If decisions about education policy and practice started by asking what works for the child, how would resources—time, space, and human—be arrayed to ensure each child's success? If the student were truly at the center of the system, what could we achieve?"
—The Learning Compact Redefined: A Call to Action, ASCD, 2007
This quote set the basis and helped launch our ASCD Whole Child approach to education in 2007. The chart below matches four tenets of the Whole Child approach with indicators for schools to assess their Whole Child efforts. It focused attention on the child and flipped the educational equation to place that learner at the center. Taking this child-centered focus to the next level would mean empowering students as coagents in their own education. This means not just providing "choices of three projects," for example, but truly engaging them as co-constructors of how they learn as well as what they learn. And as the student's role changes, so must the teachers: The teacher's role becomes more one of pedagogical expert and learning curator and less of content deliverer.
Advancing agency in this way helps students develop self-direction skills and the ability to navigate challenges and solve problems.
Key Whole Child Indicators on Student Empowerment
Whole Child Spotlight: On Student Empowerment-table
Safe | 10 | Our teachers and staff develop and implement academic and behavioral interventions based on an understanding of child and adolescent development and learning theories. |
|---|---|---|
| Engaged | 1 | Our teachers use active learning strategies, such as cooperative learning and project-based learning. |
| Engaged | 2 | Our school offers a range of opportunities for students to contribute to and learn within the community at large, including service learning, internships, apprenticeships, and volunteer projects. |
| Engaged | 3 | Our school policies and climate reinforce citizenship and civic behaviors by students, family members, and staff and include meaningful participation in decision making. |
| Engaged | 5 | Each student in our school has access to a range of options and choices for a wide array of extracurricular and cocurricular activities that reflect student interests, goals, and learning profiles. |
| Engaged | 6 | Our curriculum and instruction promote students' understanding of the real world, global relevance, and application of learned content. |
| Engaged | 8 | Our staff works closely with students to help them monitor and direct their own progress. |
| Supported | 5 | Our school staff understands, and makes curricular, instructional, and school improvement decisions, based on child and adolescent development and student performance information. |
| Challenged | 2 | Our curriculum and instruction provide opportunities for students to develop critical-thinking and reasoning skills, problem-solving competencies, and technology proficiency. |
| Challenged | 5 | Our school works with families to help all students understand the connection between education and lifelong success. |
| Challenged | 6 | Our curriculum and instruction include evidence-based strategies to prepare students for further education, career, and citizenship. |
| Challenged | 7 | Our extracurricular, cocurricular, and community-based programs provide students with experiences relevant to higher education, career, and citizenship. |
Visit www.ascd.org/whole-child for more information on the indicators.
Your school can advance student agency by adopting a Whole Child approach to education. Get more information on ASCD's Whole Child tenets and the new Whole Child Network at www.ascd.org/whole-child.
