Test What’s Possible

As educators, we recognise our role in affirming the need students have to make and carry out their own choices in life. We want them to set constructive and attainable goals for themselves. We encourage them to reflect on their emerging sense of agency, as they adapt to their changing circumstances with creativity and judgement.

We want every student (and those who teach, support and lead them) in a school for tomorrow to:

•  Collaborate with teachers, mentors, experts and peers to exchange mastery 
•  Grow in the performance character that fulfils potential through purpose, persistence, and reflection 
•  Test possibility and acquire increasing agency that is open to the gifts of others 

The increasing permissioning of agency can allow students to step into their experience with greater confidence and to explore what they might know, do, be and learn through the adaptive expertise and self-efficacy required to thrive in their world. 

An education for agency, therefore, arises from our normal and human need to form relationships that provide meaningful encounters that shape our ideas about self, place and the other. In school, agency is nurtured through exchanges with teachers, mentors, experts, and peers within learning that is accessible, rigorous, and relevant; agency empowers students to test what’s possible and act with an increased sense of purpose that can guide them to thrive in their world. 

In school, agency is nurtured through exchanges with teachers, mentors, experts, and peers within learning that is accessible, rigorous, and relevant; agency empowers students to test what’s possible and act with an increased sense of purpose that can guide them to thrive in their world.

1. Good schools examine character, competency, and wellness in depth. These schools place character, competency and wellness at the core of the work of education – it is seen as the essential preparation for students to thrive in the new world context, not as an additional thing to be done. Effective solutions are not pre-packaged but both build on the exemplars of others while also taking into account the needs and culture of a school’s unique context. They develop an evidence-based approach to describing and implementing both a framework for an education for character, competency and wellness, and an ongoing conversation within their communities about how best to ensure the practice of a school is world-class in its approach. 
   
   
2. Good schools are thorough about educating their students for character, competency and wellness. A strategic and intentional approach towards an education for character, competency and wellness is observably and tangibly more successful than reliance on assumptions about what might be happening in classrooms and other learning environments. The accidental and incidental ‘caught, not taught’ approach fails to provide high quality education for character, competency and wellness to all students. Good schools want to work towards systematic formal and informal means of character education for each student, implementing a range of both proven and innovative collective, collaborative and personalised strategies that are regularly evaluated for their quality and effectiveness.
   
   
3. Finally, good schools measure what they do. This is based on a belief that the character, competency and wellness of learners can be described and that changes in student outcomes in these areas can be both tracked and measured in a variety of qualitative and quantitative ways. The impact of an education for character, competency and wellness is also measured, allowing schools to know where there is good value in exerting their efforts and resources. 

Good schools also develop systems that help them to replace assertion based on anecdote with knowledge based on evidence in the discourse of every member of the community, especially when it comes to co-constructing narratives of a whole education for character, competency, and wellness in the lives of their students. They gather data progressively and conduct appropriate analysis of results across all key competencies and external benchmarks, as well as appropriate measurement of levels of wellness. Evaluation of this data takes place in alignment with the values, principles, and purpose that comprise a school’s ethos and define its values proposition, as well goals that measure the achievement of its value proposition. At the same time, good schools should implement evaluation processes to demonstrate the development of the supportive school climate that actively encourages holistic student achievement levels. They must make deft judgments about the correct placement of evaluation systems and processes. They must also determine the right measures to prioritise the right type of holistic student achievement within the warp and weft of school life.

Schools and those in them won’t get everything right as they do this work. As Richard Owens puts it, we ourselves need to model the willingness to test what’s possible that lies at the heart of all agency:

"Take risks, trust the kids and be prepared to fail fairly often … over time, those types of endeavours push the envelope of what’s possible."

Richard Owens | Game Changers insight*

Further to this, good schools can successfully articulate a values and value proposition that honours the new social contract of education: today’s learning for tomorrow’s world. The values proposition should speak to the development and embodiment of the school’s values in the transformation of learners, educators, and families. The value proposition needs to show some tangible benefit to this process of transformation that speaks to:

1.  Valuing education: Placing a high value on education that is tangibly reflected through levels of funding, attitude, support, community involvement, and support.
2. Valuing teachers: Encouraging school stakeholders to take concrete actions to connect with, support and value teachers, through recognising the importance of their work and understanding that their profession is complex.
3. Valuing improvement: Developing teachers through mentoring, classroom observation, and constructive feedback to become more professional and more collaborative in all areas of practice, especially in tracking and diagnosing the nature and progress of an individual child’s learning.

At the heart of all of this needs to be the imperative for helping learners bring about positive change in their capacity to thrive through growth in character, competency, and wellness. Students need to be able to map this journey towards transformation and present a story of their yesterday, today and tomorrow that tracks the development of their voice, agency, and advocacy. The experience of school for learners should be, therefore, a wide field in which we inspire, challenge, and support them to rehearse for their adulthood by providing many diverse encounters with and experiences of competency within deliberately incremental and immersive learning. Like the mediaeval tales of old and the computer games students play now, the challenges must become harder and more important as the quest goes on.

The experience of growth and transformation in school for a learner (be that an adult, adolescent, or child in whatever capacity) is about becoming someone new – a better version of yourself with the agency to make a difference in your world. 

