17th May 2018 Megan's reflection

Reflection 1

As we began our discussion with our learner agency partner we began to realise that in order to really facilitate learner agency we need to have some student voice within our discussion.

We gathered three students from our year 5/6 community and sat and listened to their understanding of learner agency and what they feel would be of great benefit to them to help engage students in having more learner agency in their class.

The students gave great insight into what they felt would be really beneficial to enact learner agency within the community. Their first piece of suggestion was to have experts in certain areas when we are learning so they have other people they can go to if they are in need of assistance. They explained that they can learn from their peers as well as their teachers but aren't always sure about who the right peer might be to go to when working on certain tasks. From this information, we discussed as a group, an idea of having an expert wall somewhere within our learning space, where students can access someone who believes they are an expert during a certain task for assistance. Students voiced that this would need to be quite visual so that all peers could have access to it and understand that if they are in need of assistance during any part of the lesson, beginning, middle or end, that those experts would be the person they could go to. This was also a way that the students felt they could share their knowledge and understanding with others so that each person within the community could be an expert at some point in their learning as we all have different strengths and can use them to help others at different times.

The other point of conversation we had with students was the idea of having someone to converse with during learning time, such as a working buddy. The students also acknowledged that there needed to be some other option for working buddies if a working buddy was away. as the students discussed and used their agency to explain that maybe it would be more beneficial to have working groups with a set of two learning buddies in each group so that if one working buddy is absent for any reason, that child is not left on their own to try and work through their activity. The students voiced that they found it hard to work through activities without having someone to share their thinking with and learn from. Fro this, we asked the students to show us on our working buddies wall, how they would like to have this displayed for them so that we can help them with this agency.

We will be documenting the use of these two ideas for our student's learner agency over the next two weeks and have data and evidence to help us reflect, with the students, about this process hand what else the students feel they need to help their learner agency.

Megan