Category: Learner Agency

Learner agency as a concept in 21st century education relates tightly into students’ perceptions of their own learning experiences. Agency is the capacity to act, to make decisions about one’s own life and learning.

Support agency to increase engagement!

Learning environment is so much more than just the physical surroundings or LMS and learning materials. It is where the learning process happens and we should invest time to supporting Learner Agency and SEL.

How much control do your students have over their learning environment?

In the era of online teaching and learning we might be tempted to say that students have more control than they used to. And in some ways, this is true – students may have the choice of having their laptop on the kitchen table, or be laying on their bed or in some other location in the house. But, does that really mean that their learning environment has changed?

Learning environment is so much more than just the physical surroundings or LMS and learning materials. It is where the learning process happens and it definitely extends to the social, cultural and material environment, in addition to the interactions between instructors and students [1].  Students’ perception is what matters in this relational triangle of self, content, and environment, because the perception defines their motivation and choices for participating and engaging in learning.  EdSurge has a great article about this: The key to Better Student Engagement Is Letting Them Show You How They Learn. Please read it!

If students are just focusing on earning a grade, or going through the motions of complying with their learning tasks, there is not much agency related to their learning experience. No need for metacognition, either. Enhancing the learning environment – which in this case means providing choices and acknowledging existing competencies and individual differences – can make a huge difference by helping students to choose to move from mere compliance towards learning engagement. At the same time, it may shift students’ perception of their agency from detachment towards ownership of their learning. Isn’t this exactly what we want for every student?

Learner agency and engagement are deeply intertwined.  Engagement in one’s own learning process is profoundly different from mere participation in classroom activities – whether online or in physical classroom[2]. Often heard claim is that students must participate in order to engage in learning, but I think we may have to challenge this. The reason is that the student may already know the content and possess the competency this particular lesson is about. Participation may enhance this competency and provide more information about the topic, but what this particular student really needs, is to be challenged in their own level of competence. This is why we do differentiated instruction, right?

The question then is: how do we know what each individual student needs? This is where agency and empowerment are so very important! We must ask students to tell us what they need. Helping students to identify and communicate their needs is certainly a part of educating them to be productive members of a society.

When students have strong learner agency, they often are aware of their metacogitive skills and will tell you what they need. This happens because they are intrinsically interested in learning for life and have very strong ownership over their learning process. They learn everywhere and are actively trying to understand how to use what they learn in different contexts. (In my research I called this unbound and ubiquitous learning.)

When students exhibit less agency, they are not interested in engaging in their own learning process, and just try to go through the motions and complete the expected activities. Enhancing the learning environment to meet the needs of these students is crucially important! Otherwise, they will remain detached from deeper learning, and may never feel the thrill of intrinsic interest to learn something. The emphasis remains on reproducing information, passing tests, earning graders and feeling that their learning is seriously missing real-life connections. All my research participants discussed this detachment, and it is very important to remember that the exhibited engagement does NOT define learner agency, because it is situational and contextual.

Even as adults, our learner agency shifts based on the expectations we are facing. Some trainings exist solely for compliance – I am thinking safety trainings, IRBs, policies and procedures. We are not going to exhibit ubiquitous agency in those trainings, as we just need to get through the task. Therefore, getting through the motions is enough for engagement in situations where only low-level information is shared.

Engagement choices are about self-determination and our own learning process. In externally regulated learning environmnet there is very little or no use for self-determination [3]. So, we cannot just assume that we know when students are engaged. Nor can we trust assessments or evaluations, because they are just snapshots in time and the student may have learned very much after that test. We just won’t know about students’ engagement levels unless we ask. Student self-assessment are a great tool to start these discussions about metacognition, and we definitely must support students’ self-reflection of their learning.

As the subject matter experts of the learning content, we should be suggesting suitable learning strategies for our students to help build their metacognition. We understand the concept hierarchies in the subject our students are learning, and while it makes perfect sense to us how things relate, we just have to ask questions to figure out what still may be unclear to students. And then help students to move forward from that point.

