30 October 2024

In this episode we explore how South Australian schools are empowering students to take charge of their learning through the concept of learner agency. Join Brenton Wilson from Kilkenny Primary School, Narelle Christiansen from Avenues College, and students Elliot and Joe as they share their experiences participating in workshops that foster student voice and wellbeing. Hear how these initiatives are transforming classrooms and helping students collaborate with teachers for better learning outcomes.

Show Notes

Transcript

Dale Atkinson: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name is Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education and today we're talking about students as agents of change and we are joined by Brenton Wilson who's the head of school wellbeing and learner agency at Kilkenny Primary School with Elliot who's a student there also at Kilkenny and also Narelle Christiansen who's the head of wellbeing at Avenues College who's joined by Joe who's a year 10 student there.

Brenton Wilson: Hello.

Narelle Christiansen: Hello.

Dale Atkinson: So firstly to you Brenton, can you tell us a little bit about this student agency project you've been doing within the portfolio and the impact that it's had for your students?

Brenton Wilson: I think a component of this program has been us being able to get together in a forum. So, you know, 90 kids together twice a year, just to sit down and have some discussions and working with each other and bouncing ideas off of each other.

So like a student forum situation has been really beneficial for Elliot, for our kids to get ideas off of other kids and listen to what's happening in [00:01:00] other schools and the chance for, myself, the classroom teacher, and our kids to sit around the table and have some really meaningful discussions that we probably wouldn't have otherwise has been a really beneficial factor of this.

It's not work that we're doing in isolation and school. We're doing this together as a partnership with 10 to 15 schools working together with a really good facilitator, running processes that we can then bring back to school and use it with our teachers and in our classroom. So that's been a really good part of this as well.

Dale Atkinson: And so Narelle, has that been a similar experience to what you've seen at your school?

Narelle Christiansen: Yeah, just what Brenton was saying as well, like the actual experience of participating in the workshops and having that quarantine time to sit with your students and actually brainstorm and discuss and reflect on ideas, going through the processes, the activities, the really useful activities that then yes, you can take them back and do them with your students or with staff as well.

And also, you know, the value of actually hearing other schools and what they're doing and sharing [00:02:00] ideas. I know our students really enjoy being able to work with other students from other schools, and it's improved their confidence or built their confidence to be able to share ideas with their peers, to listen to ideas from other students and actually, I think just know that their ideas are valued has been really important for our students.

Dale Atkinson: Sounds like an incredibly rich and interesting and exciting thing to kind of lean in on. Can you talk about a few of the common themes that were coming up in those workshops from across all the schools?

Brenton Wilson: Because the strategy is so big, a lot of the schools just went into exploring, at this stage, around student agency and student voice and what that looks like back in the school. I think probably that was the big theme around, okay, we've got permission now to talk about this and to get stuck into this. So it was probably still in the early phases of, Okay, we've had two workshops, we've sort of got a bit of an idea now, our theme is now to go back and discuss that. A lot of our schools are still at a global level, [00:03:00] you know, what can we do as a whole school? We've sort of narrowed it down to a classroom level a bit more in our school, because we've sort of been doing this work for a while. The big theme was around how do we involve students more in the whole process?

Narelle Christiansen: I definitely agree. I think it was mostly around, yeah, student voice and learner agency. I think a few schools were also, looking into wellbeing and different areas of wellbeing as well.

Brenton Wilson: And around what that looks like for them, so it was really a global thing, but the individual context coming through, and everyone sort of left the workshops with ‘This is an area I want to explore, let's go back and explore it together as a school’.

Dale Atkinson: Will you be meeting again?

Brenton Wilson: I think the beauty of this work is that it's going to be slow moving work.

I mean, we can't just go in and do it and say it's finished and it's over. So, with time constraints, I think a term 2 and term 3 each year would be really good. So, I think our partnership's really keen to stay involved and just to continually chip [00:04:00] away at this over the next couple of years. We do have an online forum coming up in term 4 where we're going to explore a bit of wellbeing data to see how we can use that to work through the process we're using and how we can start to evaluate and find evidence around if these are the changes we're making is it having an impact.

So I guess we started sowing the seeds, and now we've got to work out how then we can gather evidence to say that these seeds are growing and we're paying attention to them.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, that's great. Can you talk to us a little bit about the work that you're doing to empower your young learners in their learning?

Narelle Christiansen: We have only really recently become involved with the Students as Agents of Change, as part of the partnership project. We became involved because we've been doing a lot of work with our student leaders on looking at how we can actually restructure our student leadership team and our system. Because we're really looking at how we could improve student voice or gain more student [00:05:00] voice.

It's an area that we've been working on for a couple of years now, we've done a lot of work around student wellbeing and trying to improve student belonging, around safety and connectedness. But we were really looking to build on that and look at gaining more student feedback and student voice around teaching and learning.

