I recently shared my thoughts about student agency and how it might be enhanced simply by building good habits. In doing so, I quoted James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, who tells us that, ‘Every action we take is a vote for the person we want to become.’ Essentially then, our identity determines our habits, and our habits reinforce our identity so the two either become beautifully or dangerously entangled, depending on the habits we build. Let’s start with a dangerous entanglement. What if we don’t have a clear identity? Like Alice, would we come unstuck answering the Caterpillar’s question? What exactly would our habits be reinforcing? Imagine a 15-year-old called Sasha who attends an expensive private school. Her life is structured around a rigid timetable over which she has precious little control. During the day she shuttles dutifully from lesson to lesson, punctuated by a few short breaks. After school she has basketball practice then...
If there was such a thing as ‘School Improvement Plan Bingo’, the term student agency would be a banker on your bingo card. It is ubiquitous in modern education and has an uncanny knack of finding its way into so many school improvement plans...then cunningly reappearing year upon year. Why is that? Is it because it feels right to say we’re champions of student voice and choice? Is it because there’s a degree of ambiguity about what it actually means? Perhaps it’s simply that we don’t really know what it takes to get better at it. The likelihood is that it’s a combination of all the above. Whatever definition we settle on, we can probably agree that it involves a level of empowerment for young people, and that’s got to be a good thing that’s worthy of our sustained efforts. That’s the first two points covered, but how we do get better at it? Recently, a close friend of mine (also a school leader) bou...