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It would appear that happiness is now the barometer for success in life, and it simply isn’t; it is far more about our lives being meaningful and fulfilling. By giving young people increasing agency over their learning, we are encouraging them to take greater responsibility for their learning This responsibility includes them taking both the upside and the possible downside of that responsibility. Increasing agency and taking responsibility for our self, go hand in hand.
Last century there were less choices and consequently there were less decisions for adults to make. This mimicked the lives in the workplace environment and a society where most people had less agency over their work and their stereotyped relationships, social lives and status. Established societal rules also meant we made fewer decisions back then in many aspects of our lives. On the other hand, most children roamed the streets and byways, jumped on their bikes and spent many hours out of reach of parents, spending time with groups of friends playing imaginative games and sports and making numerous decisions about much of what they did.
In this century, the autonomy we adults have over our lives has changed significantly and that is true also for children, but in opposite directions. As adults, we are experiencing increasing agency over our world, both in our relationships, social and work settings, as well as decisions about our personal lives and financial responsibility. There is a global trend for adults to take greater agency over their employment and many are becoming self-employed. Increasingly, a company or government is no longer responsible for payments to us on a regular basis for the work that we do.
On the other side of the ledger, children have less agency with parents and technology managing their worlds for them. Risk taking has gone from being very high to being very low in a very short time. Parents are increasingly micromanaging their children’s lives, saving them any remote possibility of risk, injury or inconvenience. Children no longer get bored, and they need to be!
The increase in learner agency in school mimics the eventual world they will inhabit when they get older. In the school environment, learners should make mistakes and learn from them in an encouraging environment, so it is important that we do not save them from their mistakes or fix all their mistakes for them. Learners must get bored, be imaginative, fail and know how to deal with that!
One of the key aspects of increasing agency is having the learner take responsibility for their learning, where they can be aware of, and learn about, their mind-set and their capacity to show ‘grit’ (determination). Learners in schools get the opportunity to ‘play’ with taking agency over their world and this is one of the most powerful learning lessons we can possibly gift them.
It is important to note that we must enable learners to take agency over their learning by ensuring that they are competent to be independent, lifelong learners.