Student Agency Classroom Strategy

Student agency is being given more thought and focus in the new PYP changes. Student agency refers to giving children a level of control, choice, autonomy and power of their learning.

We all know that when children are given choice in what and how they learn, the learning engagement rises significantly.


This was our last week before the Christmas holidays and I wanted to experiment with a different way of offering stronger student agency for maths.

The children were given the table (below) of learning experiences on a Google doc.

The learning experiences were divided into three columns. The first column were to be carried out individually (to ensure each child had some personal thinking time), the middle column needed to be done with a partner (to ensure different strategies were being explored through sharing) and the third column they could choose to do alone, with a partner or as a trio. 

To help broaden who they were learning with, they could only do a learning experience with a certain classmate once. I had been noticing lately that some children were consistently choosing the same partners to learn with so I wanted to help them see the benefits of broadening their learning partner choices.

The top three learning experiences were mandatory and they knew those three needed to be completed by the end of the week. These were chosen as informal formative assessments where I was able to observe who might need additional help in our future ratios and probability units and what sort of help would be needed.

Provided those three were completed by the end of the week, the children were able to choose any of the other learning experiences. There was no expectation to complete any others. This allowed them to put as much or as little time needed. 

Christmas Maths

Individually	With a Partner (Choose a different partner for each activity)	Choice: Individually or with a partner (Choose a different partner for each activity)
Baking Christmas Biscuits Materials Needed: ° Doc (link above)	Elves' Uniforms - Possible Combinations Materials Needed: ° Doc (link above) ° whiteboard for creating strategies	Christmas Word Problems   Materials Needed: ° Doc (link above) ° whiteboard for creating strategies
Santa’s Workshop Map Materials Needed: ° Doc (link above) ° Map ° ruler	Christmas Trees- fractions / decimals Materials Needed: ° Doc (link above) ° square centimetre paper	Wrapping Christmas Presents Materials Needed: ° Doc (link above) ° boxes ° ruler
12 Days of Christmas Materials Needed: ° Doc (link above) ° Whiteboard	Design a Christmas tree ornament out of triangles and rectangles. Eg angels, stars, etc Then create a strategy to measure its surface area	What is the surface area of the Christmas star? Materials Needed: ° Christmas star
Estimate the number of Christmas baubles in the box on the laptop trolley. Rules: You cannot pick up the box. Write your estimation on a sticky note and place it with your name in front of the box.		Four Christmas Maths- Challenging Materials Needed: ° Doc (link above)

Google Doc Link to the Table (above)




Estimating: How many Christmas baubles link




N.B Doing this again, I will offer two or three levels of word problems to help cater to different learning needs like normally is offered in our class. (I was pretty rushed Sunday night creating all this, so I really need to put some more time into creating different levelled options for the mandatory learning experiences)

The week of learning was incredibly successful. There was always high levels of engagement and there was genuine excitement when they knew maths was the next learning we would be doing. Children were opting to do these learning experiences when they extra time to choose what learning they did. Some children were spending an impressive amount of time trying to create strategies and they were developing their own hyptheseses to prove or disprove. (The probability elves combination saw some students displaying strong perseverance and amazing mathematical trail and error skills to try and create a strategy)

There were some conceptual understandings or skills that some children might need to learn to do some of their learning experiences, so I suggested that we have 10-15 mini-inquiries that the children could sign up for each day over the week. There was a request to learn how to measure the area of a triangle in an easier way, so that was offered on the board and some children chose to sign up for that mini-inquiry with me on one of the days during the week. Not all children ended up signing up for it and that was alright. Those mini-inquiries were a great way to create and test hypotheses they formed. Some samples from that mini-inquiry small group:

Wonderfully, a student offered to run their own mini-inquiry. They had become really curious about the most effective strategy to solve the '12 Days of Christmas' problem. Four children signed up and they independently ran their own mini-inquiry where they shared the strategies they had used and then they tried to determine which were the most effective strategies. The group didn't need me to ran this and observing, it was fabulous to hear of some of the connections and patterns they had discovered whilst trying to solve it. Some samples:

By creating this tallying strategy, this learner was able to see a pattern that the day determined how many more gifts were given. They continued to test their hypothesis and proved it was true.

Another small group had been completely engaged and curious to find an effective strategy or pattern with the probability combinations elves' uniforms problem. They had spent over an hour creating multiply hypotheses and testing them out. They offered a mini-inquiry which a few classmates also signed up for where they shared discoveries and wonderings they still had:

I was curious to find out why there was such a positive buzz towards their learning and so in class and group discussions, I heard the following reflective feedback:

° They loved having choices- both what to do and who to do it with

° They liked how there was a range of active learning experiences and others that required sitting down. One student shared how they felt they could learn according to their mood- if they were in a high energy mood they could do the more active activities.

° They liked the sense of accomplishment and responsibility in having the three mandatory activities to complete (Some shared a sense of pride when they had completed those three)

° They liked how there was a mixture of different mathematical thinking- measuring area, ratios, fractions etc

° They liked the flexibility of learning where they wanted to and with whom.

° Some shared how they liked being 'forced' to learn with a different classmate each time as they thought it helped everyone to feel more included (interesting!)

° They also liked how they felt like communityof mathematicians by sharing strategies they had created / used when others might be stuck with ideas.

° They loved the theme of Christmas. There were suggestions that we should try to always do a week like this when other holidays arise such as Valentine's, Easter, student birthdays etc.

Thinking about their reflective feedback, I plan to set up learning experiences more often like this for the rest of the year. There is a lot of research for the benefits of student agency and I think when we can create and experiment with different approaches to honouring this in our classrooms, we can help raise the engagement of curiosity in our learners.

I loved their idea of creating their own mini-inquiries for classmates to sign up to participate in and definitely want to explore that strategy a lot more after the holidays.