Teaching to Empower

Taking Action to Foster Student Agency, Self-Confidence, and Collaboration

Debbie Zacarian, Michael Silverstone

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781416628576
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

We want students to master academic standards, and we want them to be confident, adaptive, and socially responsible. Above all, we want them to find meaning and satisfaction in their lives. Achieving these goals requires a concerted focus on the social-emotional skills that empower students in and beyond the classroom.

In Teaching to Empower, Debbie Zacarian and Michael Silverstone explore what an empowered student looks like in our increasingly diverse contemporary schools and prompt educators to examine their own relationship to empowerment. The book's evidence-based strategies and authentic examples show you how to foster an inclusive culture of agency, self-confidence, and collaboration that will give each of your students—regardless of race, culture, language, socioeconomic status, abilities, sexuality, or gender—the opportunity, responsibility, and tools to become an active learner, thoughtful community member, and engaged global citizen. Whether you're a preservice teacher, a classroom novice, or a veteran, you'll find the practical guidance you'll need to* Create inclusive and empowering physical learning spaces.
* Set up self-directed learning and promote positive interdependence.
* Promote student self-reflection.
* Teach the skills of collaboration.
* Foster the self-advocacy that fuels deeper, more autonomous learning.
* Partner more effectively with families and the community to support student empowerment.

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Chapter 1

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What Does an Empowered Student Look Like?

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When we provide professional development and ask teachers to describe what an empowered student looks like, they often offer the examples of heroic young people like Malala Yousafzai and Emma Gonzalez, both of whom spoke up for themselves and for others, raising international awareness about the social issues and discrimination that they had faced firsthand.

Both of these names are probably familiar to you. In 2012, at the age of 15, Malala Yousafzai survived an assassination attempt by a member of the Taliban in Swat Valley, Pakistan (Malala Fund, 2018). She was targeted in response to her persistent defiance of the Taliban's ban on female education. At great personal risk, Malala used social networking to let the world know what was happening under Taliban rule, and she became widely known for her relentless pursuit of girls' right to an education. At the age of 17, she became the youngest-ever recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, recognized for her activist efforts. In February 2018, 18-year-old Emma Gonzalez sheltered with classmates in her school's auditorium during a shooting rampage at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Just two days after the shooting, she delivered a passionate and persuasive personal statement at a gun control rally. Subsequently, Emma helped to lead massive student and teacher walkouts in the United States and elsewhere, demanding legislative protection from gun violence.

While these two are known to millions, there are countless everyday examples of students in our classrooms who have taken stands for themselves and their own right to self-determination, for their classmates and communities, and for what they feel is right. In this chapter, we explore the interconnected attributes of empowered students—their habits, traits, and mindsets—and examine how these attributes support positive outcomes in their learning and beyond. We'll do this by considering the following topics, for the following reasons:

• The dynamically changing definition of an empowered student. Historical context sheds important light on our current practices and values.
• Critical factors in diverse classroom contexts. These factors must guide how we tailor education practice to serve changing student populations.
• Preconditions for student empowerment. These set the stage for successful autonomous and collaborative learning.
• The intersection of personal responsibility and social interaction. Exploring this topic clarifies how students can share responsibility for creating a safe and empathetic community focused on the greater good.
• Empowerment through adaptation. Our students must be able to successfully respond to ever-changing environments.

Student empowerment is a complex concept that has evolved over time. To understand it more thoroughly, we need to grasp both its historical meaning and its current definition and application in contemporary education. A first step toward taking action to help all our students to be empowered is to explore what we mean by an empowered student.

The Dynamically Changing Definition of an Empowered Student

Let's dig a little deeper into why Malala Yousafzai and Emma Gonzalez might so frequently be offered as examples of empowered students. We would argue that their empowerment is rooted in two factors: personal action and collective responsibility. Both of these young women seized opportunities to gain a sense of control and assert agency in decisions that affected their lives. They took initiative, acting with confidence and autonomy. Drawing on personal experience, they identified a collective need in the public sphere. They bore responsibility and made contributions to a collective good.

