Unknown

>> I will be kicking it off. I'm Rebecca Winthrop. We are really excited to be here to talk to you about a topic that is near and dear to my heart, Student agency. And I will be, uh, telling you a little bit what we hope to share with you, um, this hour that we have together. We have three main goals. The first one you see on the screen there is really to say, uh, what student agency looks like concretely in terms of how kids engage in their learning. The next one is how we can support

student agency. And the third one is really why we need to invest in supporting student agency in and outside of the classroom. And this is something I'm going to frame up. Um, based on a new book I have out, um, called The Disengaged Teen helping kids learn better, feel better, and live better. My co-author, Jenny Anderson, is here at South By but is doing another session as we speak. But we do have a book signing at 1 p.m. later, and I've gotten several requests from colleagues over the last two days for a study guide and

materials related to the book, which I'm happy to share. We usually give them to schools and districts where we do book talks and workshops, but Kayla has a blue notebook and she can pass it around. You can put your emails in there and we'll collect that later. So what do we mean by student agency and student engagement? We did extensive research, including with a great partnership with Brookings and Transcend to really investigate this question of why kids don't like school that much. And we found that kids really don't like school that much. In grade three,

75% of kids say they love school, and by grade ten, it flips. And only 25% of kids say they love school. And one of the things that we found was so, you know, sort of one of the driving reasons of why kids really don't like school is that they're deeply disengaged. And we know very rigorous research, multiple decades, that student engagement is incredibly important for all the things that we care about. If we care about student attendance and chronic absenteeism, we have to care about student engagement. If we care about student achievement, we have to

care about student engagement. If we care about kids mental health and well-being, we have to care about student engagement. And one of the insights that we found in this research process is that so often we are so busy in our classrooms, in our schools dealing with the day to day, you know. Get those kids in the building, manage classrooms, Naep scores, school shootings. Like so much that is on educators plates. That engagement is often seen as a as a nice to have. We'll get to that later. But really what we found is that engagement is

really not the cherry on the top of the ice cream sundae. It really is. It is the ice cream. And we really have to focus on it if we want our kids to thrive. And so what is student engagement? We define student engagement in four ways. These are four dimensions of student engagement. They all interact to create an engaged learner. The first one is behavioral engagement. This is what kids do. Do they do their homework? Do they come to school? The second one is emotional. Engagement is how kids feel. Are they interested in what they're

learning? Do they feel they belong? The third one is cognitive engagement, which is what they think. are they using deeper learning strategies, self-regulated learning strategies, persisting when tasks get hard, or connecting what they're learning in one class to what they're learning in another class? And you can be engaged in all three of these dimensions and be very much following what is asked of you. The last dimension of engagement is really important, and this is where agency comes in. It's called agentic engagement and it's what kids initiate around their learning. It's how they intervene in the

flow of instruction to make the learning environment more interesting and supportive to themselves. And these can this can be done in very small ways or in total big school redesign ways. So in small ways it could be as simple as students asking, can I study with a friend? Could I write my essay on Mars? That's what we mean by agentic engagement. So if this is really rigorous research on what makes up student engagement. Another thing that we found is it's really not that practical. It is very hard for educators, parents, school leaders to look at

a student, never mind 30, never mind 500in their school and try to analyze each kid across all these dimensions. And so we really tried to figure out a different way, how can how can we better see student engagement. And we came up with the following the four modes of engagement. And this was really how we found most kids engaged in their learning. You see at the bottom you've got passenger mode. This was the vast majority of kids spend a lot of time in passenger mode. These are kids who are behaviorally engaged. Not much else. They

might be happy to go to school to see their friends, but not deeply engaged in their learning, and they're coasting along doing the bare minimum. These are often the kids who ask Clarification questions about instructions given for tasks. Then you've got kids in achiever mode. These are the kids who are trying to get the gold star on everything that's put in front of them. There's many good things about kids and achiever mode, and for a while we thought it was the top of the mountain, but we learned that it really wasn't because there is a

downside to being too much in achiever mode, which we found that kids are very fragile learners. They are really focused on the outcome, and if they don't get the perfect grade, they may melt down and think the world is over. And they also confer a great deal of, um, self-worth related to their performance. And so we see two things a lot of risk aversion, not taking risks because they don't want to rock the apple cart. And we also see a lot of mental health anxiety in this group. Um, so they often are the kids who

