From Marshall Memo:
1. Classroom Practices That Boost – and Dampen – Student
Agency
In this
paper from Harvard’s Achievement Gap Initiative, Ronald Ferguson, Sarah
Phillips, Jacob Rowley, and Jocelyn Friedlander report on their study of the
ways in which grade 6-9 teachers in 490 schools influenced their students’
non-cognitive skills. The central variable that Ferguson and his colleagues
measured was students’ agency. This, they write, “is the capacity and
propensity to take purposeful initiative – the opposite of helplessness. Young
people with high levels of agency do not respond passively to their
circumstances; they tend to seek meaning and act with purpose to achieve the
conditions they desire in their own and others’ lives. The development of
agency may be as important an outcome of schooling as the skills we measure
with standardized testing.”
The
researchers used data from Tripod surveys of students’ perceptions of their
teachers [see Marshall Memo 461] to examine how Ferguson’s “Seven C” components
of instruction (caring, conferring, captivating, clarifying, consolidating,
challenging, and managing the classroom) influenced agency, which manifested
itself in the following ways:
- Punctuality
– The student tries hard to arrive to class on time.
- Good
conduct – The student is cooperative, respectful, and on task.
- Effort –
The student pushes him- or herself to do the best quality work.
- Help-seeking
– The student is not shy about asking for help when needed.
- Conscientiousness
– The student is developing a commitment to produce quality work.
- Happiness
– The student regards the classroom as a happy place to be.
- Anger –
The student experiences this in class, which may boost or dampen agency.
- Mastery
orientation – The student is committed to mastering lessons in the class.
- Sense of
efficacy – The student believes he or she can be successful in the class.
- Satisfaction
– The student is satisfied with what he or she has achieved in the class
- Growth
mindset – The student is learning to believe that he or she can get smarter.
- Future
orientation – The student is becoming more focused on future aspirations (e.g.,
college).
The researchers also identified a number of disengagement
behaviors – the opposite of agency: faking effort, generally not trying, giving
up if the work is too hard, and avoiding help.
What did the data reveal? Ferguson and his colleagues found
that some teaching behaviors were agency boosters and others were agency
dampers, indicating the delicate balance teachers must maintain between what
they ask of students (academic and behavioral press) and what they give
students (social and academic support).
The details:
• Agency boosters – Requiring rigor came through strongly in
the study – asking students to think more rigorously by striving to understand
concepts, not simply memorize facts, or to explain their reasoning. This boosts
mastery orientation, increases effort, growth mindset, conscientiousness, and
future aspirations – but sometimes diminishes students’ happiness in class,
feelings of efficacy, and satisfaction with what they’ve achieved. “These
slightly dampened emotions in the short term,” say the researchers, “seem small
prices to pay for the motivational, mindset, and behavioral payoffs we predict
to result from requiring rigorous thinking. Combinations of teaching practices
– for example, appropriately differentiated assignments, lucid explanations of
new material, and curricular supports to accompany demands for rigor – seem quite
relevant in this context.”
• Agency dampers – Caring may sometimes entail coddling: “in
an effort to be emotionally supportive,” say the authors, “some teachers may be
especially accommodating and this may depress student conduct as well as
academic persistence.” Conferring can sometimes lack a clear purpose, which can
undermine student effort and reduce time on task. Clearing up confusion can
occur too automatically, with teachers doing the work for students and denying
them the incentive and opportunity to diagnose and correct their own
misunderstandings, which diminishes effort and conscientiousness.
•
Future-orientation boosters – Caring and captivating are the teaching
components most closely associated with college aspirations, the researchers
found.
•
Achievement boosters – Challenge and classroom management are the components
correlated with students doing well on standardized tests, as the Measures of
Effective Teaching study found.
“The point
is not that there is a trade-off between annual learning gains and higher
aspirations,” say Ferguson and colleagues. “Instead, the point is that the most
important agency boosters for each are different. A balanced approach to
instructional improvement will prioritize care and captivate to bolster
aspirations, and challenge and classroom management to strengthen the skills
that standardized tests measure. Certainly, without the skills that tests
measure, college aspirations might be futile. But in turn, without college aspirations,
the payoffs to those skills may be limited.”
Here is their distillation of ten classroom practices that
develop agency:
- Care –
Be attentive and sensitive, but avoid codding students in ways that hold them
to lower standards of effort and performance.
- Confer –
Encourage and respect students’ perspectives and honor student voice, but do so
while remaining focused on instructional goals – and don’t waste class time
with idle chatter.
- Captivate
– Make lessons stimulating and relevant while knowing that some students may
hide their interest.
- Clarify
with lucid explanations – Strive to develop clearer explanations, including how
the skills and knowledge you teach are useful in the exercise of effective
agency in real life – especially for the material students find most difficult.
- Clarify
by clearing up confusion – Take regular steps to detect and respond to
confusion in class, but do so in ways that share responsibility with students.
- Clarify
with instructive feedback – Give instructive feedback in ways that provide
scaffolding for students to solve their own problems.
- Consolidate
– Regularly summarize lessons to help consolidate learning.
- Challenge
by requiring rigor – Press students to think deeply instead of superficially
about what they are learning. Anticipate some resistance from students who
might prefer a less-stressful approach – but be tenacious.
- Challenge
by requiring persistence – Consistently require students to keep trying and
searching for ways to succeed even when work is difficult.
- Classroom
management – Achieve respectful, orderly, and on-task student behavior by using
clarity, captivation, and challenge instead of coercion.
“The Influence of Teaching: Beyond Standardized Test Scores:
Engagement, Mindsets, and Agency – A Study of 16,000 Sixth Through Ninth-Grade
Classrooms” by Ronald Ferguson with Sarah Phillips, Jacob Rowley, and Jocelyn
Friedlander, a paper from The Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard University,
Oct. 2015, http://www.agi.harvard.edu/publications.php
Back to page one