After working for years with teachers pursuing their M.Ed. degrees, I am convinced that even adult learning still happens in interactions. From a developmental viewpoint it is obvious that the younger the student, the more interactions are needed to support learning. Fortunately we have a plethora of resources to support all students’ learning process and agency in all levels of education. Social- emotional learning (SEL) provides great tools. CASEL framework has identified 5 areas in SEL:

  • SEL competencies:
    • self-awareness
    • self-management
    • social awareness
    • relationship skills
    • responsible decision making

Embedding the SEL competencies into our everyday discussions with students helps us to address the individual learning process and agency. This may be a learning opportunity for faculty, but the CASEL framewords makes it very clear and straighfroward.

  • Discussions for SEL competencies includes the following (and more):
    • Supporting students’ self-awareness means that we address their metacognition, which includes the thoughts, beliefs, emotions and motivations regarding the learning experiences students have.
    • Supporting students’ self-management means that we help students to take initiative and cope with their emotions and thoughts, and we also provide guidance for stressful situations.
    • Supporting students’ social awareness means that we model empathy and compassion, recognize (and verbalize) situational demands and opportunities, and help all students to take perspective.
    • Supporting students’ relationship skills means that we emphasize cooperation, communication and proactively teach students to seek help and offer help to others.
    • Supporting students’ responsible decision making means that we teach students how to make good decisions, first with smaller things and about personal behaviors and social interactions, but also increasingly more complex decisions.

All the five SEL elements are organically present in our lives, in our societies. Formal education shouldn’t be an exception of this. Choosing to teach with the focus of supporting students’ learning process also helps us empower our students to learn more on their own. Investing time to these two things that may seem auxilliary in formal education – learner agency and SEL – increases students’ metacognition which then strengthens learner engagement and learning success.

References:

[1] Just as a reminder: Nina’s Notes refers to learning process as defined by Illeris: “an external interaction process between the learner and his or her social, cultural or material environment, and an internal psychological process of acquisition and elaboration” (Illeris, 2003, p. 298)

Illeris, K. (2003). Toward a contemporary and comprehensive theory of learning. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 22(4), 396-406. doi:10.1080/0260137032000094814

[2] Emirbayer, M., & Mische, A. (1998). What is agency? American journal of sociology, 103(4),
962-1023. Retrieved from: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/231294.

Biesta, G., & Tedder, M. (2007). Agency and learning in the lifecourse: Towards an ecological
perspective. Studies in the Education of Adults, 39(2), 132-149.

[3] Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2008). Self-determination theory: A macro-theory of human motivation, development, and health. Canadian Psychology, 49(3), 182-185. Doi: 10.1037/a0012801

Smith, N.C. (2017). Students’ perceptions of learner agency: A phenomenographic inquiry into the lived learning experiences of high school students. (Doctoral Dissertation).  Northeastern Repository

Choices are important for deep learning

While doing my research about learner agency, I interviewed high school seniors about their learning experiences. Students’ common perception regarding learner agency was that they do not have enough choices to engage in their learning. Also my M.Ed. students keep telling me experiencing the same phenomenon during their undergrad studies: very few choices being available. This makes no sense! Research shows the benefits of extending autonomy and the differences between instrumental and intrinsic motivation to engage in learning [1].  So why don’t we offer more choices for students?

Because I support teachers and faculty in their studies of instructional design, I have wondered this question for quite long time. I also and believe there are many answers to this question.

The first answer is frightening: we teach the way we were taught. There is a great chance for behaviorism being the predominant learning theory used in that instruction, and it is often combined with student engagement that focuses on passing instead of learning.

Yet, we have decades of educational research about learner autonomy and benefits of learner- and learning-centered instructional practices being superior to operant conditioning and rote memorization [2]. Having choices allows students to perceive that they have control over their own learning – which makes the work they put into learning and the effort to understand complex concepts to feel a little less a requirement, and thus more interesting. Students’ perceptions matter! Kahu (2013) states this clearly “Engagement is fundamentally situational – it arises from the interplay if context and individual” (p. 736).  How to engage is a choice every student makes during every lecture or class. Offering choices for engagement and learning is a great way to build learner autonomy. Self-determination and intrinsic motivation are related to better learning, performance, and well-being [4]. Especially adult students thrive in transformative learning environments, where they can engage in perspective transformation.

