Empower: What Happens When Student Own Their Learning

by John Spencer

In an empowered classroom, this involves allowing students to geek out on their favorite subjects and topics. It involves tapping into their interests rather than trying to make things interesting for them.

You begin to appreciate the craft involved in making what you are consuming. You are able to distinguish between good and bad quality.

In an empowered classroom, teachers can provide opportunities for this critical consuming through larger projects,

After becoming an expert, you start picking out the best and commenting on it. You collect things, organize things, and share your reviews with others.

curators are able to seek out the best resources and share them with a unique lens.

In an empowered classroom, we can help students distinguish between plagiarism and inspiration.

It’s critical that they understand issues around Copyright and Fair Use, but it should be something addressed as a learning experience rather than a punitive measure.

Kids combine elements from various favorite works that they have curated, and then make something

the things that inspire a student become the imaginative starting place for a new work.

Other times, the mash-up involves taking an idea from one area and applying it to a new context—which

This is the stage where students start taking the biggest risks and making things that are truly original.

assessment is something we do—not something we give and take.

they are able to figure out the following: What they already know (prior knowledge) What they don’t know (areas of improvement) What they want to master (their goals) What they will do to improve (action plan)

Empowered students are able to set goals, monitor their own progress, and determine which types of assessments they will use for specific outcomes.

This requires a shift from teacher-directed assessment to student-directed assessment;

it involves a collaborative partnership between students, peers, and the teacher.

When students engage in self-assessment, they begin to see their own progress in the moment.

As they monitor progress and adjust what they are doing, they are able to see the vital role that assessment plays in learning.

Instead of attributing academic success to a teacher or to luck, they see it as a result of their hard work.

Students gather their own data and analyze it in a graphical way.

the data has to be real and relevant to the students. They need to know what it means and why they are analyzing it.

Here students answer reflective questions about what they are learning, where they are struggling, and what they need to do next.

Students might use a Likert scale, selecting specific words from a bank, or ranking items.

Students are able to look at the progression from emerging to mastering with specific descriptions in various categories.

when students are assessing their own work with a rubric, they have a greater sense of ownership in the process.

A checklist can be a powerful diagnostic tool that students use before, during, and after a task. Pilots, doctors, and engineers all use checklists as a way to determine whether their work has met specific criteria.

“One essential characteristic of modern life is that we all depend on systems—on assemblages of people or technologies or both—and among our most profound difficulties is making them work.”

when trust and transparency are present, critical feedback can fuel creative thinking. As Pixar’s co-founder Ed Catmull puts it, “We believe that ideas—and thus, films—only become great when they are challenged and tested.”

This begins with one student sharing their work or pitching an idea while the other student actively listens. It then moves into a chance to ask clarifying questions, get feedback, respond to feedback, and chart out next steps. Each of these stages lasts two to three minutes apiece.

This is the idea of structured feedback. With this type of feedback, you (the teacher) provide specific sentence stems that your students can use to provide diagnostic, clarifying, or critical feedback.

This is simple. Students provide three strengths, two areas of improvement, and one question that they have.

While peer feedback and self-assessment are both critical for student ownership, there is value in the kind of feedback students receive from their teachers.

Students are empowered to ask questions about their work and to reflect on both the product and the process.

#1. Advice Conference: This empowers students to ask for advice. This conference is all about learning specific skills that students are missing. Each student must ask the teacher a series of questions based upon an area where he or she is struggling.

#2. Reflection Conferences: This empowers students to reflect on their learning. Instead of telling students what to do, the goal is to draw out student reflection.

#3 Mastery Conference: Unlike the reflection conference, the focus here is less about reflecting on the process and more about students judging their own mastery of the content.

students would use these structures in a more meaningful way if they selected which structure they wanted to use instead.

We want them to revise and iterate based on what they learned from failing—all on a path to real success.

As long as we let students go through the entire process, and we support them along the way as best we can, failing is not a bad thing.

Make the helmet straps adjustable. Make the pedals adjustable. Make the seats adjustable. Suddenly the mortality rates plummeted as they embraced this idea of flexible design and quit assuming that people needed to conform to a mythical idea of average.

When students own both the content and the process, they shift into the fro-yo model. Here they decide what they want to learn by doing it themselves. They select the exact amount of yogurt they need and they focus on toppings they think are both interesting and necessary. The teacher is still present as an advisor and an architect of the master system; however, students are working in a self-directed way.

They are self-directed, choosing the topic, the themes, the product, the ideas, and the questions based upon their own desires, passions, curiosity, and mastery. They are selecting the intervention and enrichment.