Agency: The Case for Competence

In this podcast episode, we discuss competence. We know that children are inherently capable, so we discuss our role in championing students as sense makers. We are joined by Dr. Corey Drake who has some powerful reminders about the importance of recognizing and valuing diverse ways children demonstrate understanding, rather than just focusing on what they can't do. Our conversation underscores the need for educators to shift their mindset to believe in all students' competence and provide multiple avenues for them to showcase their learning.
This is Part 1 of a 2 part episode.





Intro Music:
David Biedenbender
Other Music:
Hyunwoo Kim from Pixabay

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Transcript

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Unknown: 0:00

Okay,

Introduction: 0:01

Okay, now we're recording. So welcome toteach wonder. Yes. Welcome to teach wonder, a podcast hosted by Ashley O'Neill and Julie Cunningham.

Ashley O'Neil: 0:24

I have two brothers. And growing up, thanks to a small, extended family on one side, grandparents who hosted us for a few weeks, it's summertime, with a dismal selection of movies and an abundance of freedom, I also have three cousins who feel like siblings, two sisters and a brother, and now we're all in this age range where we have jobs, we have and we've lost relationships. We have kids, we have pets and bills, and particularly my two cousins and I each have a kid who are about the same age. They're all born within seven months of each other, and as parenting goes, we're just like everybody else. We're trying our best, but we're hitting all these milestones together, and because we grew up together, and now we're watching the growing up of our kids together, it has us all looking at the past and talking about it as we try to make sense of the present, and we're learning a lot about how we experience the same house and the same vacations, but it was so different for each of us, and the one thing that's been standing out to me as we've had these conversations as how we saw each other and how it really mattered. You see, I was the bookworm of the group. I would show up with stacks of books for a week at the cottage, and I would get lovingly teased by everybody there, because we were supposed to spend our time outside, not reading. But I would bring my books anyway. My cousin was also a prolific reader, but we didn't connect over that until we were both in college, because I found out later, he would downplay his love of books when we were there, because it was my thing. I would get asked about what books I was reading all the time. People would assume that I was going off to read whenever I was had a chance by myself, but none of that ever came up for him. Another example, I remember feeling so awkward in my own skin, because I would watch how at ease my other cousin was in hers. I just thought she was so confident and so outgoing and so gregarious, and that wasn't me, but now I know she had her own comparisons ways that she both felt stuck and left wanting, and we both saw each other as a goal we couldn't attain in our own ways. And it's funny, because the kids we're talking about are so many versions of ourselves ago, but also they're not who do I call for advice about money, about kids? Who do I call to ask questions about school? Who do I assume unload the answer when I'm navigating a difficult situation at work? Do I call my cousin because they're the best person for that moment? Maybe, and maybe it's also because that's the part they've played in our family for so long that it's become as good as true. What advice Am I missing when I lean into these patterns that were established while we were still losing our teeth and blowing up birthday candles? I've known my cousins for my whole life, and I'm still learning about the roles and that we played as kids, and how they last for each other and for ourselves. Today, we're talking about this topic. It's been at the forefront a lot at the conversations here in work and on teach wonder. We're talking about the presumption of competence, the presumption that not only are kids capable of making sense of the world, but that they are actively doing it right in front of us, and that sometimes we're getting in our own way of noticing it, and that matters. We've asked our delightful colleague, Corey Drake back as a guest for this conversation. I think we can safely credit her both for giving us the push to start this podcast and to start having these conversations explicitly and intentionally. So it's really special to bring her into this conversation. Today, in our episode, we're going to discuss what we mean by competence, who assigns it, and why does it even matter, and what does competence specifically have to do with agency. But before I start our conversation, I want to be really clear we're not calling into question whether or not kids can or cannot do something that's not even on the table. We know that they can. Our discussion is about what we choose to believe about kids and how it impacts them and the classroom and us really, because we can tell ourselves something for such a long time that it can become true, and that's not something to be taken lightly. I've really enjoyed our conversation today, and I know you will too. Here's Corey,

Dr. Corey Drake: 4:33

if you all would start out by just talking a little bit about the competence framing, and then we could, like, jump in or something,

Ashley O'Neil: 4:40

part of students having agency is feeling like they know what to do when they're given choices. Which comes from feeling competent, right? And we know that students are competent, but whether they feel that is not the same thing. And that begins with how teachers talk to and have. Out and what they believe about students. So to me, it's a big part of agency, because if students don't feel like they can make the decision or have the or do something when they're given the choice, then it just becomes this compounding effect that teachers less likely to give them choice in the future because they, quote, unquote, can't handle it. So that's, that's where I come from.