are asking questions about how to get a really good grade, how to do an assignment exactly right. Then you've got kids in resister mode who are not engaged, but they do have agency. They are actually influencing the flow of instruction, just not pointed towards their learning, pointed away from their learning. These are the kids dubbed the problem children. They are avoiding or disrupting learning. It could be started starting as class clown, moving to not doing homework, moving to skipping a class, etc. and the good thing that these kids have is the gumption to use their

voice and behavior, often inappropriately, to say, this isn't working for me. And we found that actually it was much easier for them if their situation changed to move them to explorer mode, which is really the top of the engagement mountain where kids love learning, their curiosity meets their drive. They really become unstoppable, and they're asking a lot of questions around things that they're curious about. And so this we have found is, is a much more helpful frame to really try to see engagement. One thing that is incredibly important to note is that these are not

identities. Kids move through these modes sometimes every mode in one day. A lot of times we found that kids kind of get stuck in passenger mode and self-identify as a passenger, even though they don't use those words, even though they're in explore mode outside of school. So that's one thing that we want to worry about, is kids not getting stuck in resist or even achiever and passenger mode. And what we really want is to get give kids as much time in explore mode as possible, because all the research we did shows that that's where kids

actually get the best grades, and they have good mental health, and they're being prepared for a world of AI because they are learning to lead their own learning, and they are able to sort of use the tech tools that are developing rather than be led by them. So that is what we're going to talk about today with my esteemed colleagues, which is how do we get kids to spend more time in explore mode. So we will move there next. Great. So, Raphael, let's start with you. You have an illustrious career in Brazil. We met almost

20 years ago when you were doing incredibly innovative work with a set of schools called Navi, with technology, doing basically game design and learning, academic subject. And that school ended up having incredible success. But you have had a career in and out of government. And I want to ask you about one thing in particular. You've been Minister of Education of the Federal District. You've also been undersecretary of education in Rio de Janeiro. And I want to ask you about your Rio real experience because you for anybody who knows Rio, it houses the largest favela, which

is a slum in Latin America. Really, really dire circumstances, extreme poverty, um, big, um, basically economic crisis and security crisis. A lot of kids joined gangs just to survive. And you decided rather than, you know, sort of strict double down on, um, you know, rules and discipline to do sort of radical agency. Right. And you started a school, um, that did that as a pilot. Can you can you tell us what that was and what you did? >> Sure. Rebecca, first of all, it's an honor to be here, to be invited. I'm actually the first

featured Brazilian speaker because of you. Because of your invitation. And Brazil is in the house. Brazil is in the house, and it's here to stay, you know, so I just I hope I'm the first one in the line of other Brazilian speakers who will be able to come and talk about all the wonderful things that we have been doing in Brazilian education, trying to transform and innovate. And one of the things that we thought when we were in Rio is that first off, we need to provide the best not for the students that already have

the best, but for the ones who need it the most. Right? So who are the ones the students who need it the most in Rio? The ones that live in the favelas and usually do not have access to good educational opportunities. So that's why we decided to create to design our most innovative school at the time, inside favela, inside Rosinha. But we didn't do it by ourselves. Of course, we invited partners from NGOs, private sectors, but the main Co-designers were students, teachers and parents themselves because we started from a point of getting to understand from

their minds what kind of problems they thought that the schools needed to solve within the schools, within the communities, and within the larger Rosina and Rio. And of course, garbage, violence, bullying, schools were all problems. And so we went on to ask, so how is it that we're going to solve these problems together? And how is it that we're going to see youth protagonism we're going to see these kids not like the kids of tomorrow, but the kids of today. And we're going to listen to them, to care for them, but mainly to believe that

they can be agents of change, that they can transform the world while they transform themselves by being educated. So we started Co-designing a new kind of school that we saw it as a lab for social justice for democracy, for transformation of everything and for solving problems, solving the main problems that they had within them, even in their families. But we just changed the whole school from infrastructure, methodology, methods of administration so that they could understand themselves as people capable of creating change. And that went on from one school. By the end of the government, there

were 80 experimental schools. And today there is a public policy in Rio that was inspired by this. It's called get and it's it's in more than 200 schools in Rio. And their goal is to get to 500 schools. And I should say that a couple of things I want to pick up. I learned from you that that one pilot school, um, you did this sort of radical agency approach. And I'm going to ask you what it looks like in the classroom next. But that school after it it ran ended up having performing the best in

