Fostering Student Agency: Activities That Empower Learning III

5th Grade Takes Action. ILG School, Prishtina, Kosovo. A group of students and friends whom I miss every day

This is the last post in the series about activities and habits to foster agency in the classroom.

Pre-assessment - Reflection

Both are part of the same goal: helping children understand the learning process, become aware of their learning, and recognize what the unit has meant for them. More specifically, they need to understand how school impacts and changes them and how certain activities have helped them develop their skills. This topic could easily warrant a separate post, so I won’t go too deep into how I do it or its importance here.

In summary, I give my students a pre-assessment at the beginning of each unit. It’s essential to explain what this process entails and why we do it, so we avoid the classic question: "Does this assessment count toward my final grade?" No, it doesn’t. Pre-assessments are a key tool for the teacher as they help us organize the unit and its objectives, but they are also useful for students, especially during reflection.

At the end of each unit, I send my students a Google Survey with questions ranging from “What was your favorite activity?” to more complex ones like “What tools do you use to research something you don’t know?” (referring to research skills). A crucial question related to the pre-assessment is: “Reflect on your answers in the pre-assessment: 'I used to think that… but now I think that…' or 'Is there something you found difficult at first but now find easier?'” These types of questions are invaluable for helping children understand their learning process, which in turn fosters their agency.

Actions

Student actions are, for me, a fundamental pillar of my 5th-grade curriculum. I guide my students to take action in each unit. As I mentioned in previous posts, I do this progressively since not all children have attended IB schools or participated in such specific activities within the PYP curriculum.

In the first unit, the action is teacher-driven, where I propose the action and help them organize it so that they have a reference for future units. In the second and third units, they propose the action, and I guide them through the process—it becomes student-driven. By the fourth and fifth units, I delegate the entire process, and I always tell them: "If something doesn’t go well, that’s okay. Next time, you’ll do better." It’s essential to let them plan and also make mistakes.

I remember a student asking me what would happen if she didn’t have time to finish her action. I responded, "That’s okay. What I want is for you to learn and reflect on why you didn’t have time and what you would change for next time."

I could write an entire post on how to do student-driven actions, but here I’ll focus on explaining why they should be part of any unit and how they foster student agency.

These actions are connected to real life. That’s where we need to direct our efforts as teachers. We must let children be part of and drivers of change. We need to educate them for life, so they can act. Classrooms are full of children who are waiting for someone to encourage them to act and open doors for them.

However, we make the mistake of thinking that children should act because they’ll be the adults of the future. But that’s not the case. They are inhabitants of the present, and as such, we must give them the option to voice their opinions and act now. I firmly believe that children can transform society, not just in the future but in the present.

It is possible to reverse the direction of education. Children can teach us many things. They taught me when my students created a beauty salon club, an art club, and a football card club to raise money and adopt two elephants in a sanctuary in Kenya. Or when Mia and Lia got involved to make recess more inclusive, offering various activities beyond football. Or when Ben got the Prishtina city council to install recycling bins in his neighborhood park. Or when Liv and Vilhelm sent their project on sustainable shelters for climate disasters to an NGO in India.

Field Trips

In each unit, I try to organize a field trip, either as a provocation for the unit or for reflection. The one I enjoyed the most was at ILG School, where we visited the Bear Sanctuary and spent a night there learning about the bears and the staff’s work for our Sharing the Planet unit. Field trips are incredibly important for students to learn the value of learning outside the classroom and the value of experiences, which sometimes have a greater impact on them than any lesson. I remember when Luna told me, "Mr. Garcia, this year I’ve been on more field trips than ever, we’ve had seven or eight, and we also learn."

Bibliography

At the beginning of each unit, after creating our PYP board and addressing the lines of inquiry, I take my students to the library with clear instructions: find useful sources for the unit, reflect on which books could be interesting for future activities, and projects, and note them in their personal bibliography. Additionally, I ask them to find websites and YouTube videos with the same purpose to create a broad and varied bibliography.

Children must make these connections at the beginning of the unit, as our minds work through association, not linearly. It also helps them become familiar with the topic and start making connections from the beginning. I always tell them to take it seriously as it will save them a lot of work in their future research.

This is the last post in this series of three on how to foster student agency. Watching students develop their agency throughout the year is one of the things that makes me love and enjoy this profession every day.