Transformational Learning Principle
Empower—Ignite Agency: Educators use a mix of learner-led approaches and flexible learning formats to encourage student agency and exploration. Students have opportunities to follow their own intellectual pursuits, take risks, make discoveries, challenge assumptions, and build lifelong learning skills.
The Information Age was about getting smart—building knowledge and skills to harness the transition from information scarcity to information abundance. Now, the Age of Artificial Intelligence is about igniting agency—the capacity to take initiative, make decisions, and exert control over actions and circumstances.
Agency is a blend of self-efficacy, determination, and a sense of ownership over one’s path. People with strong agency set goals and pursue them with confidence, even in the face of obstacles. In the last several months, AI systems have gotten so useful that leading experts suggest agency is what will set humans apart.
In February 2025, Andrej Karpathy, one of the world’s top AI researchers, posted on X: “Agency > Intelligence.” He explained: “I had this intuitively wrong for decades, I think, due to a pervasive cultural veneration of intelligence, various entertainment/media, obsession with IQ, etc. Agency is significantly more powerful and . . . scarce. Are you hiring for agency? Are we educating for agency?”
Reacting to Karpathy’s claim in a podcast, Paul Roetzer, CEO of Marketing AI Institute, said: “People with high agency don’t just let life happen to them. They actively shape it. They combine self-efficacy, determination, and ownership over their path.”
“Now, the idea here is that with AI, everyone’s going to get more of this type of agency by default,” Roetzer added. “But also, as AI handles increasingly complex cognitive tasks, intelligence becomes a commodity. It’s basically on tap. So really, the only true differentiator [is] agency. As a result, we need to be prioritizing agency in everything we do” (2025).
Fortunately, agency-building has a snowball effect. LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, coauthor of Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future (Authors Equity, 2025), explains: “An often underappreciated part of our AI era is that everyone will get more agency by default. The benefits will stack, cascading through society and compounding into a 1000x acceleration of human progress. . . . As individuals gain more agency, they, in turn, empower others, creating a chain reaction of autonomy, decision-making power, and innovation” (Hoffman, 2025).
These noted business leaders all agree that as access to expertise in the form of third-generation large language models (LLMs) and reasoning engines grows, agency that animates problem solving is the new superpower. This superpower has the potential to augment what a person can do exponentially, and our education systems play a key role in helping young people cultivate this sense of what’s possible.
What Is Learner Agency and Why Is It Important?
Traditional models of education, focused on knowledge accumulation in environments of passive compliance, have yielded widespread disengagement. The solution, says Rebecca Winthrop, author of The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better (Crown, 2025), is a greater focus on agency and engagement: “Our sort of big argument is it’s really time to move from an age of achievement to an age of agency in education” (Tavenner & Horn, 2025).
Charles Fadel, author of Education for the Age of AI: Why, What, and How Should Students Learn for the Age of Artificial Intelligence? (2024), argues that it’s time to prioritize the “drivers” of learning: agency, identity, purpose, and motivation. With answers readily available online and through AI, he notes, students are increasingly questioning the value of personal effort, wondering, Why do I need to work hard?
“To motivate them,” Fadel explains, “we have to pay attention to their identity and belonging, their agency and growth mindset, and their purpose and passions (Vander Ark, 2024).”
The belief and drive to learn and achieve are built on intrinsic motivation and are fostered through engagement and relationships. Learning environments that value curiosity, enable voice and choice, and empower personalized pathways develop students’ agency and related dispositions of efficacy, self-determination, and adaptability.
Agentic learning in the age of AI is not just problem solving but learning to find problems worth solving.
Traditional education models focus on recalling the right answers to small questions. Now that everyone is empowered with intelligent copilots, educators can focus on asking better questions and imagining new possibilities. Agentic learning in the age of AI is not just problem solving but learning to find problems worth solving; not just preparation (just-in-case learning) but contribution—creating value for your community while engaging in real-world learning. Agentic learning is deeper learning.
Developing Agency Through Deeper Learning
The concept of learner agency is embedded in Michael Fullan’s extensive work on deep learning, education reform, and student empowerment. In Deep Learning: Engage the World Change the World (2017), Fullan underscores the importance of cultivating a sense of ownership over one’s learning. When students are actively involved in shaping their learning experiences, he maintains, their engagement and motivation soar. “Students have untapped potential but given voice and choice through deep learning, we see them influencing dramatic changes to organizations, society, and pedagogy,” Fullan writes (p. 48).