the Brazilian national exams of any school across all the slums in Brazil, not just in Rio. That's right, that's true. And one funny thing that we also talked about was that when we started designing the the school, we told the students and the teachers and families and everyone, look, there's there's some good news and some bad news. Some good news is that you're being invited to a great opportunity of reinventing a school, the school that you're at. The bad news is that you have no option. You either stay and help us do that, or you

can be transferred to whatever school you feel comfortable with. And we had a very bright student at the school that said, I don't want to stay. I actually want to be transferred to another traditional school because that's where I know how to beat the tests. I understand how to do well in this system. So she's probably in the the she's an achiever mode, right. She likes to achieve. She doesn't she's not an explorer mode. Right. So she decided to change. And we also had a case where there was one kid that was already labeled as

a troublemaker. He was very hard, very tough to deal with him. And because of everything that we did in trying to recognize him as a leader, because they do have a lot of agency, they lead, they influence other students. And telling him that he could use that energy, that vibration, that all that everything, that he had the intelligence to do good things and to transform his reality. We ended up having him as a student who wouldn't want to leave by the end of ninth grade. He wouldn't want to go to high school. He said, this

is the school where I was first cared for, and where people told me that I was able to do something important. I don't want to go to other schools. One of the things you said in there that was was really important that you invited teachers, parents and students themselves to co-design the school and you gave them an option to be like, come do this. And if you if not, we'll find a home for you somewhere else. Um, that seems to me to be incredibly important, talking about agency and talking about a strategy when you roll

out new models like this. Can you just final question for you, Raphael. Can you tell us, like, what did a day in the life of the school look like? What's an example of the project? How was it set up? What would it look like if we were to all of us here walk into that school today? So the reality in Brazil is that today we still have lots of schools that work part time. So kids stay for 4 or 5 hours in schools. And at this school in housing. We had a longer day as it's

now increasing the number of schools in Brazil that have longer days, like 7 or 8 hours a day of schooling. We had that and they got to the schools, um, we wouldn't have regular classrooms. There were huge like working places with circular tables where they sat with five other students, and we call that a family. And one teacher was responsible for four families of six students, and they were always working together. So for some part of the day, they were working on their personalized itinerary path and trying to develop everything that they had to develop

in terms of academic subjects. And when they have some kind of trouble or find it hard, they first asked their classmates, their mates to help them in understanding and in achieving some kind of success in an activity. And if they couldn't do it by themselves, then they would go and ask for the teacher for help so they would first try to solve even academic problems by themselves, and then resort to teachers, and then resort to specialists and then resort to other people. But the big chunk of the day was working with problems, so it would

always be like, okay, what kind of problem are we going to solve in this during this month or during for two months or for six months? And one of them was that they were very worried with the garbage problem because it was creating disease, because there was a lot of garbage on the streets. They didn't have any recycling programs. And so the whole school went on working in this garbage. What kind of solutions they could possibly create. So they all different subject areas languages, math, science, even physical education, all of them got together and created

activities related to how we are going to create together, co-design a solution for this. Who do we have to talk to? What do we have to learn? What kind of solutions are there in other cities? In other countries, you know, and they ended up making the the government more frequently go there to collect garbage. And they also got a recycling program to start inside because they made a lot of pressure on the, the, the deputies and the politicians in Rio. So that was amazing. Love it. Um, thank you, Rafael, very much. Well, we will come

back to you. Um, I want to move to you, Urvashi. Now. Um, we are moving now to India. Um, you also have done an experiment in kind of. I call it Radical Agency. Um, in your schools and in your work. But in your context, it's very much. There is economic deprivation, but sort of thinking about gender inequality. And I met Um. Urvashi. Um, many years ago, um. And was very impressed to learn about her story. She was started the first domestic violence hotline in her state of Uttar Pradesh, which is a state of 240 million

people. If you want to think about size and scope, um, and you started it because your cousin was murdered by her husband and didn't go to jail. And that happens in India. And there's 18 dowry deaths still each day that are reported in India. And 50% of the girls don't want to be girls. And there's reasons for it. So you found education actually as like girls education is the root cause and work with very marginalized girls. Um, and so I wanted to ask you a little bit about, you know, when you started working with them,

how did you, you know, what did you do and how did you think about why did you think about giving them agency and how did you do it in that context? >> Thanks, Rebecca, and thank you for having me here. It was 12 years ago that we met. So I live and work in Uttar Pradesh in India, which has one of the worst human development indicators and especially those with girls gender indicators. So why did I do what I did? Actually, it was prompted by my own life. I went to a very good school and

