Teacher Tips: Student Empowerment
By Spencer Burrows
As teachers move away from the‘ sage on the stage’ role towards a facilitator in the classroom, we are always striving to empower students in their learning and impart agency in the educational process. But that begs the question— how to best empower students in their learning?
Emerging from the pandemic, it has been an uneven transition back to full speed academics and school function. Accordingly, students are still finding their footing in academic performance, study skills, and their roles as students. That makes it even more important for educators to find meaningful ways to grant agency to the students. The articles in this issue of Connections give some great tips on student empowerment and agency:
The Power of Autonomy: Building Self-Efficacy, Connection, and Inner Motivation
• In practice we often sacrifice highminded principles and whole-child education in the race to prepare students for the next steps ahead, and forget that what students need most from schools are environments that support self-efficacy, connection, and inner motivation.
• One helpful framework for remembering these important goals of education is Self Determination Theory( SDT), which posits three basic psychological needs all humans share across ages and cultures: competence, relatedness, and autonomy.
The Importance of Experiential Learning and Reflection in Building Student Empowerment and Leadership
• Educators can offer an experiential brand of leadership education that prioritizes the use of the pedagogical tool of reflection as an antidote to disillusionment, an opportunity to empower, and a way to help students better understand and feel a sense of agency about their place in the world.
• The study of leadership provides students the opportunity to better understand their strengths, weaknesses, how they relate to others, and their relationship to the larger community.
• The leadership class at Episcopal High School( EHS) focuses on topics such as leadership traits, types, leader follower interaction, organizational culture, communication, and ethics.
From Compliance to Empowerment: Shaping Confident, Critical Thinkers
• Empowering students to understand the reasons behind community expectations, while also being open to adjusting expectations that may not be reasonable or are outdated, will help them build stronger moral courage and better prepare them to navi-
Page 34 Summer 2025 CSEE Connections