While Malala Yousafzai and Emma Gonzalez are singularly dramatic examples of empowered students, all students possess the potential to take ownership of their own learning and choices by applying the skills and knowledge that they have acquired through personal experience (Gauvain, 2001, 2013; Rogoff, 2003). This can take many forms, such as deciding what independent study to undertake, raising a hand to state an opinion, seeking help, asking questions, and expressing needs. Each of these are examples of actions students take when they feel able to exercise their own agency in their particular situation.

The examples of Malala and Emma clearly illustrate how empowerment is commonly seen today as a combination of autonomy and collaboration. This is something of a departure from past views. The student's traditional role has been obediently following a set of explicit and implicit expectations, rules, and directives handed down by authorities. Present-day examples include high school students following a school schedule that's controlled to the minute, completing assigned and monitored tasks, and participating in mandatory examinations. Expectations like these date from the early days of a universal public education, the point of which was to help all students acquire the skills and dispositions necessary to promote the acquisition of knowledge and involved citizenry (Alexander & Alexander, 2011; Labaree, 2011).

Underlying the foundation of a universal education was the assumption that children were empty vessels who would receive the knowledge, attitudes, and moral leanings presented to them by teachers, who acted as stand-ins for their parents and religious authorities. Indeed, when public schools began in the United States in the 1800s, they reflected an uncritical and unwavering English Protestant doctrine, with moral lessons embedded in the curriculum. Consider these reading exercises from McGuffey's Eclectic Reader, the most common school textbook of the 19th century:

12. When Ralph found that he could not have the white rose, he began to scream, and snatched it. But he was soon very sorry. The thorns tore his hand. It was so sore he could not use it for some time.

13. Ralph did not soon forget this. When he wanted what he should not have, his mother would point to his sore hand. He at last learned to do as he was told. (McGuffey, 1879)

In those days, students were expected to learn through "quiet attention, obedience to teachers, and recalling and repeating material" (Cohen, 1988, p. 12). They would have been expected to exhibit the characteristics listed in Figure 1.1, because those were the attributes that they would need to achieve those goals.

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Figure 1.1. Descriptors of Virtuous Students in 19th Century Classrooms

Acquiescent
Adherent
Compliant
Deferential
Docile
Dutiful
Obedient
Observant
Passive
Respectful
Reverential
Submissive
Subservient
Unquestioning

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It was in the first half of the 20th century that our contemporary sense of an empowered student took root. Educational scholar and reformer John Dewey advocated for a revolutionary model of education, proposing that a public school enterprise should be a place of vision, discovery, intellectual challenge, adventure, and excitement—a place where "all individuals have the opportunity to contribute something, and in which the activities in which all participate are the chief carrier of control" (Dewey, 1938, p. 56). This dramatic shift to learning by doing rather than learning through a lecture model called for cooperative classrooms where teachers would limit or reduce their all-knowing authority and elevate students' contributions as highly valuable and necessary to promote the ideals of social responsibility in a democracy.

Following this train of thought, if we use Dewey's thinking to guide our thinking about the characteristics of an empowered student, we wind up with a very different set of descriptors (see Figure 1.2).

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Figure 1.2. Descriptors of Collaborative Students in Post-Dewey Classrooms

Adaptable
Artistic
Collaborative
Committed
Courageous
Confident (or self-confident)
Creative
Daring
Determined
Energetic
Experimental
Extroverted
Flexible
Generous
Honest
Honorable
Humble
Humorous
Industrious
Insightful
Intuitive
Knowledgeable
Loyal
Mindful
Nonjudgmental
Observant
Open-minded
Outspoken
Passionate
Perseverant
Problem-solving
Resilient
Respectful
Self-controlled
Validating
Valued
Witty

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Among the terms in Figure 1.2 are several that earlier generations of educators would recognize as student virtues. But notice how many skew active rather than passive and how many seem collaborative and creative rather than receptive. It is not that the post-Dewey shift in philosophy completely abandoned the norms or mission of the past; the teaching profession simply expanded its definition of empowerment to be broader and more complex.