I really did very well as a student, so I built a lot of cognitive capacity. But what I didn't get, I was married off a year later. I must have been. I was about 18, just about 18. And I didn't say no, I didn't get to go to college. And I learned much later that I learnt I got a lot of academic skills. But what I didn't learn was the important lesson that I had the right to use these skills for my own life and to live a life of my own choice. And so I

felt that quality education needed to be redefined and that girls learn to need to learn, most importantly, that they are equal, autonomous persons deserving respect and they have the right to live their life according to their own choice. Not a lesson that their families teach them or society teaches them. So what did we do? I developed a critical pedagogy, actually inspired by Paulo Freire. But I lent a feminist lens to that. And we sat and culture circles, which is what he called them. And we had critical dialogues once a week. We felt that they must

learn lessons of equality along with all the lessons of math and science, because without that they would not have the life outcomes that we were hoping would come from the education that they were getting. And so what did they do during these critical dialogues? They would talk about their stories, their lives, tell their stories, and we would all listen to each other, and we wept together and laughed together. I shared mine too. And what were these stories about? Normally the teacher would I would give them a prompt that, you know, okay, tell us what happens

at home. And we have all we hear a lot about domestic violence. What does it mean. And they would tell you they would act it out. Sometimes we would do drama and they would talk about it. And then as my role as a facilitator, I would ask them all the unaskable questions, questions that they would never ask. For example, I would tell them, all right, so who at home, who beats whom, you know, how does it look like? So they said, you know, our dads get drunk and then they come and beat our moms. And

when my mom is mad, then she beats us. I said, all right. And what does she do? When does she does she retaliate? Does she ever beat him? And they would laugh. It was a sheepish laugh. I said, well, why not? What happens when she goes out? And if somebody were to beat her, she said, oh, she would retaliate. She would yell and she would take out her slippers and beat them. I said, well, why not at home? They said, you know, society doesn't accept that. I said, then who is society? And the idea was,

it was people like us. And what I was trying to get across to them was that all these gender norms and gender rules that governed their lives were not God made or natural, but were human, made by people like us and that they can be unmade. And then we would collectively think of solutions. So what would we do if this was happening at home, given the power that we have or don't have? What would we do? And then collectively, using our collective agentic capacity, we would come up with solutions. And what has happened with that

is that our school really has a 92% retention rate, as against a government retention rate of 58%, and 90% of them go on to higher education, right? Not just that. Then they told me, they said, you know, we learned we developed a self and they said that, why aren't we doing it with the other girls too? These were 10th graders. I said, all right, well, there's just one of me, and there's all of you. They said, well, we'll do it with them. And so they did. And then they said, but what about in our communities?

You know, they need to talk about all this stuff too. And so I said, so what are you going to do? So we gave them little videos. They called these meetings home of older women and would speak to them. Then they marched in their communities having signature campaigns against domestic violence, against child marriage, all the problems they faced. And then we took it up. And now we run in India's daughters campaign that has reached millions of parents and students all over the state. Right. A little later, we realized, and I wish we'd thought of it

earlier, that we need to include boys, you know, and it was actually the parents who said, and what about our boys? And my first response was, not me. Somebody else is going to do that. But they persisted, and I'm so glad they did. And we started. And what we did was we used the same pedagogy with them, and we would sit and talk to them. And the goal was this to help them see that, you know, whereas patriarchy looks like it definitely is very cruel to their sisters, their mothers and their aunts. And though it

looks as though it gives them a lot of power and privilege, and actually it doesn't, it doesn't work for them too. And it was them that we cared about and wanted to talk about. And so we do the same thing with them, starting with their lives, their fears, their anxieties, what did they want from their lives, and then moving on to building empathy. And so we found then that what would happen is that they would have these conversations at home so that parents became allies. And then because they had a bigger voice at home, they

became champions for their sisters and were able to stop their child marriages, then became champions in the community and were able to talk to their own peers about what boys can be like. And that had a huge impact too. And so now with the India's Daughters campaign that we run every year, the boys are equal partners in that. And what we found is that, you know, like you mentioned that when you talk to students about things that really matter to them, they are fully engaged. Each one of them, because it's their story, they want to

