HMW empower student agency?


So there’s this iceberg.

It has floated in and out of my teaching life at Mount Vernon - most recently as an operative metaphor for an identities unit in 7th grade humanities...

Who am I?
What’s the story behind my story?

On one level, I think it does serve as a helpful visual by which we might explore ourselves and our stories. The iceberg might help us ponder how much of ourselves we’re ever really able to show and share with the world. (As I write this, I hope I haven’t imparted the message that we, like this iceberg, are destined to float alone, bobbing over waters vast and serene and empty…


The aforementioned iceberg.


Today, this iceberg represents what my students have helped me begin to see and understand about their experience of school. Especially...around our early prototypes of competency-based education.


Our school uses a learning platform called Altitude Learning. The student-facing experience of Altitude centers upon “cards” - that is, the discrete learning tasks each teacher assigns to direct student learning. These cards can vary in length, can invite formative or summative assessment, and often feature due dates with enough flexibility to allow middle schoolers to (learn to) decide which learning tasks need doing, and when doing needs to convert to done. Altitude cards don’t bear any traditional letter grades. They document a learner’s journey of learning from “novice” to “emerging” to “proficient” to “advanced”. 


For the most part, our students hate them.


How do I despise thee? Let me count the ways.


Unfortunately, my habit energy still pushes most of the blame back upon students. Of course, they don’t like Altitude cards, I reason with myself. It’s school. And middle schoolers don’t like school. Not that they have to - but they’re wired to just not care….


But I know this is a selfish, shallow narrative that blames children for not adoring my class. It hides some of what I already know: that, despite my best efforts, there are days when my Altitude cards offer little more to students than content coverage busywork on a digital worksheet.


Worse still, it shows me, plain as day, that leaping upon the moving sidewalk of pandemic denial - the “Look, y’all! It’s time to lean back into school and get after it!’ - that I wish more of us in the education world would practice avoiding at all costs. 


“Look, y’all! It’s time to lean back into school and get after it!’


As we wind down our first design challenge, Ryan, Todd and I know our time is now to co-create with students a way they might show us what they are learning that might spark more student agency, ownership, and (gasp!) joy around what they’re learning alongside us. 


After collecting several rounds of student feedback, we clustered and categorized what they learned into…


...an iceberg.


This floating block of “How might we?” unmoored all the right questions for us. 


HMW incorporate more joy into the learning?


HMW empower learners to take charge of their own assessment?


Todd and Ryan immediately sketched out a plan by which students could assign themselves an Altitude card, answer a few open questions that let them think aloud about what they were learning, attach as much evidence as they had collected to describe their learning journey, and submit it to us for feedback when they felt ready.


Meanwhile, the three of us were collaborating and commenting away on a shared Google doc to render our learning outcomes into student-friendly language. We put them in front of our students on giant posters, and invited them to Post-It what they thought an “Advanced” demonstration of understanding should be. 



We invited some of our teacher-partners to “dot-vote” the student responses that sparked surprise, delight, and a way forward towards the kind of flexible, creative, empathy-fueled mindsets where questions unfold into… more questions.


Or, sometimes, the right question.



As I type this, we’re watching our students make use of them for the first time. 


I’m as hopeful as ever for new glimpses into what they are seeing - and what they are learning to see. Like any technological tool we use at Mount Vernon, I’m delighted to find that Altitude has literally been waiting for me to imagine and invite the kind of collaborative learning experiences for and with my colleagues and students that a competency-based model of assessment hopes for.


But, still, icebergs in the teaching and learning life, like this one, remain hidden in plain sight. I know better than to think I can see more than what I saw before. I’ll settle instead to remain about the work of seeing – and learning to see – what icebergs mean to teach us. 


What icebergs lie hidden in your plain sight?


Share with us on Twitter:

@TheMVDesignLab 
#impactfromthemiddle

Kevin Day @knowKMD
Todd Wass @toddw42
Ryan Welch @welch79

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