When we heard about the Students as Agents of Change, the partnership workshops, that was a really good opportunity for us to invite our students to participate and start doing some more work around student voice and learner agency with our students.

Dale Atkinson: So Brenton, what is the program focusing on? What are you trying to activate when you engage with the students in this way?

Brenton Wilson: So I guess for us, as a school, we really want our kids to be working shoulder to shoulder with our teachers and our leaders, and just looking at how they can be activated in this process to focus on learning improvement. Our trials, as a result of this, have been students understanding the learning process and being involved in the learning process, and how they can contribute to that learning process [00:06:00] for better outcomes.

We're really looking this year at metacognition and self-regulation and how the kids can be involved in that through emotional regulation, but also through being self-regulated learners, around setting goals, around giving peer to peer feedback and in our junior primary area around having more voice through song and bee keeping. So primarily, as a whole school, we're working together with our kids and involving them in that learning process.

Dale Atkinson: So, Narelle and Brenton, Narelle, you first perhaps. What are you seeing that's different in terms of student behaviour and student engagement as a result of this process?

Narelle Christiansen: The big impact for me, in the past, a lot of the work we've done with our student leaders and around student voice, We've always got a lot of feedback around more building a positive school culture and, you know, running our house challenges and our special events.

We've been working in that area for quite some time. I think just from being involved with the partnership workshops recently, it's kind of like there's been a light switch moment for some of our students because [00:07:00] we've been asking for feedback, not about extracurricular activities, but it's more been around feedback on their learning, and the teaching and learning in the classrooms.

And giving them permission to have a voice about their own learning and how they can influence what's happening in the classrooms. It's about that working in partnerships with their teachers to empower them and give them a little bit more control over their learning.

Dale Atkinson: Is that a similar sort of experience that you've had Brenton?

Brenton Wilson: Yeah, definitely. I think for us, this is our third year as researchers in the project with the inner west partnerships. I think really the last couple of years have been around exploring our PAT data and having a look at that and question analysis. So this is our first year that we've been looking at the new strategy and doing some work around that.

I think the previous years around focus on the data and the testing has given kids a really good understanding of why we're testing and around a data analysis. They're a lot more interested in the data. So last year's PAT testing data, and if they've made improvements on this year's data, but they're analysing questions a lot better when they're doing their testing and understanding what the questions are asking.

We've seen a real growth in data just around that, around kids understanding what the testing's about and they're putting more effort into their testing because of that focus and the sort of, the skilling we've done with the kids with that.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, it sounds amazing. So Elliot, I might ask you, what's your experience been like?

Elliot: Well, I feel like I can kind of choose what's going on in the school.

Dale Atkinson: What's changed? Like, is there anything that's kind of changed in terms of the classes for you?

Elliot: Well, we're doing peer to peer feedback so that we write a story and then we get a partner to give us feedback on that story.

Dale Atkinson: How is that different from the feedback you'd get from a teacher?

Elliot: Well, in this, the student gives you two good things that they like about it and one thing that you can work on.

Dale Atkinson: And is that something that, uh, you and your peers enjoy doing?

Elliot: Yeah.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, [00:09:00] nice. That sounds like something that's a little bit different, Brenton, in terms of how you might approach assessment and developing some of the programs of activities. Is it taking more work for you and the other educators to design that kind of interaction?

Brenton Wilson: Not really. So we've sort of been working in professional learning teams for probably three or four years now. And we've been trialling and doing our sprint work pretty well as teams, but. What we're trying to do now is infuse students into that process as well, bring them into that learning base around this is what we're trying to do as teachers, this is the trials we're doing, how can we involve you so that you're part of our success criteria as well.

So if at the end of this sprint we want teachers to have a chance to practice, Having the kids be involved in that, and what do we want to see our kids be doing more of and taking control of in their learnings? Before it was all the teachers giving the kids feedback, so now it's kids getting feedback from each other.

So they're understanding that feedback process, they're understanding the editing process, and then they're giving [00:10:00] each other feedback to promote the learning for the teachers getting involved. Probably what we want to see is our teachers doing less work and the kids doing more work in the space.

Dale Atkinson: Narelle, back to you. You spoke a little bit about how the engagement was, you didn't use this language, but less superficial and more ingrained in the actual day to day learning. Can you talk a little bit about what that looks like in terms of classroom activities?

Narelle Christiansen: We've only recently just started with this whole Students as Agents of Change process.

So where we're at more is we're participating in the first workshop, which was really useful for us to explore the new public education strategy with students and look at the areas of impact around wellbeing and learner agency. And because we already had the goals around trying to improve or widen the scope of our student voice at our school, it was a really useful workshop.

