learners need to be ‘assessment capable’. That is, they need to understand where they are in their learning, what they need to do next, and how to achieve this. Stonefield School’s inquiry was connected to this bigger vision, while also addressing the issue of how to scale effective teacher practice across the school.
The project team worked from the belief that learner agency does not develop by chance. Instead, agency grows in a developmental process that requires teachers to be intentional about gradually shifting the locus of control from them to the learner. Initially, some learners require quite high levels of scaffolding and support to become self-regulated learners. Learning design matters.
The purpose of the project was to:
- enable teachers to learn from and build upon proven examples of effective teaching and learning
- develop and consolidate ongoing collaborative inquiry relationships with colleagues working on similar puzzles of practice
- use storied evidence, artefacts, and illustrations to identify, develop, measure, and make visible the new pedagogies and practices that best accelerate learning.
Three questions gave focus to the inquiry:
- How to design learning to deliver and enable learner agency?
- What does learner agency look like at different transition points?
- Which strategies, tools, organisation, scaffolds, and learning processes support the delivery of agency for deep, authentic learning?
What did the teachers try?
The initial intent of the inquiry was to scaffold teachers in how to better equip learners to be adaptable, digitally competent, and resilient lifelong learners. Expert teachers would be strategically placed with their colleagues in the school’s hubs, so that they could support them, not just in co- design planning sessions, but as they worked in their hubs. A ‘floating’ teacher would work across the hubs to offer on-the-spot coaching and modelling. Furthermore, digital technologies would support the development of shared understandings and ways of working across teachers, learners, and parents. In particular, the school would use the SchoolTalk app to monitor what happened as teachers co-constructed students’ next learning steps and provide evidence to parents/whānau of ongoing learning outcomes and progress.
The inquiry unfolded in an iterative way, scaffolded by the Stonefields three-phase Learning Process: Building Knowledge, Making Meaning, and Applying Understanding.
Early on, the team realised that its knowledge building needed to include developing a shared understanding of what learner agency is. Exploratory focus groups were held separately with learners and teachers to begin to unpack this concept. Further work happened within the partner schools in Te Roopu Pourewa and in its Learner Agency Working Group. The working group drew upon the shared learning to identify six ‘agency capabilities’: self-aware, assessment, collaboration, using tools and strategies, resilience, and take action. The school and its partners contend that a rich opportunity for learning is one that has been deliberately designed to foster these capabilities.
The project team then wanted to know how to measure shift in agency and chose to measure students’ own perceptions of their agency. To do this, they developed and validated an Agency Self- perception Tool (ASpT), which is now used across Te Roopu Pourewa. Learners are presented with questions and scenarios that enable them to monitor their own development, while also allowing teachers to ask critical questions about the patterns they see.
The tool provides teachers with information and insights to inform the design of learning experiences that foster learner agency. It is used to survey parents and teachers, as well as students. ‘Empathy conversations’ with parents enabled the team to unpack the parent surveys in more detail.
An analytical tool allows student data from ASpT to be tracked over time. This purpose-built tool makes it easy for teachers to manipulate data and produce graphs for interpretation as they inquire into their puzzles of practice.
SchoolTalk is an app that the school was already developing in partnership with a tech company and some other schools. Its purpose is to make learning progress and reporting more interactive and visible, increasing teacher efficiency and fostering learner agency. It allows students and teachers to collaboratively track and manage learner progress relation to expected progressions. It is intended to provide a holistic view of learning and to enable parents and whānau to see how their children are doing in ‘real time’.
SchoolTalk includes a teacher dashboard. This provides tools for teachers to design learning. Everything is in one place and teachers can make their planning visible to colleagues, learners, and parents.
Regular meeting times and working group days were an important part of the project, enabling opportunities to share practices and inquiry questions and to go deep into particular issues. The project also set up and trialled several different sharing platforms. These provided a place for teachers to tell their stories about how they were using the capabilities and their developing understandings about student agency to guide inquiry and inform learning design. Teachers made a point of sharing their learning and their wonderings about what didn’t work, as well as what did.
