400: #evolvingEDdesign: Giving Students Real Agency

Imagine you and I were about to make a dinner together. Now, I bring a love of baking to our project, and a decently strong roast chicken game. But I don't want to dominate the conversation too much. "Let's make roast chicken and vegetables," I say, "and cookies." Your face falls a little. "Oh, but you can choose which vegetables we roast, and what kind of cookies - I have M & Ms AND chocolate chips."

Perhaps you love making bibimbap, tagine, paella, tacos, or BBQ pork. Maybe you've got three Ottolenghi cookbooks in your bag and you were about to suggest a middle eastern buffet followed up by your incredible raspberry jam donuts. Possibly, you spent a year in culinary school before I knew you, and your artisan pizza was legendary among your college friends.

You put all those ideas aside and dutifully don an apron, trying to look OK with the choice between sweet potatoes and carrots, chocolate chips and M & Ms.

But what if I had started the conversation by showing you everything I had in my kitchen, including my rainbow shelf of cookbooks, and asked you what you'd like to make? And how I could help? How would that feel?

Agency is a key word when it comes to education, but it's easy to underestimate its power and think of a few small choices as agency. Today, in our continuing conversation about #evolvingEDdesign, I want to think bigger and wider.

How can we give our students more agency in the classroom, empowering their creativity? Let's dig in.

Throughout this podcast, and the ones to come in this series, I'll be showcasing graphics and displays from the #evolvingEDdesign Toolkit, a vast free resource I made for you.

You can grab it here: https://sparkcreativity.kartra.com/page/evolvingEDdesign

Please share your classroom design stories, questions, photos and ideas with the #evolvingEDdesign hashtag across platforms so we can continue the conversation off the pod!

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