Julie Cunningham: 5:23

I agree with what you said. And then I was also thinking about this idea of competence. So I always go back to the I don't even know what I did with the book, that book about maker spaces, which is the first time I think I really thought about student agency, especially student agency in a makerspace, and I think that in I'm sure this is true in a classroom as well, but maybe it looks a little different in the classroom, but getting students in the Makerspace or an informal education setting to be competent with their skills and ideas in order to be willing to share them with others, and not because, that's not because we set them in a group for someone to teach the other kids. I don't mean like that, right, but I mean like this, like I feel competent enough to run this piece of equipment or to design this piece of or. And again, I guess that comes back down to Ashley's definition of that feeling of competence, but also so that it's not the person that's facilitating the class who is the only one who has competence, but that competence is valued, Right, owned and valued throughout the class.

Dr. Corey Drake: 6:41

Yeah, that makes sense to me. It's interesting, Ashley, as I was listening to both of you talk, but starting with you, the connection to student agency and student choice, because that's an iterative cycle, a reinforcing cycle. So if I believe you, if I the teacher, believe you the student, are competent, and one way I communicate that to you is by opening up a space where you have agency and you have voice and you have choice. I'm immediately communicating to you that I believe you are competent because I am allowing you to have this voice and this choice, and I believe you can direct your learning, and I believe you can do things, and I believe you can build on what you already know to create new knowledge. So when we think about like, what is competence and who needs to see it and feel it, it's it is this iterative thing where, if I believe you have competence, and I set you up to exercise that competence and to exercise your agency that's communicating to you my belief in your competence, which then, now as a student, I think, Oh, the teacher thinks I can do this. I guess I can, or let me try it, or maybe I can. And then I try it, and then I see what I can do, right? And then those those pieces reinforce. So I think the other piece that's really important about competence is in assigning competence is it's not just about the student, right? Sometimes we say, Oh, we can find strengths in all students. We can find all students brilliance, and that's absolutely true. But oftentimes we leave the content when we do that, and we're like, oh, you know, how are you competent? How are you brilliant? How are you strong in math class? Well, you listen really well to others, which is, like, super important. But unless I'm redefining mathematics learning and teaching and said talking about how listening is a strength that contributes to my learning. I'm almost saying you're not actually competent in math, but you're really good at listening, right? So it has to be these, like two things together, where I'm seeing and assigning and helping you see your competence in ways that are directly related to what does it mean to do math and learn math and be good at math? And so, like, I think those are two important pieces of it, that connection to agency. But also, it's not just about how you think about students, but it's how you think about content, and what it means to learn content and do that content

