Empower: What Happens When Student Own Their Learning

by John Spencer

Obedient—complying or willing to comply with orders or requests; submissive to another’s will.

Is this what we really want from our students?

Do we want to develop generations of students that will challenge conventional ideas and think for themselves—...

Compliant—inclined to agree with others or obey rules, especially to an excessive degree; acquiescent.

Compliance is not a bad word, but it should not be our end goal in education.

My belief is that we need to move beyond compliance, past engagement, and on to empowerment.

If our students are truly compliant when they walk out of schools, they will always need someone else’s rules to follow. To develop the “leaders of tomorrow,” we need to develop them as leaders today.

Empowering students teaches them to have their own voice and follow their own direction, but if they are going to be successful, they will need to truly have the discipline

“Empowerment” and “hard work” are not mutually exclusive;

Helping students find their own paths—not the ones we set out for them—has always been the focus in education,

this is about shifting our mindset, which will ultimately lead to students not only believing they can change the world, but doing it because of school.

Are we trying to develop students to fit into our world, or are we hoping students feel they have the power to create a better world both now and in the future?2

Your legacy as an educator is always determined by what your students do. You change the world by empowering your students to do the same.

What are we doing with all of this time? More importantly, what are our students doing?

The question is, what are our students doing during these classes?

Why do we rarely give students choice in what they learn, how they learn, when they learn, and why they learn?

School doesn’t have to look like this, because the world and natural learning doesn’t look like this.

Phil Schlechty, who founded the Center for Engagement, describes engagement as the merging of two key factors: high attention and high commitment.6

When students are engaged, they are attentive to our chosen content and objectives.

When we shift from preparing students for what’s next, to helping them prepare for anything, a world of possibilities open up in their learning.

When students are making, designing, creating, and evaluating, they are going way past what tests cover.

Standards are the architect’s blueprint, and you, the teacher, are still the builder and designer. When you include students in the learning design process, the possibilities are endless of what the architect’s blueprint will actually look like in real life.

please read this book as a challenge to take action and to chase that moonshot idea of student choice.

This is for the teachers who refuse to teach the way they were taught just because that’s how it’s always been done.

Empowered learners are the future of our world, and how they spend their fourteen thousand hours will determine not only their future but the future of generations to come.

I became a different person—not because of the program or even the process but because of a teacher who saw something in me that I couldn’t see in myself.

When we give students choice, allow for inquiry, and foster creativity, we see the amazing things they can do.

As teachers, we have to embrace the notion that technology can open up a world of learning opportunities and then give our students the chance to own those opportunities.

Empowered learning brings us closer together through communication tools, real-time collaboration, and sharing meaningful and relevant work that brings the learning to life.

Stories have passed the test of time, and continue to enlighten and motivate people every day to learn and grow.

we can use technology to transform our storytelling and how we learn.

our job as teachers is to help students prepare themselves for anything.

we are the guides, and our students are the heroes of the story.

Teachers can be guides who empower learners because we can be free of always having to be the content experts (especially as content continually changes).

Knowing how to learn is a skill we can share with our students to help them learn anything.

“The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

This type of environment is where we can get new information and analyze it, apply it, and use it to create or evaluate.

Empowered environments allow our connections and impact to move beyond the classroom walls and continue to be powerful, long after our students are out of sight.

We must step aside as the gatekeepers and instead move next to our learners to take the journey together.