tell it and it's their life. And those are the problems they want to solve. You know, there was a dramatist, really, who said that the goal of education is not just to know, but to learn to live. And I think many of our schools, they just forget that. And it becomes all about knowing and knowing for what? Kids don't get that connection. So unless it is relevant to their lives. And then this spills over into their other classes as well, and they learn to make that relevant to their life. And unless it's something that will

help them change their lives, where we can build a capacity to aspire and where they can see that their life can change because of the education they get. Why would they be engaged? I'm not even surprised. So I think, you know, what you teach is as important as how you teach it. And that's how we've been able to find that our students have changed, their lives have changed. We have delayed child marriage to 24 years, and 52% of our students are employed. The girls, as against you know, there's only a 27% participation in the national

workforce. Thank you. Urvashi, I think just a few nuggets that stuck with me on what you said is, you know, you in your school with prana and the schools you run around, um, around the state that you work in, you have the same curriculum as every other school, just this one additional class called Critical Dialogues, which is And I remember asking you, you know, what is it? And you said, well, it's feminist pedagogy, but we don't call it that. We're very subtle and careful, and really it's just reflecting on yourself and your problems and how

you might want to make your life better, which is the core of feminist pedagogy. And it really is just actually, you know, unlike what Raphael did with Jenny, which was a total school redesign, you just did this small, small addition and it made a dramatic difference. Like, it's incredible to to me to see that, you know, 50% of girls or 58 or something regularly complete high school. And in your schools it's 97% 92, 92. Um, no, 92 going on to higher ed, 97 complete. You told me. 92% that we retain and 90% of those that

want to higher. Education. Um, so regardless, massive, massive, um, uh, outperformance. Um. And can I just add one more thing that what happened actually, was that when we started with these critical dialogues, we hadn't really turned it into a curriculum. And then when we did, it was using it was actually an emergent curriculum that came out from the dialogues that we had built. And we did that with the boys too. So an important lesson we learned was that the curriculum must be co-designed with the students because they know what they want to learn and how

they want to learn. And if you follow their cue, it becomes extremely relevant to their lives. And we also conducted these critical dialogues with the parents and also gave them assignments which engaged with help them engage their parents at home in those dialogues. So there's been a transformation not just of the students, but of the entire parent communities as well. We're hearing a theme about how agency isn't just resting in the students, but really needs to be cultivated across the whole community ecosystem that touches kids. So Nadeem, that's very relevant for you and your story.

We also met many years ago, and you are a global expert on really rewiring systems for change, and that's how we've worked together over the years. And you're incredibly effective at it. And three years ago you started NAFTA, this movement across Lebanon of basically giving agency to head teachers, um, to keep education going amid a series of crisis. So you had economic crisis, severe economic crisis in Lebanon, where actually teachers, the government just had a massive financial crisis, ran out of money, couldn't even pay educators. Then you have severe political crisis, very deep polarization, quite

relevant to our context here today between in this in the case of Lebanon, religious groups, so much so that you couldn't even in the country elect a president for two and a half years. And then, of course, there's then the recent security crisis, which we'll get into maybe later. Um, but in that context of crisis, why did sort of agency, head teacher, agency, teacher and principal agency. Why was that the thing and what did you what did you guys do concretely? >> Great. Thank you Rebecca. And it's wonderful to be in the company of such

giants in the field. So, you know, before I answer the question, something that Rafael said triggered a thought, which is the school that Rafael created was intended to solve community problems. In our case, out of deep frustration with the fact that schools were left to fend for themselves, a group of us wanted to simply help schools survive, right? That was our initial intention. And then we found some principals who wanted to go beyond, and in spite of what was happening, they wanted to transform their schools. So we said, well, let's help you transform your schools.

But where we landed, actually, now, is that schools can transform not just their communities, but society at large. Not in the future when the kids grow up and become leaders, but in the moment. And that's sort of been a revelation for us. In fact, we started by let's give schools some hope. Now, a lot of us in this work are gaining hope from the schools we're working with. It's quite a shift. Anyway, to get back to your question on Principal Agency one, we had no choice. So basically we we felt like we needed to work

with what exists, what exists that the government wasn't giving anything out. So we we gathered some principals who hadn't yet given up. All right. And together with them, we charted a path for survival and transformation. We didn't have a master plan. Everything emerged in real time, but the journey took some sort of a course with some structured steps that we developed with the principals in real time. And the first step in the journey is as a page out of the book of the center for Universal Education at Brookings. It was lucky that I knew Rebecca,