Ashley O'Neil: 9:18

totally it's like the there's the bucket that we have. We have the content bucket and the content skill of that, and then we have, like, the social nicety, or the make school easy for everyone else, bucket, right? Like, if a good listener can pass out papers really well, can walk down the hallway on their own. And like, like you said, those are important skills, but that that does not contribute to them feeling competent in that class, in math, in ELA, in science, and whatever it is. And in fact, a lot of times kids read, I think they read through those coded language just like we would if we were in some sort of adult pottery class. And I kept being told how helpful I was, like I would get the impression that I'm not so great at the pottery day. Kids get those and they understand those unsaid things really well. I'm pulling part of our conversation out to save for later. So now I have to jump back in and give a little context. When we talk about competence, we're saying that all kids are capable, and we're saying that all kids are capable of doing content, and that can bring up some difficult realizations. So let's start with an example of us as adults. If I had $1 for every time I heard an adult in the makerspace when confronted with a drawing task, say, Well, I'm not good at art. I would have a lot of dollars. And the thing about that statement, I'm bad at art, is that it's meant to lower all of our expectations about that person prior to them even trying, but it actually is doing a whole lot of other things too. It's telling me that maybe you didn't get a robust art program in school, so you didn't get the chance to practice art. It tells me that maybe you didn't like the feeling of clay as it dried in your hands, so you learned to dread all of art in general. So you were pretty disengaged during that class, and you didn't get a chance to practice. Maybe you like to be outside and play games, so you didn't sit down with a pencil and paper often, so you didn't get a chance to practice. Maybe your family didn't have a lot of art supplies sitting around for you to experiment with, so you didn't get a chance to practice. And maybe some or all of these things have led to this moment when you the adult, are asked to draw a dolphin on a piece of paper in our MakerSpace, and you feel like the time when it was socially acceptable to practice drawing a dolphin is long past, so now you're here and your student is looking at you, and you're supposed to draw this dolphin, and you feel like you have to admit that your drawing skills may not match the drawing skills that everybody else has decided would be acceptable for you to display in this moment, even though nobody has articulated what those are, and it's not easy to do something in front of people when that's the case, but none of these things are actually related to your mechanical ability to draw in any way, shape or form. It's all about the history the time you've had to practice, the gap you're feeling between your skill set and what would be expected of you, and the truth about why adults are pausing when we ask them to do art. Yeah, it's more complicated than the can and the can't. It's the same with kids. It does have a lot however, to do with the definition that this person has around good and bad art, and it has a whole lot to do about their prior experiences with art as well. You

Dr. Corey Drake: 12:55

I think that if we do want to jump to equity for a minute, right, I think one of the challenges and opportunities when we think about competence is exactly this right to both think about and support teachers and support students in recognizing the many different ways in which competence is demonstrated and communicated and expressed. And so it's not just about finding the things that you are competent at, but like, what does it mean to notice those as a teacher? What does it mean to make those visible? What does it mean to highlight those? And if we are sticking with, like, the narrow set of competencies that have tended to be valued in mathematics classes, right? That you are fast, that you are quiet, do you raise your hand to give an answer that you don't ask questions, that you know those kinds of things, if we think about that, that you're really good at, like abstract compute, computation and work with numerals versus a visual strengths or spatial strengths. Okay,

Ashley O'Neil: 14:00

so do you remember our bad at art? Example, I think about the adults who've come in here and told me that they're bad at art, and I know for a fact that some of them have beautiful gardens, they have built sturdy shelves or chairs, and they sing in the car on the ride home. They have a knack for picking the perfect paint color for their kitchen, or they have this way of styling outfits that are unexpected and just like work, they've recently acted in a local play, or they teach dance class on the weekends, or they've cliched their favorite superhero for every single cousin in their family for Christmas. That is all very unrelated to the drawing of dolphins, but it sure sounds like art to me. Do

Dr. Corey Drake: 14:40

so if we don't expand what counts as competency in a math class or science class or an English class, and the ways in which competency can be expressed, right, it's not always expressed in writing, on a written text. Test, right? But what does it mean to speak confidently? How do you use gestures? How do you use models? How do you ask questions in ways that demonstrate competency? And where can we find competency? I think that is closely tied to questions of equity and closely tied to being able to recognize competence in somebody who doesn't think, act, speak like I do. What does it mean to see competency in them versus someone who you know, it is very similar to me in a lot of ways. That's a more challenging task,

Ashley O'Neil: 15:38

for sure. I think it also just gets back to that like, Oh, really, it's not basic meaning, like easy, but basic meaning foundational. There is something that happens in your brain when you decide to believe that all the students in your class are sense makers and are competent and capable and and I think about, I hear I hear myself, so I'm not I'm in the group. I'm not saying other people and not me. But when people say like, well, I know what they mean, or like you, when you see that a teacher is giving students lots of leeway time to explain their thinking, because they know that they get it, they just it's they are trying to communicate it. Hate it still, but I would think about the students where I'd say, Well, I know what they meant here, and I know what they meant here, but then what about the students that you didn't say that about, right? And so when you decide to feel that way and to just champion all of your students that way, it really changes and challenges how you think, because now the impetus is on you to be the detective and to challenge yourself to think differently, to catch up with where the students are, rather than saying, I'm the fixed point. Come and come and meet me up here and all the other kids that make sense to me right away, which is a big change.