The other possibility for choices missing from instructional strategies is that providing choices can be intimidating for faculty:  it changes the power structure in the classroom, and shifts responsibility from teaching to learning. In instructional models based on transmission of information (lectures, MOOCs) and in accountability-based educational models it may be easier to vest the power to instructors instead of students. Also, it is often easier to measure that instruction has happened, instead of measuring learning that has occurred – especially as many assessments and evaluations focus on having a snapshot of students’ current knowledge across the group or cohort, instead of the increase of individual knowledge. Yet, even in such educational environment it is possible to embed choices into instructional practices to support students’ interest in their own learning process. In the information era, the supportive learning environment provides students with additional choices for finding information that help them to enjoy their learning engagement and learn more – even beyond the scope of the syllabus.

Another thought I had about the lack of choices in learning environments is the mismatch between developmental/learning theories and instructional approaches. The theory of stage-environment fit [5] describes the conflict between increased need for learner autonomy (during adolescence) and a rigid learning environment. Equally true is the incompatibility between adult development [6] and learning environments that limit choices and self-regulation. Both problems stem from viewing students as a group instead of individuals, and applying one-size-fits-all approach in instruction. Instruction becomes a transaction. However, the learning context, the environment – whether virtual or classroom – is where learning happens, and where the appropriate learning theories must be applied to support students’ engagement. If instruction is a simple transaction we might as well replace faculty with artificial intelligence. I think we have a misconception of adult students having no need for interactions with faculty. This is seldom true. Especially in transformative learning experiences the dialogue with faculty is crucially important, because of the possibility of life-changing impact of higher education [7].

Adult learning theories acknowledge the importance of self-determination for mature students, but maybe the distinction between self-directed (SDL) and self-regulated (SRL) learning is not always clear for faculty, hence causing hesitation to support learner autonomy. Generally SDL is seen to be the broader concept, where learners are choosing what and how they learn, while SRL is more often used in formal education, where curricula or syllabi are given, but students’ self-regulation is supported by instructors [8]. The easiest way I have found to use SRL in higher education, is to embed the cycle of planning, performance monitoring and self-assessment practices into course design, and provide a repository of planning, learning and reflection tools for students to use both independently and attached in  assignments. Teaching the learning skills essential to mastering the discipline-specific content is embedded to the instruction of the content, instead of assuming that students have learned those skills prior to the class. While some students may have learned the skills, others might not, which presents a further requirement for providing choices: it should not be mandatory to spend time regurgitating what you already know. It doesn’t support deep learning.

Having choices is the prerequisite for ownership.

Essentially, providing choices in a class creates a differentiated learning environment where every student can be challenged on the level of their need and comfort. Challenging individual students appropriately can be done by including them into decisions of what and how they learn, and how this learning is measured. I am not advocating for having no boundaries, quite the opposite. Excellent learning environment defines the end goals for learning and means for demonstrating competency. Often this is done with including rubrics and descriptions of expected skill of knowledge level to syllabus and discussing them openly during instruction. It is crucially important for the faculty to provide choices for readings, assignments, and assessments. Then students can make informed choice about their own learning and afterward reflect upon their own learning and growth as a result of the activity they completed (this is where SRL cycles are extremely valuable)[9].  But, the assessment and evaluation practices must be non-punitive to align with this type of instruction. We cannot punish students harshly for the mistakes they make in their learning, because that will stop the interest to engage in learning process.

Providing choices, supporting SRL, and including students in their learning process strengthen learner agency and ownership. Encouraging and empowering students to learn more on their own can create trajectories where classroom learning is extended to students’ lives outside of the formal education becoming ubiquitous and unbound [10]. Being interested in one’s own learning is crucially important when the goal of instruction lies in deeper learning, in higher order thinking, and becoming a subject matter expert in one’s own field.

Isn’t this exactly what we want as faculty?

 

 

Here is one-page PDF about SRL for online learners. Here is a PDF presentation about SRL in mentoring

References:

[1] Patall, E. A., Cooper, H., & Robinson, J. C. (2008). The effects of choice on intrinsic motivation and related outcomes: a meta-analysis of research findings. Psychological bulletin, 134(2), 270.

Murayama K, Matsumoto M, Izuma K, Matsumoto K. 2010. Neural basis of the undermining effect of monetary reward on intrinsic motivation. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 107:20911–16.

