This professional learning experience provides an opportunity for leaders to develop coherence and establish the network of support necessary to deepen existing leadership practices. In Leading for Agency, school leaders try on new roles that enhance the learning culture, establish distributed leadership, and build trust – the leadership practices that enliven agency, identity, equity and inclusion.
Course Goals
Leaders will understand and develop shared agreements on:
- Key conditions and instructional practices that support student metacognition, self-regulation, motivation, and ownership of learning;
- Leadership and school-level practices that promote, and those that hinder, shifts in the teacher and student roles as learners;
- How learner agency develops over time, including what changes for students as they move from a compliant learning stance, to being engaged in learning, to demonstrating student agency, and
- Strategies for leveraging systems-level change, spread and scale of new models for student learning.
Through Leading for Agency, leaders will learn strategies to observe classrooms for evidence of student and teacher self-regulation skills that are necessary for equity. Leaders will explore new practices to deepen the culture of learning in classrooms and schools to strengthen student perseverance and enhance students’ academic ownership, and how to design and support student demonstrations of learning that showcase secondary students’ readiness for college and careers.
Together, leaders will:
- Explore how to best support instructional and building-level changes to advance equity;
- Understand the design of professional learning experiences that support teacher agency, and those that hinder teacher and student agency;
- Develop new feedback models;
- Support scaling formative assessment practices; and
- Manage adaptive change and scaling.
Sessions include a mix of new content, application activities, student and teacher vignettes, rubrics, and analysis tools. The course models key practices that deepen adult learning, such as effective feedback and honoring emerging knowledge.
A Tailored Approach
The WestEd team works in partnership with school and district leaders to design a unique and tailored course that reflects the context and priorities of clients. Course content builds on learning that has been underway. This might include ways to:
- Explore and understand the landscape for student agency at their site(s);
- Explore ways to embed and integrate practices that support learner agency within other site-based initiatives (for example, student-led conferences, culturally responsive teaching, or graduate profiles); and/or
- Identify and address barriers that hinder an effective learning culture and allow all teachers to experience agency in their own learning practices.
The press for new learning is grounded in equity goals, and the belief that new conditions and new ways of working are required to meet the course goals. Leading for Agency is an online course designed to be an embedded professional learning throughout the school year, most often taking place every other week through the school year.
What deepened for me is we talk a lot about teachers looking at and using and responding to interpreting and responding to evidence of learning. But what’s really become clear for me is how important it is for students to be able to do that as well. Where are students noticing and interpreting and responding to their own evidence of learning and that of their peers?
Tulsa Public Schools Leader
Contact Us
To learn more, contact Nancy Gerzon at [email protected] or 603.491.7684