The work on learner agency, learning design, and SchoolTalk prompted a re-think of the school’s vision essence statements, outcomes, curriculum, learning progressions, and graduate profile. All staff were involved in this review. The graduate profile is now built around a framework that captures the community’s beliefs about the curriculum learning to which all learners at Stonefields School are entitled. The framework integrates:
- essence statements for each of the school’s ‘vision rocks’ (Building Learning Capacity, Collaborating, Making Meaning, Breaking Through)
- outcomes, ‘big understandings’, and indicators for each of the essence statements, on a gradient from ‘Beginning’ to ‘Part of Me’
- links between the outcomes and agency capabilities so that teachers can use observations and ASpT to know which of the outcomes and associated indicators they need to explicitly design for.
What happened as a result of this innovation?
The project was successful in fostering learner agency through supporting teachers to design and implement pedagogical approaches that gradually scaffold learners to take control of the learning process.
Teacher reflections capture changes in understandings and practices that include:
- developing coherent understandings of what learner agency is and the capabilities with which it is associated
- developing shared understandings about what progression looks like and, therefore, what to notice, recognise, and respond to
- using the graduate profile to weave their emerging understandings about agency with the school community’s re-developed graduate profile
- using ASpT to empower learners to identify their next steps and start conversations
- using insights from ASpT to design learning that builds on strengths and addresses areas needing development (for example, incorporating opportunities for learners to collaborate or take action)
- scaffolding junior learners into the Stonefields language around the learning pit, learning process, and learner qualities
- re-organising the layout of the hubs and scaffolding learners to create learning spaces that promote opportunities to be agentic
- using digital tools to make learning visible and promote interaction.
In the following video, learners speak articulately about what learner agency means for them and their learning: Learner Agency @ Stonefields School
While the project team consisted of one group of teachers at Stonefields School, the use of focus groups, sharing of impact stories, development and introduction of new tools, and review of the graduate profile involved the entire community. Learning from the project has influenced the school’s strategy and charter and is the subject of continuing inquiry. Having taken place within the context of Te Roopu Pourewa’s exploration of learner agency, the journey also influenced the refresh of this community’s achievement challenges.
What did they learn?
An important lesson was the need to develop a shared understanding of what learning agency is and what progression looks like. This required the development of new tools that enable investigation, particularly in terms of understanding the perceptions of learners themselves. Data about learner agency makes it possible to make new correlations and derive insights that had not previously been possible.
The team soon found that learners’ self-perceptions of their agency align well with the judgements made by their teachers. However, a puzzle emerged when results from ASpT indicated that a backwards shift in learners’ sense of agency. It was learners themselves who identified that as they developed a more nuanced understanding of what agency is they became ‘tougher’ on themselves – the scale against which they measured themselves changed. As one student said, “Now I know what it means, I look at it differently.” This issue of a changing ‘scale’ is important to take into account when analysing qualitative data like this.
A separate case study describes four benefits of adopting SchoolTalk:
- It enables agency for learners, making learning visible.
- It offers real time reporting on progress and achievement for parents, students, and teachers.
- It creates efficiency for teachers, aiding gap analysis, learning design, and the ability to differentiate and personalise learning.
- It helps create a learning partnership with whānau, providing resources and personalised support.
Inquiry Team
Jana Benson and Bob Miller were the project leads. Membership of the inquiry team evolved as the project was spread across teachers working in different hubs. People who took a key role over time included Ollie Baker, Naomi Toland, Wendy Rundle, Kyle Hattie, Emily Ruffell, Sarah Martin, Anita Unka, Sally Stanley, Miriam Gwyn, Nicole Walsh, Nardia Turner, Klara Coulter, and Stacey Rowe.
Expert support was provided by:
- Rosemary Hipkins (NZCER)
- Nina Hood (Education Hub)
- Mary Chamberlain (Evaluation Associates).
For further information
If you would like to learn more about this project, please contact the project leaders, Jana Benson (jana.benson@stonefields.school.nz) and Emily Ruffell (emily.ruffell@stonefields.school.nz)
Reference List
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Ministry of Education. (2019). Rich Learning Opportunities Guidance Document. Retrieved from https://curriculumtool.education.govt.nz/en/Home/LearningGuidance/99200
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