and I called her and she said, you know, if you're doing something in education, maybe the first thing you should suggest is for the principals to go out into their communities to create a shared picture of what are the priorities, what's the vision, the principals like that they all did that. And out of that emerged in each school, 2 or 3 priority areas that they want to do something about. That's a transformation bit. And then we said, well, listen, you know, if you want to move in that direction, you decide how you want to do

it. And here's a small block grant that gives you the opportunity to buy some services from the experts and the nonprofits in your vicinity to try to move towards whether it's equitable education, which some of them move towards, or whether it's community service projects like Raphael's situation or gender equality, or in the case that I want to zero in on. It was Stem and Steam education. So one of the schools I just want to mention how it played out in that is it's in Mount Lebanon. It's a public school, a secondary, about a thousand students,

and their theme was Stem and Steam. And they got really excited about it. And we said, in order for, you know, to make progress on this, we again introduced serendipitously this idea of develop a project and a project team and see what progress you can make on that in 100 days. Again, comes from my past history, this idea. So the school team set their goal and started building their steam lab and makerspace with the help of professors from UB and different NGOs. And they actually set a goal, which is kind of part of the thinking

of this, the 100 day challenge to build for websites for businesses in the area. So the idea is to go beyond infrastructure and training and actually do something that has some real benefit for somebody in the community or in the school. In 100 days, they they didn't quite do for websites. They did two of them, but I actually visited a few months later, and they had continued with that and built many websites for many businesses. But what I want to stop at is something that happened after the 100 day project ended, which is, as Rebecca

was saying, the there was the collapse of the economic situation. The teachers, rightly so, went on strike because basically what they were paid was just not enough to get them to school. Even so, they were totally right in doing that. But the students were very enthusiastic about the Steam lab that they created and all the momentum that they had built. So they went to the principal and they said, we want to keep going even though there's no teachers in the school. And the principal said, go ahead. You know, the student agency. So she told me

she would give them every morning, she would open the school. She had the key and then turned the generator on because in Lebanon there is no electricity and they would go into the lab and they actually developed their own lesson plans and started teaching the lower grades about the Steam projects that they did. And they went on to teach students in neighboring schools about that. And in fact, the professor who taught them about makerspace when he visited to see how sustainable his work was, he told me later on when he arrived, he said, these these

kids had their own lesson plans in place. I didn't need to do anything. I just said, thank you very much. I'm going back to Aiyub. So that's an amazing story of head teacher, principal, agency and educator agency leading to student agency. I mean, it's an incredible story. And I know that's just one example you gave. And having talked to you, there's examples like that all over, all over the country with the NAFTA network, you know. Can you tell us a little bit about you know why. You know how yours is. Is that how is that

showing up in other contexts. It's not just this one aberrant school where the kids were like, you guys are shutting school down. Never mind. We're keeping it open. And they called their siblings and said, we're we'll be the teachers. I mean, it's incredible what, you know, is it more widespread than that? Uh, actually it is. But again, in, you know, full transparency, it's not as if we came in with the idea of we want to build student agency. We just found that probably the one theme across all of the projects that happened in NAFTA schools

was student agency emerging. And just two examples that, you know, struck me as as sort of very what moved me quite a bit. Um, so the same school in, in, in Mount Lebanon again, we stumbled on the idea of like pyramid scaling. so a project is successful. You as a school can now go to other schools in the network that we created in NAFTA in other areas and transfer some of what you learned to these other schools. So this school in in Mount Lebanon went to a school in the North and taught them. They developed

a Steam lab with them. We gave a small block grant and they they replicated this but adapted it to that situation. And then, you know, fast forward to October, November of last year, when the country endured the israel-hezbollah devastating war. About a million and a half people were displaced from south Lebanon and the southern suburbs into the rest of the country. Many of them into the north, because it was relatively safer. So the team and the class that absorbed the training and the the project from the school in Mount Lebanon sitting in the north. They

developed. They used the coding skills and developed an app that they then distributed to all the displaced families to help them find shelter in the area that they were in. And this was again, not not a school project, not a I'm sure some teachers were involved, but totally driven by students and their sense of civic duty. So that's one. And then the the other example that um, even goes further in my view, and gets to the heart of why Lebanon is in such a bad situation of the polarization that Rebecca mentioned, a student or a