Time for Reflection

1. Which of the words in Figure 1.2 would you use to describe an empowered student? Before you circle your choices, think about how each characteristic might factor into autonomous learning and collaborative pursuit of a group goal.
2. Now look back to Figure 1.1 and circle the words there that describe an empowered student. What type of overlap do you note in the words you circled in both figures?

When we (Debbie and Michael) completed this reflection task, we found that many words from both lists fit our concept of an empowered student, among them observant and respectful (i.e., students who can learn effectively from seeing models and are considerate of the needs of others) from the first list and adaptable, daring, flexible, mindful, and open-minded from the second. This collection of terms illustrates how the phrase empowered student represents a paradox in contemporary education. Today's students are expected to be autonomous yet collaborative, and they are to make the most of their individual contributions toward the common good while also working within the explicit and implied rules set forth by their learning communities.

Critical Factors in Diverse Classroom Contexts

Before going any further, we must acknowledge the long-standing barriers to empowerment that many students face. Prior to the landmark Brown v. Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1954, a K–12 public school education was not applied equally and equitably across minority and underrepresented populations; it was mostly for white Americans (Flores, 2017).

The 1960s marked a major shift in educational practices to address entrenched inequities. President Lyndon Johnson began what he called a War on Poverty, and his administration implemented the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which earmarked funds to better serve students from poor and underrepresented communities (Stone, 2009). Many seminal Supreme Court cases were brought forth during the 1960s to address the inequality experienced by the nation's students who were poor, nonwhite, non-native English speakers, and homeless, as well as students with disabilities (Alexander & Alexander, 2011; Stanford University, n.d.). In his research on social recognition, Peter Gabel (2018), a public interest lawyer and theorist, describes these unification efforts as transformative toward the mutually agreed-upon societal shift toward social justice and equity in the United States. They signaled a new role for student empowerment and an elevated responsibility for attending to it.

Across U.S. rural, suburban, and urban communities, the school-age population continues to diversify, and with this shift has come a good deal of research documenting the value of student collaboration. Almost 100 years after Dewey's philosophical contributions on the importance of students' contributions, we have significant scientific evidence showing cooperative learning to be an invaluable method of supporting autonomous learning and citizenry in a democratic society. It is especially effective in diverse student populations (Cohen & Lotan, 2014). However, a teacher limiting his or her direct authority and giving students cooperative learning tasks is no guarantee that students will take the initiative and assume responsibility for their learning, let alone the responsibility of supporting their peers' efforts to learn. Students' success in cooperative learning environments depends on an array of factors involving the skills and agreements that allow for autonomy and collaboration. An essential one is students' perceptions of their own status as well as the status of others (Cohen & Lotan, 2014).

Social psychologist Claude Steele (2010) researched a phenomenon called stereotype threat, which is what certain groups of students can feel when they perceive themselves to be in an ethnic, racial, cultural, economic, or gender group that is not expected to show mastery or success. Steele found that, without intervention, stereotype threat has a significantly negative effect on student outcomes. Given this finding, it's educators' responsibility to intervene—to intentionally provide a certain set of conditions that disrupt stereotype threat and promote student empowerment. According to Steele, when students perceive themselves or others as largely incapable of being successful in school, this prediction is likely to beco...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Praise for Teaching to Empower
• Introduction
• 1. What Does an Empowered Student Look Like?
• 2. Starting with Ourselves
• 3. Creating a Physical Environment That Supports Empowerment
• 4. Self-Directed Learning and Positive Interdependence
• 5. Student Self-Reflection
• 6. The Skills of Collaboration
• 7. Self-Advocacy
• 8. Extending Voice to Families and Communities
• Acknowledgments
• References
• Study Guide
• Related ASCD Resources
• About the Authors
• Copyright