Now that we have considered the structures that support adult well-being, let’s focus on the conditions that support student well-being and agency.

Spark: Inquiry Activity

As you read the following quote from Dr. Dena Simmons, consider this question:

What conditions support students to thrive and become change-makers and leaders in the school ecosystem?

SEL has tremendous potential to create the conditions for youth agency and civic engagement and, ultimately, social change. We owe our students an education that centers on their lives and explicitly addresses the sociopolitical context. This will not only prepare our students to engage civically and peacefully across differences, but also to become the changemakers and leaders we need.”

- Dr. Dena Simmons, 2019

Step 1: Read

Transformative SEL invites students to develop skills not only for their individual success and community-building but also to participate in, improve, and change institutions and systems for the better. Explore the conditions for student Transformative SEL with a focus on student voice by reading and reflecting on the excerpt from "Street Data: A Next-Generation Model for Equity, Pedagogy, and School Transformation" by Shane Shafir and Dr. Jamila Dugan below.

PDF - Shifting from a Pedagogy of Compliance to a Pedagogy of Voice

Step 2: Explore

Teachers committed to embodying Transformative SEL see students as possessing inherent value and wisdom and value their agency and voice (which includes non-verbal ways to communicate). Select the pop-up boxes below to review different ways to support student voice and agency. You can expand each box by dragging the bottom right-hand corner with your mouse. To close each box, select the X in the top right-hand corner.

Prioritize Student Voice Shift the cognitive lift to students by designing lessons where they have most of the learning time for reflection, peer-to-peer discussion and independent work.	Create a Culture of Inquiry Invite students’ authentic questions about themselves, each other and the world. Then, consider designing lessons, assessments or units around the questions they pose.
Center Reflection and Revision Create routines and rituals around reflection and revision to shift your role from “expert lecturer to expert coach” (Shafir, 2021), where your job is to build students’ capacity and knowledge.	Make Learning Public Give students an authentic audience by inviting them to teach their peers or students from a lower grade or to share their learning with family or community members in an end-of-unit showcase.
Explore the Use of Circles Consider reshaping your classroom by using circles (rather than defaulting to rows) to encourage equity of voice and coming together for dialogue.	Cultivate Action Provide opportunities for students to reflect upon and understand the root cause of inequities before taking civic action to challenge the systems that lead to inequities.

Try It Out!

Pause to consider which of these pedagogical approaches you already engage in, and which you might like to try in your own classroom or school context. Why did you select this approach to try? What do you hope might shift after trying this approach?