Bryson, C., & Hand, L. (2007). The role of engagement in inspiring teaching and learning. Innovations in education and teaching international, 44(4), 349-362.

[2] Corley, M.A. (2012) TEAL Center Fact Sheet “Student-centered learning.” Just Write! Guide 23. U.S. Department of Education, Office of Vocational and Adult Education. Washington, DC. http://www.capitalnorthraen.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/TEAL_JustWriteGuide.pdf#page=29

[3] Kahu, E. R. (2013). Framing student engagement in higher education. Studies in higher education, 38(5), 758-773.

[4] Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The” what” and” why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological inquiry, 11(4), 227-268.

[5] Eccles, J. S., Midgley, C., Wigfield, A., Buchanan, C. M., Reuman, D., Flanagan, C., & Mac Iver, D. (1993). Development during adolescence: The impact of stage-environment fit on young adolescents’ experiences in schools and in families. American psychologist, 48(2), 90.  and  Bollmer, J., Cronin, R., Brauen, M., Howell, B., Fletcher, P., & Gonin, R. (2016). stage–environment fit theory. AZ of Transitions, 160.

[6] Kegan, R. (2018). What “form” transforms?: A constructive-developmental approach to transformative learning. In Contemporary theories of learning (pp. 29-45). Routledge. An overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_developmental_framework

[7] Hoggan, C. D. (2016). Transformative learning as a metatheory: Definition, criteria, and typology. Adult education quarterly, 66(1), 57-75.

[8] Saks, K., & Leijen, Ä. (2014). Distinguishing self-directed and self-regulated learning and measuring them in the e-learning context. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 112, 190-198.

[9] Zimmerman, B. J. (2000). Attaining self-regulated learning: a social-cognitive
perspective, in M. Boekaerts, P. Pintrich, and M. Zeidner (Eds.) Handbook of Self-regulation (pp. 13–39). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

[10] Smith, N.C. (2017). Students’ perceptions of learner agency: A phenomenographic inquiry into the lived learning experiences of high school students. (Doctoral Dissertation).

3C Approach for Instruction

Educational change is occurring all over the world. Some educators are intrinsically interested in a paradigm shift to challenge the traditional views of learning. Others are invited to take part in professional development and collaborate within their institutions to make the change to happen (Butler, Schnellert & MacNeil, 2015). And some are trying to hang on to all the changes presented to their work environment.

At best the focus in education is moving towards supporting students’ individual  learning processes,  rather than emphasizing teaching. The importance of information delivery is just a tiny part of the whole teaching-learning interaction cycle (the other parts are feedback, assessment and transfer; sometimes also evaluation for external stakeholders). Receiving information to be learned is just the beginning of the learning process!

Teaching and learning are two separate processes. We shouldn’t try to discuss them as one process, but acknowledge the interaction between the two. In order to improve instruction, we need to know how learning happens. In other words, rather than assuming that it is the professor’s or teacher’s job to impart wisdom to students who will somehow magically absorb it, the focus is in the instructor’s ability to guide the students into building a knowledge base of their own.  Working with students’ need to know makes learning and teaching much more meaningful.

An important part of the 21st century teaching is asking non-googlable questions and emphasizing applications of learning over reproducing given answers. Students need to learn HOW to think instead of being taught WHAT to think. There is more information (and misinformation) available than ever before in the history of humankind and students need to be prepared to find the important information they need. This supports students’ own interests and curiosity, too. Understanding how students think, how to motivate them, and the importance of social context has been recognized by American Psychological Association (APA, 2015).

3C Approach is built on learner-centered and learning-centered educational practice, hence belonging to the humanist-constructivist paradigm, where knowledge construction is considered to be personal, situational, and contextual.

C1 – Cognitive approach makes teaching and learning easy and effective. Viewing learning as a student-centered and dynamic process where learners are active participants, it strives to understand the reasons behind behavioral patterns. Instruction focuses on application and transfer of the learning, supporting and building students’ higher order thinking skills. Learning strategies and metacognitive skills are discussed frequently, because this helps students to understand how to best support their own learning and what is needed for becoming successful in learning and life. Instructors provide graphic organizers and models, and discuss the hierarchy of the concepts in the learning material to support the transfer.

