A Million Little Positives – A Year 2 Update

Two springs ago in this journal, I shared the start of an appreciative inquiry into the relationship between students and their lived experience in school. What follows is the story of how this inquiry has evolved into another as we spiral deeper in our efforts to support students’ sense of belonging, efficacy, and agency during a period in their lives where transitions are abundant and their sense of self is emerging in dramatic and sometimes unexpected ways.

Building trust with the students meant being consistent about follow up conversations and sharing the data beyond the group. We shared their honest feedback with the staff, parent advisory committee, and district leadership team. Having one conversation with a group of students is not enough. Our students need to see that actions are taken when they share their experiences. Honesty and transparency of decision making allows for trust to grow and flourish. When working towards change, it has been important to be unattached to specific outcomes (Aguilar, 2020). We need to trust the process of authentic collaboration between students and school leaders.

Actively engaging in the Spirals of Inquiry (Halbert & Kaser, 2022) means finding ways to embed listening into our ways of being as teachers and leaders. If we want students to show up in the world as thoughtful listeners and empathetic community members, we need to model and embody this practice as educators. Working through conflict with restorative practices, like the circle process, has allowed for authentic conversations where trust can build and agreements can be made. Through tracking restorative actions, we noticed a sharp decline in recidivism. This has been an effective way to build trust and empathy across divides (Aguilar, 2020).

In addition to developing empathy and listening skills through restorative practices, we are also planning to use methods like those described in “The Listening Project” (Way and Nelson, 2018) where we explicitly teach how it looks and feels to be a good listener and to be listened to. This project provides an evidence-based response designed to get at the root of the crisis of connection plaguing middle years students (Way and Nelson, 2018). First, adults will model a rich interviewing process where students aim to gain powerful insights, ‘Golden Nuggets’, about the subject (Way and Nelson, 2018). Students are then tasked with interviewing an adult in the school, then fellow classmates. The project culminates with a presentation of learning about their subject. Students will learn how to be active listeners and be open to the conversation wherever it goes, rather than waiting to respond. If our experience reflects that of those in the study, relationships between interviewer and interviewee will have deepened and they will have begun to see themselves and others as having qualities that they were unaware of (Way and Nelson, 2018).

Checking the effectiveness of the strategies we are using through the data we are collecting will mean looking for evidence of student agency. Middle school students often feel unheard and unseen by adults and can lack a sense of agency. Agency doesn’t emerge in a vacuum or traditional classroom, it emerges in a learning environment where power is distributed, knowledge is democratized, diverse perspectives are welcomed, and students are intellectually and emotionally nourished (Dugan & Safir, 2022).

Dugan and Safir think of agency as having four domains: identity, mastery, belonging, and efficacy. Exploring identity through approaches like “The Listening Project” can provide ways for students to explore their own and their subjects’ ways of being, learning, and knowing in the world. This project places importance on these values. It also allows students to notice that they are not that different from one another and that often people have more in common than differences.

Once students develop their sense of identity, the next domain is to allow for authentic expression of knowledge mastery. When students feel they can share their learning in ways that are true to their own identity, honouring their own special gifts to this world, and are celebrated for it, they demonstrate knowledge of themselves as learners and a profound sense of agency. In order to feel safe enough to share these aspects of their identity, they need to feel a sense of belonging.

Belonging emerges in a classroom characterized by deep and caring relationships (Dugan & Safir, 2022). We see evidence through the actions of our marginalized students that strong relationships to their teachers and the adults in the building can make or break the level of engagement students have in the classroom. As described in Street Data, there is a phenomenon of students being willed not to learn where students resist learning activities because they feel their teachers don’t authentically care about them (Dugan & Safir, 2022). This concept puts to the forefront that students cannot learn if they don’t feel a sense of belonging.

One way to witness students’ lived experience with belonging is to shadow a student for a day. Strategies to do this can be found in Aguilar’s (2020) book, Coaching for Equity, where she provides resources and ways to do this that allow for authentic data collection. We can learn from this experiment what the day-to-day school experience is for students from the margins without having to explicitly ask them. It gives us a ground-level view of the ways students are included, excluded, marginalized, or just plain invisible in their learning environments (Dugan & Safir, 2022).

Finally, once belonging is apparent, agency is about students’ ability to feel they can make a different in the world, their self-efficacy (Dugan & Safir, 2022). Student voice in their learning and appropriate levels of autonomy in what they are learning and/or how they are expressing it can invite them to stand up for what they need in order to learn and shape how they can make a difference.

Dugan and Safir (2022, pgs 104-106) share three specific strategies to help school leaders and classroom teachers measure agency which in turn provides a way to measure the success of the plans discussed in this paper. The strategies shared by Dugan and Safir are summarized below:

1. Administering a ten-question pre and post survey on a 1-4 Likert scale, from strongly agree to disagree with questions like, “My ways of learning are valued here.”, “I feel seen and loved by my teachers.”, “I feel like my classmates care about me.”
2. Conduct agency interviews with a sample of students, asking specific questions. For example, “To what extent do you feel your ways of being and learning are valued here?” and “What ideas do you have to make our school a place where you feel a greater sense of power and agency?”
3. Have students regularly complete a single-point rubric reflection on agency.

One challenge with middle schools generally is the manner in which students and parents are faced with the reality of a profound, often uprooting, transition for two of the three years of a child’s middle school life. In my experience, transience breeds tension and makes it harder to live in the moment. This quick turnover can also provide opportunities to implement new interventions more nimbly than a system where the same group of students attend a school for 4-5 years. Overall, a more inclusive, holistic, and intentional approach to supporting adolescents will soften the edges for what can be a jarring experience for children and families.

The strategies above used to measure student agency provide ways to track progress on the concepts and interventions that I’ve outlined through the inquiry cycle in this paper. These concepts and interventions were selected based on current pedagogical research as it relates to adolescent brain development. By continually revisiting the inquiry cycle and routinely circling back to the Spirals of Inquiry, we hope to inch forward with progress, through actioning a million little positives, relentlessly over time.