In this way, the experience of growth and transformation in school for a learner (be that an adult, adolescent, or child in whatever capacity) is about becoming someone new – a better version of yourself with the agency to make a difference in your world. This process of transformation can often be frustrated by a personal reluctance to let go of the person who once was (something which poorly informed and utilised cultures of tradition can unwittingly abet) instead of honouring the process of gaining expertise through a relationship of character apprenticeship that can show you where your future might lie and how to explore the possibility that this might entail. 

The following model of experiential education might provide us with a good starting point for understanding the process by which the development of the learner, the development of character and the development of agency intertwine:

Figure 1: The a School for tomorrow. Model of Experiential Education for Growth and Transformation

This Model of Experiential Education for Growth and Transformation** begins by identifying childhood as a period of preparation for life. Students discover their areas of potential competency and anticipate the fulfilment of this potential through an emerging sense of their agency as they learn, live, lead and work in relationships with others. They may resist this compelling imperative along the way – in their adolescence in particular they like their fun and enjoy what is done in the moment. They don’t necessarily want to be told what to do all of the time and many enjoy some mischief along the way. But on the whole, their world of potential is about finding their passions, learning about the necessity of effort, dreaming about possibilities, achieving good (or at least acceptable) grades, exploring their sense of self, and spending time with their friends.

This model sees meaning develop into understanding, authenticity, shape identity, transformation aided by reflection, an emphasis on survival and sustainability progresses towards one which is more concentrated on results, an awareness of service become the generation of true purpose, and immediate relationships giving some ground to the need to appreciate a broader context and a wider world. This journey of becoming within what we call “a school for tomorrow” is, therefore, also the experience of gaining the mastery of our essential competencies based on civic, performance, and moral character, as well as the attainment of the qualities of self-efficacy (how we organise ourselves) and adaptive expertise (how we respond to the changing world around us) required to thrive. It’s about testing what’s possible and striving for answers to increasingly more challenging questions.

As Adriano and I argue in our book***:

"A school for tomorrow goes about what it does by grounding meaningful, connected and integrated learning models and systems in deep appreciation of people, place and planet. From this understanding of the context of schooling and the society it serves, a school for tomorrow propels forward the emerging voice, agency and advocacy of students on their pathway to adulthood."

Ref: Game Changers: Leading Today's Learning for Tomorrow's World (Hawker Brownlow Education 2022) p.9

While all of this is going on, learners will be attending class and enjoying the playground. They will learn how to learn and achieve success. They will also learn by making mistakes and growing through both challenge and adversity. They will play sport and participate in other co-curricular activities together. They will make and lose friends. They will learn from teachers and mentors about how to respond to the world around them. They will sit tests and try to pass the seemingly inevitable sets of external examinations that will define for them the range of their options at the next stage of their lives.

In time, they will come to demonstrate character, competency and wellness with adaptive expertise and self-efficacy learned within experiences of excellence across the curriculum, co-curriculum, and extra-curriculum. With this increasing (but never even or entirely predictable) sense of agency, they will grow, make progress and achieve results that give them access to preferred pathways to their future. More importantly, they will demonstrate a set of graduate outcomes that link their values to their intentions to their actions and the consequences of all of these as they test for themselves what’s possible with:

1. The integrity to lead a meaningful life as good people – this draws on the employability skill of self management,​ which is about building your personal organisation, resilience, adaptability, self-awareness, response to feedback and personal responsibility.​
2. The ability to manage complexity with authenticity as future builders – this focuses significantly on the employability skill of communication​, which is about building your influence, understanding of others, relationships, connection with audiences, numeracy, and capacity to listen, speak and write.
3. The capacity to grow and transform as continuous learners and unlearners – this relies on the employability skill of learning and technology, which is critical to future-readiness, especially through how you engage in your own learning, develop new capabilities, support of others to learn, and the building of your digital fluency, digital citizenship and management of data​.
4. The wisdom to provide sustainable direction to the world as solution architects – this requires the employability skill of problem solving,​ which is shown through evaluation, decision-making, creativity and innovation, reasoning, consultations with stakeholders and the generation of options.
5. The perspective to balance the local, the regional, and the global as responsible citizens – this is based on the employability skill of planning and organising​, which is exercised through capacity in initiative, taking action, managing risk, managing resources, implementation and review​.
6. The willingness to work well in inclusive relationship with others to bring success and fulfilment for all of us as team creators – this is grounded in the employability skill of teamwork which comprises collaboration, cooperation, respect, ethical conduct, team wellbeing and professional culture.

Over the coming weeks, we’re going to dig deeper into the major findings of this global research and development into the agency required for our learners to thrive through our a School for tomorrow. Test What’s Possible publications and our Game Changers podcast series. While Adriano is on a special assignment, I’m going to unpack the why, what, and how of building agency in your school community through the lens of our six global standards of high-performing schools – culture, leadership, learning, performance, strategy, and systems & operations. 

I’m excited to share our more detailed thinking about an education for agency with you.

I can’t wait.

Let’s go!

Phil

* You can listen to Richard Owen’s Game Changers Episode here: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/series-10-episode-4-future-schools-richard-owens/id1503430745?i=1000566315919

** You can learn more about the experience of schooling here: https://www.aschoolfortomorrow.com/the-way/work/the-experience-of-schooling 

*** You can purchase your copy of Game Changers: Leading Today’s Learning For Tomorrow’s World  here: https://www.hbe.com.au/hb1338.html