But we noticed that at the workshop. There was some misunderstanding about the concept of learner agency and what that meant for students, so we kind of took a step back and then we had another workshop at [00:11:00] school and really just unpacked the meaning of learner agency and what that looked like at our school, what the current situation is at our school and how we would like to improve on that and how students could be more involved and what that would look like in classrooms for us if students are working more in partnerships with our teachers.

So we unpacked that a little bit more and then we attended the second workshop. And from that, we were able to explore Learner Agency a little bit more with our students and set some goals and some next steps as to where, you know, how we can improve learner agency and have students working more in partnership with their teachers around their learning.

And I think we're at that stage where we, from the feedback that students have given from the workshops, is around that they're actually wanting to share their understanding of learner agency with their peers and also with their teachers and then it'll be a little bit more specific about what our next actions are from there and what that will look like in the classroom. So that's [00:12:00] about where we're at with our change process.

Dale Atkinson: So Joe, how has that changed your perspective on how you can influence the things that you're learning and what agency means for you.

Joe: Oh, it is obviously very early steps, but with those workshops we had those days, we got to all sit down, go through what it meant, get a much better understanding of what the student agency and all of those other areas and then we've just started getting all of our ideas together, doing lots of brainstorming, and then thinking about what we can implement. We haven't implemented a lot yet, we're still working on the action side of things, but it's definitely made me understand a lot more about how the whole process of student agency and communication between students and teachers and all sorts of things.

Dale Atkinson: What are the ideas that have been floated up by you and your peers? What are you seeing that you might be able to influence now?

Joe: Well, everyone has different ideas. There's something that I thought was personally interesting was that everyone had different things. There was [00:13:00] lots of students that were saying we need to work on some wellbeing side of things. There are lots of students saying we need to work on communication between teachers and students. Lots of ideas around having comfortable environments for people and having everyone feel like they have a say, everyone can have an influence. So that really was one of the main things we got out of that.

Dale Atkinson: And does it make you view teachers in the school differently going through this process?

Joe: A little bit, for me, not very much. That might be more so for some of the other students because this is new to a lot of them. I've been involved with some of these things for quite a while with the student leadership team, so I'm more just interested in how this student leadership program is going to evolve over time and how I'm seeing all of this stuff brought into it. But yeah, it's definitely added on to my understanding.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, that sounds really strong, really powerful. Thank you, Joe. So, Brenton, back to you. In terms of how that's changed the environment and the teaching practice within your school, what's the change [00:14:00] process been like for you and your colleagues?

Brenton Wilson: Yeah, it's gradual. So, it's taken time. So, this is sort of, I've been here five years, so we've sort of been chipping away at this for about five years now, just around how we can continue to involve kids in that learning process. I think the catalyst for us was a card saw that we did at our first researcher's day around, we used the strategy cards around metacognition and self-regulation, because that's sort of an area that we've been focusing on.

So we got the kids involved in that, and the number one thing the kids talked about was wanting to have more productive learning tools in the classroom. So we brought that feedback back to the teachers and we got them to do that card sort as well. And through the card sort, each teacher identified a different area.

So we've had peer to peer feedback. We've had goal setting. So there's a number of our teachers in the year level team, working on more productive goal setting strategies, feedback strategies, and then year six is looking at editing strategies. [00:15:00] Strategies that sort of gives them the power to be agents in their learning, for each other and with each other, but also promoting more learning dialogue in between. So the peer to peer feedback that Elliot was talking about is about getting kids to have productive learning talks with each other before the teacher gets involved in that. It's a bit of a change process that we're all working on like Avenues, still very early and we're just trying to do point of time, point of need work that's not too overwhelming for our teachers and our kids, but just keep chipping away at some new processes, new strategies and try and get them embedded into our practice.

Dale Atkinson: Sounds like an enjoyable journey.

Joe, if you had some friends from other schools who asked you about this, um, as a program and would you recommend it to them? And what would you tell them?

Joe: I think I would recommend it to them because it's always good for students to have that voice, that chance to make a difference, have an impact on their learning and people around them.

And I would probably tell them that it's just really [00:16:00] interesting to know more about the kind of logic behind how we're taught, those kind of background things behind what the teachers have actually given to us, and how we can, even though we see and we just go through it, it's actually we can make a difference on it, and we can shape it to something that's more suitable for us and I think that's a really positive thing. So I would definitely recommend it.

Dale Atkinson: Sounds like an excellent thing. Helping to influence your learning. All those sorts of activities that make a big difference in a student's sense of agency and their belonging in any environment, in any school, and their connection and relationship with their teachers.

Brenton, Narelle, Elliot, Joe, thank you very much for your time and good luck as you build and progress this into the future.

Brenton Wilson: No worries, thank you.

Narelle Christiansen: Thank you!