Fostering student agency is at the core of Dr. Krista Herrera's approach as an educator.
“I truly believe that our job is to help prepare students to advocate for themselves and solve problems in our communities,” says the Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction for the Santa Maria Joint High School District in California. “I am a high school administrator. “So our students will take on the role of leading our community for the next 10 to 20 years.”
Herrera recently received the Innovative Thought Leader Award during the tech & Learning Innovative Leaders Summit at the Liberty Science Center in New Jersey. Recognized for her dedication to supporting student agency, she shares tips for doing just that.
1. Boost student agency by encouraging student voice and choice
(Image credit: Courtesy of Dr. Krista Herrera)
Teaching students to find their passion and use their voice is an important part of an educator's role, Herrera says.
“We've been given this gift over the last two decades, where we no longer have to retain information,” he says. Instead, students have access to more information than they can possibly process at their fingertips, and the role of an educator is to help students harness the power of that.
“It's really given us the opportunity to allow them to explore and develop their own voice and their own passions,” he says. “And then really teaching them how to use the tools that they have at their disposal and the resources that they have at their disposal to meet their needs.”
2. Creating an inclusive space
Before we can encourage student voice and choice, it is necessary to create a sense of belonging in students. “The first step, before changing your entire teaching practice, is to make sure you have a really safe space where we encourage students to collaborate,” Herrera says. “We create a space where they feel comfortable expressing their opinions and ideas without judgment, but also a space where they can listen to opposing points of view and ideas without judgment.”
3. Honor the different types of success
Success is not always equal and too often educators in the school setting can forget this.
“School was easy for me because I'm a natural student, I'm pretty docile, I want to please the people around me and I can learn the game pretty quickly,” Herrera says. “I learned that the game of 'study' was really easy for me. But there were people around me who were much brighter than me and probably could have solved much bigger problems. But because they weren't 'studying' properly, they weren't playing the school game, they never got to see themselves in this kind of successful, safe place.”
Helping these types of students achieve success is essential, Herrera says. “Building student success and allowing them to see success in their skills and share their talents is really important in this space.”
4. Provide mentoring
One strategy to help students feel supported enough to succeed while pursuing their passions is to offer mentoring. Having an adult at school that you can turn to outside of class to help you with personal problems or life skills, such as writing an email, can be very helpful for students, Herrera says.
As students demonstrate their learning in different ways, it can also be helpful to help connect them with community mentors. “If I was going to try to make some kind of change around fire safety, I could have an additional mentor who was a local firefighter, who I could talk to about their specific content knowledge,” Herrera says.
In addition to helping with a specific project, this type of mentoring can encourage students to begin networking with professionals in the community.
5. Don't sacrifice rigor for choice
One mistake Herrera frequently sees when educators try to implement more choice for students is that they confuse choice with abandoning curriculum requirements. For example, he will sometimes see that instructors offer multiple paths to success, but not all of those paths are rigorous enough.
“Some of these choice boards had two really good, rigorous options, and then six that weren't even related to what they were supposed to do,” he says. “We remain a standards-based educational system. Those standards have to be taught, (but) the way to reach them can be very different.”
6. Don't be afraid to let students struggle
Not all difficulty is bad, but it's easy for well-intentioned instructors to forget when they watch students try and fail to grasp the material at first.
“Wrestling is really productive in its learning cycle,” he says. “So if we take away all that struggle, we're really taking away the whole learning experience.”
Instead of revealing the answers, he suggests educators ask students if they need more time, more language, or more information. If they need more time, let them work on it longer, if they need more language, explain the question in a different way, and if they need more information, give them new resources perhaps by suggesting you read a passage from the textbook or talk to them. with another student about the problem.
“That is a big struggle that teachers have,” he says. “We want to help students be so successful that we actually take away from their learning experience by bailing on them too early.”
NEWSLETTER