Dr. Corey Drake: 16:59

I think that is, I think that is like the central shift right from i as teacher, am listening to you, or looking at your work, or seeing what you're doing, and just seeing, does it match mine or not? Does your answer match my answer or not? Does your way of explaining it match mine or not? And that's like, in many ways, a simpler task, but it runs completely counter to this assumption that all students are sense makers. Students are always making sense. Humans are always making sense, and my job is not to see if your way of making sense matches mine, but like you say, to be that detective, to have that stance of curiosity, to say, like, can I understand how you are making sense of this? Because if I can understand that, then I can support you in continuing to build your understanding. But until I can understand how you are making sense, I can't do that and that it that is the fundamental shift from, are you making sense the way I am to, I know you're making sense. I just need to figure out how so I can help you build on that.

Ashley O'Neil: 18:11

And I know it sounds so basic and so like, is that really necessary? And I truly think it is, but in my brain, I really work on practicing saying those things, either out loud or in my head out loud, you know what I mean? Like just walking through that, just like people say, you know, mantras in the morning, or that type of thing, and that's really powerful for them and changes their day. Articulating that to yourself repeatedly, like this child is coming from a perspective that is valued and make sense to them and matters, it's my job to figure out what that is, rather than getting them in my lane over here saying that regularly makes a huge difference. And so oftentimes I see people or it can be easy to like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we know that, yep. But then, like, that's as far as it goes. Like, we all disagree, and then we move on. But are we actually practicing that out loud and in our heads? And that gets a little at this question of, like, what strategies do we use to promote competence? Because I think it starts internally and then moves outward. It's one of those things where you can't bulletin board your way to a solution here, like it has to start inside. So what? When you think about it, what are some of the some of the strategies that you think about when it comes to promoting competence?

Dr. Corey Drake: 19:27

Also, I think you're exactly right. I do think it starts internally with teachers and recognizing that every child, every human, is making sense and is competent, and our job is to figure out how, figure out what things mean to them, and like I say, help them build on that. Because if you go in with the other stance, which is our traditional stance, of, does your sense making match mine or not? Let's say we do that, and let's say it doesn't, then what do I do? Right? Well, then I. Try to tell you again how I'm making sense to see if you can match it, to see if Lillian doll would say, to see if you can mimic it. But at that point you have no opportunities left for sense making, right? I've cut off your your opportunities for sense making. So I do think it is just reminding ourselves of that constantly. But it's also shifting our language right? It's shifting our language from, you know, of course, from like, this is right or this is wrong, or here's what you missed, or here's what you haven't done yet, to what do you what do you see that the child can do? What are they doing? What can you build on? What do they know? What are they able to do? Right? You know, you all have heard me say many, many times. I may have said it on this podcast before, in fact, that you can't learn by building on things you don't know. Learning happens by building on and connecting to things you do know and things you can do already. And so that's another piece I remind myself of constantly. It does not help me as a teacher. It does not help my student as a learner. For me to spend all my time looking at what they don't know or what they didn't get that won't get me anywhere, that won't get the student anywhere. Ultimately, what I need to figure out is, what do they understand, and then how do we build from there? And that's so critically important. But I think the reason you and I and everyone who made the shift has to keep making the shift is that our system pushes against it in so many ways. Right? Our assessment systems, our curriculum systems, our special education systems, like all of our systems, still are grounded in figuring out what students can't do and figuring out what students don't know, versus focusing on competence and what students do know. And so as individuals, though, we're trying to change systems, we're trying to push against systems, but it is having that constant reminder to yourself that when I look at a piece of student work, when I sit down with a child and talk to them, what I want to know is, what do you understand? How are you making sense of the world? What experiences are you bringing to this? What questions are you asking? And then I can help you figure out how to build on those and build new understandings based on what you already know and can do.