C2 – Constructive practice emphasizes the learning process and students’ need to construct their own understanding. Delivered or transmitted knowledge does not have the same emotional and intellectual value. New learning depends on prior understanding and is interpreted in the context of current understanding, not first as isolated information that is later related to existing knowledge. Constructive learning helps students to understand their own learning process and self-regulate and co-regulate their learning in the classroom and beyond. Regular feedback, self-reflection and joint reflection are important! Teachers individualize their practice and help students to connect new learning to their existing personal knowledge. Self-assessments are a regular practice.

C3 – Cooperative learning is about providing a collaborative environment that supports the learning process. This environment must reflect the relational nature of learning. Therefore, the definition of learning used in 3C-approach follows the words of Illeris, (2003): “an external interaction process between the learner and his or her social, cultural or material environment, and an internal psychological process of acquisition and elaboration” (p. 298).  Cooperative learning environment is inclusive, and designed to make learning enjoyable by providing a variety of different activities. Students learn from each other and engage in collaborative meaning-making. Every student has their own strengths and areas to grow, and growth mindset is openly discussed in the class.

3C practices make instruction easier while also empowering students to move towards autonomous, self-regulated learning, because they focus more on learning than on teaching.

More information about 3Cs can be found at ninacsmith.com and at my Notes.

 

American Psychological Association, Coalition for Psychology in Schools and Education. (2015). Top 20 principles from psychology for preK–12 teaching and learning.

Butler, D. L., Schnellert, L., & MacNeil, K. (2015). Collaborative inquiry and distributed agency in educational change: A case study of a multi-level community of inquiry. Journal of Educational Change, 16(1), 1-26.

Illeris, K. (2003). Toward a contemporary and comprehensive theory of learning. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 22(4), 396-406. doi:10.1080/0260137032000094814

Deep Learning

Deep and deeper learning are crucially important concepts in contemporary education. The fact is that what is taught is not necessarily learned. With deep learning approach students are likely to learn more.

Learning is a fundamental, subjective phenomenon, and an important part of being a human.  Once crucial part of 21st Century education is distinguishing learning experiences from the experience of being taught. In instructional situations, deep learning appears to be closely entwined with learner- and learning-centered teaching approaches, emphasizing the lifelong learning process.

I have been focusing on deep learning during my whole career, ever since I read about the original research about deep and surface learning (Marton & Säljö, 1976), which finally led me to do my doctoral research (2017) about learner agency.

In general, agency is the capacity to act, to make decisions about one’s own life, within the structure of our environment. In education, learner agency relates tightly into students’ perceptions of their own learning experiences. Within the context of  21st century education, learner agency means the need to change the structure of learning enviroments, so that students can make choices about their own learning. Supporting student’s individual learning processes also promotes deep learning.

Overemphasizing learning goals and targets instruction may overlook the importance of the individual learning process, especially when focusing the attention on gradable projects and tests. In my own experience, excessive goal orientation seems to be a problem in American education, when the evaluation focuses on achieving the standard.

With instructional approaches focusing on memorizing information in the tests, the deep learning strategies remain unused. However, in today’s flood of information, one of the key roles of a teacher is to guide the students to gather meaningful information, by helping the student to structure their experiences and build their own understanding of basic concepts.

Deep learning requires ownership and individual engagement with the content. Here is a succinct definition for deep and surface level learning strategies: “the basic processing operations that describe how students react to and interact with the learning material and with people present in the learning environment in order to enhance domain-specific knowledge and skills” (Boekaerts, 2016, p. 81).

Deep learning approach aligns with learner agency, because both are focusing on those transformative learning experiences that contribute to students’ learning for life, and constructing their own understanding of the world.

In all levels of education deep learning can be supported by instructional approaches that emphasize choice, learning ownership, knowledge construction, and making connections to one’s own experiences.

Suomenkielinen versio – This same post in Finnish – on page Suomeksi

Boekaerts, M. (2016). Engagement as an inherent aspect of the learning process. Learning and Instruction, 43, 76-83.

Marton, F., & Säljö, R. (1976). On Qualitative Differences in Learning: I—Outcome and process*. British journal of educational psychology, 46(1), 4-11.