Supporting Student Agency Through Small Moments by Dr. Cindi Koudelka

Supporting Student Agency Through Small Moments

My husband doesn’t buy me flowers on Valentine’s anymore. Perhaps that’s because we’ve been married longer than some of you who are reading this post have been alive, or maybe it’s because I don’t need them. Don’t get me wrong—I loved and appreciated them back in the day, but now I don’t need those kinds of performative gestures to feel valued in our relationship. For me,  it’s the small moments—like when he starts my car for me on a cold snowy morning or he asks me to show him how to upload a video lesson (he is a proud man but not a techy one!) Those seemingly meaningless microcosms of our relationship are the real windows into who we are as a couple and how we support each other so we can be our best selves. 

That support is especially important in this topsy-turvy world that we are currently navigating. Lately, I have found myself wondering how we are sharing that same kind of love and support for our students—not just in performative ways, but  how we are leveraging those small moments to help students succeed. I feel like I’ve had a million conversations throughout this pandemic that focus on grades or students being behind. Sure people have talked about students’ emotional needs, but those conversations feel like roses. It’s a lot of pretty talk that smells nice but it doesn’t take long for the petals to fall off and we are left with the thorny “lost achievement” lament.

Creating Small Moments

Lucy Calkins talks about small moment stories in her Units of Study. She uses a watermelon analogy to help students think about zooming in on the seeds to look at small moments from a bigger event (the watermelon) to help students create more focused and detailed narrative writing. But, my question is—what kinds of small moments are we creating for our students while they are in our classrooms?  Freire notes, “Sometimes a simple, almost insignificant gesture on the part of a teacher can have a profound formative effect on the life of a student.”  Knowledge is often shared through these small moments in spite of our often narrow view of education as limited to formal instruction. I think the pressure placed on teachers to focus on that formal instruction often devalues those small moments that shape our students—their content understandings, their identities, and their engagement in society. 

Honestly, one of the most vivid memories from my own schooling is steeped in a small moment. My friends and I had come in from our third grade recess, and I decided to entertain them by standing at the teacher’s desk and pretending to be her. Unbeknownst to me, she walked in and found me. Rather than yelling or punishing me, she played into my moment and let me lead the class for a few minutes. It was a thoughtful and responsive gesture that helped me understand kindness, gain confidence, and may very well have ultimately led to my career in education. She provided me agency by becoming conspiratorial in my creative inquiry. 

Finding Space for Agency 

The good thing about these gestures is that they don’t take up a lot of space or time. They occur when I greet a student by their name or preferred pronoun, chat with them briefly as they pass through the hall between classes, or offer them opportunities for choice within their assignments. Not only do these moments support students’ social-emotional health and promote positive behavior, but they allow students to problematize the status quo and engage in critical examinations that build on students’ schema of the world and his or her agency. 

However, Neoliberal educational policies that are focused on high-stakes testing limit the opportunity for students to engage with in-depth exploration in school spaces interrogating relevant issues, identity, positioning, or agency.  Students are often positioned in passive consumer roles that do not include them as critical participants or value their voice. Particularly with the added challenges of pandemic teaching, some educators may feel the need to resort to more traditional teaching methods promoting stereotyped characterizations of people from marginalized groups in an environment designed to silence any resistance or chaos. 

Blackburn discusses how “agency, or the ability to exert power, does not necessarily take the shape of school-sanctioned work”. The texts and experiences students encounter in outside spaces, often built around entertainment and political action, function as opportunities for shaping their identity and building capacity for agency. Further, Kundu describes agency as an ability to think critically about how to overcome obstacles. When mentored through a lens of empathy and hope, adolescents develop a network of strategies and resources to successfully navigate those challenges. Why do these experiences so often happen in outside affinity spaces? How can we flip the script so students and teachers have more embedded, natural opportunities for co-intentional learning that leads to transformative growth?  

When we intentionally find space to leverage small moments throughout the day, we support students’ agency which can serve as a form of critical literacy, identity construction or cultural representation, and overcoming obstacles or healing (Filipiak; Mirra).

Turning Small Moments into Big Action

Leveraging small moments is more than just fist bumping students. It is about purposefully creating touchpoints with students about their learning as well as their humanity. It is about including them as valued voices in making decisions. Just today, my youngest son, who is a senior, shared his frustration about juggling classes, college and scholarship applications, and graduation paperwork. He said, “Instead of having seniors get out a week early at the end of the year, we really need a week off in between semesters so we could get some of this paperwork done.”  Imagine if his school would take just 5 minutes talking to their seniors about their needs, they could end up finding solutions to problems they didn’t even know existed. Imagine how much more engaged students would be if they believed their voice would be heard.  

With that in mind, here are ten tips for creating small moments that can be turned into responsive and transformative learning opportunities that humanize our students and support their capacity for agency.

1. Position adolescents as assets by treating them as capable of critical analysis and engage them in rich culturally relevant dialogue across settings. 
2. Curate an inclusive and welcoming environment privileging authentic and diverse student voices incorporating a wide range of sources, inquiry, and community interests. 
3. Provide empathetic and personal feedback—not just on assignments but through quick emails or hall conversations.
4. Take time once a week for “check-ins” or class meetings.
5. Incorporate workshop model or regular workshop days that allow you to have time to conference with individuals or small groups.
6. Incorporate greater amounts of student choice in determining their learning experiences and the formats in which they demonstrate understanding.
7. Engage students with relevant, interactive materials that promote creation and production for a genuine/authentic audience. 
8. Restructure your classroom or the school’s master schedule to eliminate inequities and open opportunities for collaborative teaming.
9. Build time into the schedule for mentorship and informal social learning 
10. My personal favorite – Find a book you think a student might like and put their name on a sticky note on the book. In the moments before class or when you catch them in the hall, hand them the book and say, “I just read/found/came across this book and it made me think of you. See if you like it, because I’d love to chat with you about it.”