Laying learning’s foundation
Unlocking life-long learning
How can educators empower students to succeed in a world of hyper-speed change?
As information diminishes in importance, the value of learning how to learn increases.
Safety, agency and integration are key, particularly for the gifted, neurodivergent and twice-exceptional (2E) community because these are students likely to be harmed (innocently or intentionally) by traditional educational settings and expectations.
What is student agency?
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) defines student agency as
“the capacity to set a goal, reflect and act responsibly to effect change.”
Mass education was traditionally predicated on a power imbalance between students and teachers; teachers were presumed experts and invested with dictatorial powers.
Obedience, not originality, and compliance, not creativity, were seen as students’ primary obligations. Even now, adhering to rules or following prescribed methods are often prioritized over self-directed learning.
Agency for exceptional learners
Agency is a form of power, and therefore cannot be ‘given’ to students by teachers. It has to be cultivated in a respectful, cooperative environment.
This can be a special challenge for neurodivergent, gifted and twice-exceptional (2E) learners, as uneven development of social-emotional, executive function and academic skills may make it harder to foster the mutuality agency requires.
It is precisely this challenge that makes agency so important for this community. Too often, social and/or communication limitations lead these students to feel excluded or powerless; they may be accustomed to adults making decisions for or about them without asking for input.
According to Wilcocks (2017), “student agency refers to what a student thinks and does in a particular context at a particular time, and is, therefore, fluid, dynamic and subjectively experienced.”
This is good news for educators because it means that agency can be an ongoing collaborative project whose existence can empower 2E, ND and gifted learners.
Co-creating agency
Agency itself is based on “four inter-related concepts… self-efficacy, self-regulation, autonomy, and relatedness” (Wilcocks, 2017).
These are concrete areas where educators can adjust their didactic methods, goals and expectations to enhance student agency. As Talreja (2017) notes, “a well-developed sense of agency can help individuals overcome adversity,” making it especially meaningful for exceptional students.
Future prepped is future proofed
What difference does supporting agency make?
In Student Agency for 2030, the OECD states
When students are agents in their learning, that is, when they play an active role in deciding what and how they will learn, they tend to show greater motivation to learn and are more likely to define objectives for their learning. These students are also more likely to have “learned how to learn” – an invaluable skill that they can and will use throughout their lives.
Given that none of us knows what the world will look like in 2030, it is incumbent upon educators to do what we can now to ensure our students have the tools they need to address its dilemmas and benefit from its circumstances.
Cultivating agency
Because agency is subjective, fluid and context-dependent, we need to focus on concrete strategies to develop it through student-teacher interaction.
Reflecting on my own practice, these are six key strategies:
Explain objectives, not steps
Teachers often lead with what but, to cultivate agency, we need to start with why.
Instead of saying: today you are going to do this task, the conversation needs to begin with, Today, the objective is to learn _________. How shall we go about it?
When we explain to students why they are to undertake a task, it changes their relationship to the learning experience. Instead of doing a thing, they are working towards a goal.
Leading with why something is important also creates an opportunity to assess existing knowledge, which is critical in working with gifted and 2E students, as they are likely to be bored with rote tasks or disengage if under-challenged. Understanding the objective gives them a chance to show what they know, potentially increasing engagement and improving the lesson focus.
Offer options
Once learning objectives are mutually established and understood, students can gain agency by assessing options for achieving those goals.
Sometimes, that might mean different ways of engaging with material, e.g., listening to an audiobook chapter instead of reading, or vice versa. It might also mean exploring methods of demonstrating learning: essay? presentation? speech?
Tapping into gifted and 2E learners’ areas of special interest and skill can promote agency as they integrate new skills into existing knowledge, or develop methods to go further into their chosen realms.
Model skills
“Show don’t tell” is the writing teacher’s dictum; it should be every teacher’s dictum.
Whenever possible, model skills students need to practice. Verbal or written instructions often contain ambiguities or omissions that hinder student progress, especially for ND and 2E learners.
Since I mostly teach online, there are lots of opportunities to model useful things ranging from how to set margins on a document or a date range in Google Scholar, to how to find a rights-free image or run a Boolean search.
Collaborate and co-create
After modelling, the next step is to collaborate and co-create.
Getting started is hard for everyone, including me; working with students can ease them over this initial bump and help them find their flow.
This strategy is great for ND and 2E learners, many of whom may have demand avoidance or rejection sensitive dysphoria as part of their profile, or have been discouraged from trying new things by previous educational experiences.
Starting a task collaboratively reduces pressure, minimizes judgment and creates momentum for independent effort.
For example, a 2E student and I were writing character questions together.
For the first few, I transcribed his questions and answers. Then I suggested that I write the questions, he the answers, which he was happy to do.
If I’d told him “think of questions and type them up,” he would have balked, but this activated his verbal, cognitive and manual learning processes without any friction.
Embrace “mistakes”
Across the board, students are too concerned about correctness. Neurotypical or neurodivergent, they are pressured to deliver the “right” answer and focus on scores. This impedes genuine learning and, in the age of AI, drives cheating.
As a counterbalance, I model embracing “mistakes.” Whether typos, misapprehended word nuances, or lack of factual knowledge, I make it a point to point out my own lapses then walk through amending them.
“You’re here to learn, not to know,” I tell pupils.
Gifted and 2E students are highly sensitive, and may be especially error-averse if giftedness is a core part of their identity. Showing them that mistakes are a normal, manageable, meaningful part of learning can go a long way towards building genuine confidence and encouraging risk taking.
Invite & integrate feedback
Sensitive kids have extra-fine-tuned BS detectors. Well-intentioned educational gambits will fall flat if they feel they are being fed a line. One of the best ways to demonstrate one’s authentic investment in learning is to make feedback a two-way street; any pretence of student agency is just that as long as teachers place themselves above comment or critique.
Students need to learn how to give constructive feedback and given ample opportunity to exercise this skill with educators and peers alike.
Whenever I teach workshops or classes, I invite verbal feedback, and give students written surveys at the end which they can complete anonymously.
This allows for iterative adjustments based on in-session comments, and it empowers students to make substantive remarks based on their overall experience.
Agency is key to life-long learning because it is the cornerstone of self-efficacy, self-confidence and self-direction. To appropriate a line from Joan Didion, to have agency, is “to free ourselves from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves.”