Many students feel empowered participating in social movements connected to key issues--and this participation can be a powerful setting for civic education. School-based civic education can complement the empowerment that come with participating in social movements--if young people gain a deeper appreciation of social movements and understanding…

To encourage student empowerment, teachers must recognize and discuss the tension between their own instructional power and students' power and agency--especially in the fraught area of grading. To truly invest students with power in learning, educators must ask the tricky question of whether they are willing to give kids more ownership over the…

Psychologist Wendy Ostroff explains why using dialogue in learning with elementary-age students is a win for everyone, especially for learning. Young students are inventive questioners and naturally divergent thinkers, and they are engaged and empowered by exercising their voices. Teachers will benefit from Ostroff's guidance about fitting…

One of the central ways to teach young children how to take care of each other is through classroom management, says University of Michigan's Carla Shalaby. Here, she invites educators to: (1) understand classroom management as a curriculum; (2) understand care as political work; and (3) understand young children as already powerful.

The authors explain that the commonly held concept of project-based learning (PBL) as a student investigating a topic or creating something individually (a passion project) is only part of the PBL story. Projects in which students collaborate and do something to make a difference in their community are also a way to structure PBL and build agency.…

To spur agency and critical thinking, educators can take steps to position students as knowledge builders rather than just consumers. Drawing on Indigenous pedagogy and her own work on the value of "street data" in education, author and consultant Shane Safir discusses the importance of creating more space for student voice in…

When student agency is amplified by the integration of modern technologies, students have great potential to solve real-world problems and learn in a deep and engaging way. And yet often schools are hesitant to provide students with true agency. Richardson looks at some powerful student projects and inventions that were possible through agency and…

For students to feel empowered in their learning, they must understand the language, purpose, and goals of assessment. Dueck argues that students need to understand what they are supposed to be learning and determine whether they actually learned it. Clear objectives and cooperative assessments can help with these objectives.

Educators need to be wary of stifling imagination and creative thinking in our youngest learners. Education scholar Fang Gao discusses how it's not always about getting to the technically right answer, but allowing young learners to explore creative ways of thinking. She offers three ways to nurture this creativity.

What does the development of a young person's political agency look like, and what role can schools play in this process? The authors profile Blackstone Academy, where administrators integrate social activism, community service, and other service-learning projects into the curriculum to help students develop leadership skills and confidence. The…

At the root of problem solving, Tishman and Clapp assert, is a sense of agency. The impetus to engage with a problem starts with a sense that it's possible to reshape something by directing one's actions purposefully. The authors--who participated in a long-term project observing how the "maker movement" is being implemented in…

In this article, Bryan Goodwin reflects on a Johns Hopkins University study from 1966 that at that time sent shock waves across America. The report's sober conclusion was that: "Schools provide no opportunity at all" to bring impoverished and minority students up to the starting line. Rather, schools allow them to "fall farther…

"When students cheat, we usually feel betrayed, or we blame them for being lazy. Sometimes we even attack their character. But just like many adults, kids who cheat have rational reasons for cheating," writes English teacher Cris Tovani. In this article, she describes three instructional approaches that encourage students to cheat.…

Genius Hour is a time built into the school day or week to enable students to actively create their learning rather than passively consume it. During the time set aside for Genius Hour, students choose what they will learn about, the strategies they will use to learn it, the pace of their work, the materials and resources they will use, and the…

One popular approach to teacher leadership is to identify certain teachers as particularly successful, then have others learn from them. Collaborative leadership, in contrast, looks at leadership as a quality that anyone can have. In this model, the goal is not to figure out who is best. Instead, teachers share their unique talents and interests…