Unknown: 22:26

So I want to just go backwards for a second. Just I want to make sure that our listeners are with us, and that when we talk about like Classroom Strategies, that we're also talking about ways that we can change ourselves and our thinking, but also potentially ways in which this might play out as a classroom instructor. So if I go back to the question of who assigns competence, I just want to make sure that we're we're all on the same page, so we're saying that it's not the teacher up in front of the classroom that's assigning the competence. It's the student who's deciding how they're going to get there. That's the agency to gain the competence, to demonstrate their competence for the teacher, I think it goes whatever way makes sense to them. No, I

Ashley O'Neil: 23:16

think it goes one step further to just say, like everyone is competent, that is just a blanket fact, and it's our job as educators to buy into that fact, right, and to and to perpetuate and reinforce that fact out there.

Unknown: 23:34

But if we're asking them to demonstrate a piece of content back as competence, right? Like, if we're saying like, you need to show me that you can multiply single numbers or whatever, right? That's the that's the competency piece. So we're assuming that all of our students are competent and able to do that. But at some level, they have to demonstrate in some way their sense making for that, right,

Dr. Corey Drake: 24:06

yes, but I would say, if I was in a classroom and I thought a student had not yet demonstrated what they understood or what they could Do in relation to that, that as the educator that just means I have more work to do to open up those opportunities for students to demonstrate their competence. So maybe I'm not asking the right questions, maybe I'm not opening up the space enough or communicating enough that I value lots of different ways of making sense, so they're reluctant to share how they're making sense, right? So even when a student is not yet demonstrating their competence with a particular piece of content, it still does not mean that they're not competent. It means that I have yet to uncover that competence and connect to it and build on it.

Julie Cunningham: 24:59

so that. Was the second part of my question. I was yes. So then the strategy in the classroom becomes offering students a number of different opportunities to demonstrate that they've made sense of the multiplication or whatever it is, whatever the skill or piece of content. So, so if we're talking about strategies for classroom teachers, first a mindset, an individual mindset, right, that everyone in their classroom is competent, and reminding themselves, that's what I'm hearing both of you talk about, but then additionally, making sure that there's multiple avenues and multiple ways in which a student can demonstrate to you that they've made sense of whatever it is you've asked them,

Dr. Corey Drake: 25:51

yes, and I was multiple ways of making sense, and then multiple and also multiple ways of demonstrating or communicating that they've made sense and how they've made sense so but yeah, absolutely, I think that's the heart of it. Because I could, as a teacher, say, I believe all of you can do this. I believe you're all sense makers, and then I could give you one way that's the right way to solve this problem and one way to explain it to me. Or I could even open up the classroom to multiple students explaining how they solved it. But you know, when Ashley solves it, it's not really the way I'm looking for so I'm like, Uh huh, good. Julie solves it, and that's the way I'm looking for it. So now let's really dig into that, and let's highlight that right? Again, I'm not com, I'm not communicating then that I value each of your competence in the same way. So it is opening up those opportunities and communicating through your actions that you really do value and really are curious about the ways each of your students is making sense of that content you

Julie Cunningham: 27:08

This likely will not surprise you, but we have more to say on this topic. So much more, in fact, that we split this episode up into two parts. We will be bringing you the second portion of this conversation with Corey soon. In the meantime, here's a quick recap of this conversation as there's a lot here to engage with and think about competence as we're talking about it is the capacity and potential inside of a person. People and kids are people have the potential to do so many things. We know that kids are innately curious and are actively making sense of the world around them. When students are supported by the adults, they are more willing to try new things and test their thinking. We see this in the makerspace every time we hold a program where there are open ended problem solving opportunities, ie all of our programs. A couple examples come to mind, however, such as invention convention, when kids identify a need, do some research on the products which exist to solve the need and then prototype their own solution. Or in the makerspace, when kids engage with new tools, whether they are traditional tools or technological tools, they need scaffolding and supports to be successful. And even very young kids are finally if we think back to Episode One on agency, one way in which we can promote agency with our students is to give them choice. I want to end with a quote that I heard recently, so let's keep in mind as we continue this conversation that we can change how we get there if we have agency, we.