The Framework for Building Agency
cannot grant agency to students. So, how do educators create the conditions to make student agency a reality in schools? While it may be simpler to separate information into litanies of discrete facts and place them into silos for safe storage, teachers need to connect information across disciplines to build knowledge and engage the whole learner. Jones and Kahn (2017) continued their argument for the structure of learning:
Educators cannot teach content separate from the act of processing the information to build understanding. Students cannot learn social-emotional skills detached from thinking. Students need to actively think with others and pay attention to how they feel and how their actions make others feel. This reflection needs to take place while they are engaged in a problem with desirable difficulty. Distinct courses or separate curricula for each topic or skill students should know simply pile more on top of what teachers already have difficulties covering in the time available. Learning is a process that, if practiced, will get stronger. The learner can practice effectively by critically analyzing actions he or she has chosen, which prompts reflection (Ericsson & Pool, 2016). This analysis allows the learner to build better and stronger learning processes to then use them to better predict future outcomes. Reflecting on decisions and how those decisions helped learners reach their goals is a crucial component to what educators do too. Reflection and hindsight give outcomes context. If practice—the process of learning—is what enhances the mind, how do educators balance that with the need to eventually arrive at the right answer? That is the crucial question behind all educational endeavors. If teachers only test students for the correct answers at the end of the learning process, the students do not receive feedback on the process they used
to reach right answers, and they do not adjust their thinking as a result of feedback on incorrect responses. This dichotomous, right-or-wrong assessment removes opportunities to build stronger and more accurate conceptual understanding. As a beginning teacher, I would return unit tests and mark learners’ incorrect responses. I would then move on to new learning. If the information was needed in future study, I was surprised when students still did not know it. I wrongly assumed students would go back and see why the answer they put was wrong, even though I certainly did not take this step as a student. However, when I started requiring the students to review their incorrect answers, explain why they were wrong, and examine what the correct answers were, more of them had the knowledge needed in subsequent units. Providing midcourse opportunities for students to reflect and use feedback to adjust their actions improves their mental models and schemas (the patterns of thought or behavior that organize information), thereby enhancing their ability to think. Roger Schank (2011), a longtime professor turned college redesign advocate, argued that schools need to focus on cognitive abilities and not scholarly subjects. Certainly, the ability to solve complex problems is better preparation for life and work than a memorized list of facts. Learners need practice diagnosing problems and applying knowledge gained through research, discussion, and experimentation to generate possible solutions. Schank posited that departments of motor vehicles are better at teaching than schools because they use a test of applied knowledge. Having future drivers learn by actually doing the act of driving opens the door for learners to reflect on what they did, how well they did, and also why they did it. Those reflective questions will be the cornerstones of a school centered on developing cognitive abilities. Schank (2011) went on to say: When we look at people who are knowledgeable and confuse that with people who can think well, we totally miss the point about education. Education ought not be focused on imparting facts any more than athletic training ought to be focused on weightlifting. You learn to hit a ball by hitting one, and you learn to think clearly by thinking. (p. 81)
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Decades of research in human development, cognitive and behavioral neuroscience, and educational practice and policy, as well as other fields, have illuminated that major domains of human development— social, emotional, cognitive, linguistic, academic—are deeply intertwined in the brain and in behavior. All are central to learning. (p. 4)
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