Here’s The Book You’ve Been Waiting For
It is no longer sufficient for schools to design learning to fit yesterday’s standards. Neither is it sufficient to give our learners freedom to learn without being intentional about developing the responsibilities that come with having that freedom. The future world will be characterised by change and uncertainty, Navigating through that will require new solutions be found to new problems as they are identified. This means that our learners and future citizens must be empowered with choices and the ability to act on those choices. This is the essence of what it means to be agentic.
This book is a call to action, providing the tools, strategies and user friendly rubrics to guide you as you unlock the potential of your students, as they embrace their personal ownership of learning.
Publication of this playbook has been made possible through the generous support of the Aurora Institute (now FullScale Learning). The Playbook can be downloaded for free from their website.
A Practical Guide from Theory to Action in Simple Steps
This resource is a mix of the theoretical with the practical steps taken from lived experiences from educators, who, like you, desire more for their students in their learning experience.
“This is the book I wished I’d had when I started my new school”
Annette Thompson, School Principal, Arkansas
Agency By Design: An Educator’s Playbook has been written to help you design learning environments and experiences that foster agency in your learners and prepare them for this future. The playbook will assist you to…
Understand more about learner agency and why it should be an important focus in our schools and classrooms.
Identify the conditions required to promote learner agency in your context, and the characteristics you will observe in your students.
Design the specific actions you need to take in your context to see this shift occur.
Evaluate your progress towards these goals, and identify the ‘next steps’ to take as you work towards your goals.
What you’ll find inside…
The Playbook includes….
- definitions and descriptions of the attributes necessary to develop student agency.
- reflection boxes to encourage note-taking for who are piloting, investigating and applying the tools and resources available
- reflection questions that will provide opportunities for discussion among educators
- best practice examples from educators who are building a student -agency -centered model in their classrooms and school
- rubrics by which to assess current practice against a more agency centered practice
- self analysis tools to use over time to show shifts in understanding and practice.
A Framework to guide you..
The substantial part of the playbook is organised around a framework for implementation (Illustrated below) that is divided into 7 chapters dealing with the conditions we create to see learner agency develop, and 7 chapters dealing with the characteristics we expect to see develop in our learners as they operate within these conditions.
JUST RELEASED
Our companion guide to the Agency By Design Playbook. This guide takes you step by step through the process of introducing the playbook to your staff.
The purpose of this Companion Guide is to provide practical guidance for educators seeking to understand how the Playbook could be used in their own classroom, and for leaders who may be looking for ways to introduce this to staff in their schools or other contexts.
The first section of the guide should be considered a “book study” in preparation for your journey towards more agentic classrooms. It takes you through the introductory sections of the playbook to ensure you have a good understanding of the ‘why’ behind agentic practice.
The second section outlines the steps that can be taken toward implementing the elements outlined in the framework in the playbook in your context.
Hear what users of the playbook have to say…
Take a look at the videos below to hear the story of schools that have successfully used the Agency By Design playbook to introduce a more agentic approach to the teaching and learning in their school and district.
Principal David Jackson and Luke Harding from Pahiatua School speak about their experiences using the Agency By Design Playbook. They describe the approaches taken to introduce a half-day per week devoted purely to learning experiences to develop greater agency among students.
Principal Rob Tassoni and Amanda Trewin from Lakeside College in NSW, Australia, explain how they have used the Agency By Design: An Educator’s Playbook to guide their journey to implementing more agentic practices in their school.
Principal Claudette Trujillo and Kelley Layton from the Metropolitan Arts Academy in the Westminster Schools District in Colorado explain how they have used Agency By Design: An Educator’s Playbook to re-define their approach to implement a Competency Based approach to teaching and learning across their school.
Professional Development Opportunities
The shift to a more student agency-centered model requires courage and determination. To be effective this needs to be done in depth, over time and made relevant to the context you are working in.
We offer a range of professional learning opportunities using the framework in our playbook, and welcome approaches from school, clusters of schools, school districts, whole or state or other jurisdiction to work with you to design an approach that will work for you.
The range of Professional Learning services we can provide includes:
- In-person facilitation, including conference workshops or teacher only days, through to longer term engagements to support and mentor educators through the process
- Virtual learning experiences, from one-off webinars to introduce the ideas to longitudinal engagements to mentor educators through the process
- We can work with classroom teachers, school administrators and leadership teams or system level leaders.
Use the link below to contact us for more information.
Contact us for more information
Meet the Authors
Marsha Jones
Springdale School District (Retired)
NW Arkansas
George Edwards
New England Association of Schools and Colleges
Special Note for NZ Educators
We have had a number of copies of the Agency By Design book printed for use in some of the workshops that we run. We currently have a limited number of these books available that can be purchased if you’d prefer to work with a physical copy. These have been commercially printed on high grade paper and are spiral bound with a wire binding to make it easier to lay flat for writing in and working with.
Because of the number we had printed, we can make these copies available at $NZ35 +GST plus the cost of postage.
If you would like to purchase one or multiple copies of this book please use the form to order and we’ll arrange to have them shipped to you.
