What is ‘Student Agency’?
One of our big aims across the years at Mount Waverley Secondary College (MWSC) is building students’ capacity for agency over their learning. At MWSC, we think about agency in the following terms:
Agency is about how much and how often students take an active role in their own learning. A student who shows agency seeks and takes opportunities for independence, self-regulation and ownership of their learning.
This means lots of different things in classroom contexts, but we can narrow down to key elements of agency as seen in our MWSC agency rubric below that has been sent out to all students:
The aim here is to encourage students to work towards being active and independent learners so they are ready for challenges ahead in school, further study, work and life.
As teachers, we are still very much here to provide students support and direction through that journey, but we are keen to guide students through the process of gradually building independence, and we are passionate about sharing the sense of confidence and freedom that comes with taking control and ownership over learning.
How do I understand my student’s progress?
The other good news is that your student’s teachers also report on student agency each semester to provide families with an indicator of progress. Under the ‘approaches to learning’ section of each class, there is a teacher assessment of ‘consistently, sometimes or rarely’ for student agency.
Detailed descriptors of these indicators are available at the front of each report and these indicators are great discussion points for our regular parent-student-teacher conferences (which we love our students to attend!).
What’s next?
This is a great chance for students to continue building their skills using the tools at their disposal.
Your student will hopefully have the chance to discuss with you and their teachers about setting a couple of personalised goals – perhaps even just one or two classes to start. For example, this might look like trying to ask 1-2 clarifying questions each week, or seeking out feedback for an aspect of their work they are unsure how to improve.
Their focus could even be on building a mindset that is curious, robust and hungry to learn. This might look like practicing emphasising curiosity for the bits of subjects they don’t yet understand, and the other many unknowns of school life (marks, friends, VCE, future careers). Building this mindset is a great asset that can help us avoid anxieties about uncertainty outside our control and instead focus on how things might turn out if we put effort into what we can control.
Thank you for your ongoing support of our students. We look forward to working with you and them to help build their agency and achieve their goals.
All the best with the rest of the semester.
Mr Thomas Grant
Head of Student Voice