Fullan has been helping the Anaheim Union High School District in California create personalized pathways and deep community-connected learning experiences that bring the 5 C’s (a.k.a. global competencies)—communication, collaboration, critical thinking, creativity, and compassion—to life.
To emphasize agency and opportunity, AUHSD’s district-wide vision is based on the unlimited potential of all students (AUHSD Communications, 2019). In support of this vision, Anaheim Union partnered with the eKadence Learning Foundation and UC Irvine to co-develop a deep learning platform with embedded AI tools. This collaborative approach ensures that the AI output that’s generated is contextually relevant, accurate, and aligned with the district’s learning goals. Students use the platform to reflect on their growth and capture evidence of progress on the five global competencies. After completing projects or units, students feed their reflections into the system, and AI generates feedback for both the student and their teacher.
In the United States, the deeper learning movement seeks to fight the disempowering test-prep trend with examples of relevant, applied, agentic learning and high-quality performance assessment. High Tech High, a San Diego charter school network, espouses the deeper learning design principles of equity, personalization, authentic work, and collaborative design. Teachers often team up to design projects that “make the city the text” (Liebtag, 2017).
The High Tech High website features student projects and publications (www.hightechhigh.org/student-work/projects) that provide evidence of deeper learning. The High Tech High Graduate School of Education also shares Project Cards with adaptable templates for every subject and grade level.
“Designing learning experiences that engage young people in the community and with the community early on is the crux of deeper learning,” explains Kali Frederick, learning designer at the High Tech High Graduate School of Education (Vander Ark, 2025).
Frederick has been working with the AI platform Inkwire to help teachers identify community-focused projects and local partners in a dynamic and personalized way. “A teacher who is not used to reaching out to the community might have questions about [the process],” says Frederick. “When they put some of the ideas they have for a project into the tool, but the community partners [aren’t already identified], they can ask AI. AI starts to give all these beautiful ideas of who they could possibly reach out to in their community. That’s the confidence-building that we start to see.”
Another example of deeper learning emerged back in 1996 when the Napa Valley Unified School District in California opened a small project-based high school. By 2000, the school’s success had spurred the development of the national New Tech Network (NTN), an association of 350 schools practicing team-taught project-based learning. The NTN Student Learning Outcomes—oral and written communication, knowledge and thinking, collaboration, and agency—are assessed for each project, and students are provided with regular feedback on their growth and challenges in these focus areas. It is a strong example of promoting and assessing deeper learning through high-quality performance assessment at scale.
Igniting and supporting student agency is the new education agenda.
NTN defines agency as “students’ innate capacity to make decisions, set goals, and plan and carry out next steps based on ever-increasing funds of knowledge.” NTN provides teachers with several foundational questions to evaluate whether they are activating agency in the classroom, including:
- How can I design learning experiences that lift up different cultures, identities, backgrounds, and experiences?
- How can I adjust my classroom environment to better support student agency? What policies, structures, or supports do I need to put into place?
- What do I need to explicitly teach? What do I need to explicitly model? What do we need to explicitly practice?
- Where can I give students opportunities to self-assess and reflect?
- Have I created opportunities for students to reflect on their goals, what might prevent them from reaching their goals, and what steps they might need to take? (NTN, 2024)
Finally, in Kansas City, a deeper learning initiative focuses on curating powerful learning experiences. Real World Learning (2024) is an effort from 85 high schools in the metro Kansas City area where students participate in unique learning opportunities like client-connected projects, work internships, and entrepreneurial experiences. These industry-focused experiences, or Market Value Assets, develop students’ agency, identity, purpose, and motivation. Each one entails a meaningful project, student agency, practical application, skill development, and professional networking opportunities.
Powering Human Potential
The AI era demands an agentic response. It is the responsibility of our education system to help learners know what’s possible in the age of co-intelligence and AI-augmented human performance. When paired with deeper learning, this access and awareness facilitates the development of priority competencies and learner agency. This level of agency will be evident when all learners have the opportunity to:
- Co-design community-connected projects and conduct entrepreneurial experiences using smart tools.
- Make learning pathway choices that include work-based learning experiences.
- Experience success in the arts, extracurriculars, and leadership roles in school and in the community.
Igniting and supporting student agency is the new education agenda.
Reflect & Discuss
➛ How do your teaching practices either foster or inhibit student agency? What specific changes could you make to strengthen students’ abilities to take initiative, make decisions, and control their learning?
➛ Agentic learning is “learning to find problems worth solving.” How might you redesign your curriculum to help students identify and address meaningful community problems?
➛ How could you integrate AI tools into your classroom while developing the “human capacity for agency” that will differentiate students in the AI age?