team of students in the Bekaa Valley actually took the initiative on their own to do a call out to all other students in the schools of Nafda and the network around the country, saying, we want to reach out to you to learn about your community because we have been divided for too long along regional, along religious lines, along class lines. We want to know about your community, and we want to work with you on doing community projects in your area. And you come and do community projects in our area. And the video of this young

woman did to me has been so inspiring. I listened to it every so often because it really shows that there is hope for the country if this next generation, on their own initiative would do things like that given half an opportunity. And now I know actually there is always opportunity amid crisis, having worked around the world and whether it's crisis here at home or abroad, and you have actually now a new government in Lebanon and a new minister of education that has invited NAFTA to actually take your approach of really doing a community visioning within

each community and school and putting principal, agency, teacher agency and student agency at the core to scale it across the whole country. So anyways, huge congratulations and we wish you much luck with that. We're we're going to move to audience questions. We have questions here. And just a reminder to go to the South by Southwest Edu go app. If you want to add more questions. There's one that seems to have a lot of um votes, which is around measurement. Um, I actually only brought my reading glasses so I can only read it here. So I

think what it says is how we monitor and measure engagement. How do we monitor and measure engagement? I'm especially interested in methods to measure engagement that may not be performative. Thank you. Thank you. And are feasible. So I would love to hear maybe Urvashi and Raphael, if you could talk a little bit, you can pass if you don't want to, because there's more questions. But how, how, how would we measure engagement in ways that aren't like what I take to be performative is high stakes accountability, where kids are gaming the assessment. You know, that's a

question we get asked all the time that how do you measure empowerment actually is the question we get asked. What is evident, first of all, is that the fact that they are all participating very actively in the classroom, they are participating in the discussion, they are coming up with solutions, and then they're acting in their communities. That is the kind of informal measurement that we have. What we did do was just to find out if we could, if and because our goal was gender or Gender. Gender equality. What we did was that in all their

other tests that they get in math and science and history in English and Hindi, we said, all right, can we add one question that is meant to measure? It meant for them to give them the opportunity to answer what they learned. What they've done and how they've worked in their communities based on their critical dialogues. And that has given us a very good, actually, you know, a tangible, palpable kind of a thing that shows that they did engage and that what they took away from them, that was not just sharing it in the dialogues and

then forgotten that what actually happened with that, but the biggest measurement is the life outcomes that we've achieved. You know, the action that they've taken in their in their homes, in their communities, in their own lives. Right. And and. >> When you mean life. Outcomes, because I think a lot of people in this country would think life outcomes happen after you finish school. That's not what you're talking about. No. Okay. Can you please clarify? I mean, I mean, for example, while they're while they're in school, and if they're going to be pulled out because child

marriage is rampant, we have one third of the world's child brides. Right. And that's one of the big reasons why girls drop out or they're pulled out, actually. So they have developed enough agency that they will protest at home because they've learned that they have the right to protest, and or they will reach out for help so that the teacher can intervene. They've become self-advocates of their own rights. You know, if there's domestic violence at home, they have even been able to stop that. If their fathers are abusing their sisters and they faced it, they're

able to stop that. So they actually exercise. So those are the life outcomes. We mean that, you know, in your life, are you able to transform what is your own life? And for those. >> Around you. You know what you said that about trans Education being a very transformative force. It is. But provided we transform education by itself and the way we've been doing it, it hasn't transformed much. But if you can transform how you do it and what you teach, then it is a very powerful individual and social transformation. Thank you. Urvashi. I think

this idea of sort of measuring not only sort of the experience and what they're taking from it and what they're doing, but this idea of how how are kids lives measurably changing in in our research for the Disengaged Teen Book, we really like the work of Daphne Oyserman, and she does a lot of work on sort of envisioning potential future selves with young people, which isn't what you want to be when you grow up. But next year, what is the future you want? You know, I want to get away with my friends. I've kind of

fallen into a bad thing, you know, thing with them or less drugs or whatever. And those are real outcomes while you're in school that shape kids lives. So it's a it's an interesting way. Another thing that I've been thinking a lot about with the four modes and thinking about student engagement and measuring it and talking, getting a lot of requests about is, could we have a tool that is for students to self-assess which mode they are in? Um, and think about intentionally moving between the modes, because at the moment, students just sort of end up

in a mode based on what's happening to them. So, you know, really could if if we give them a tool to think, oh, I'm in this mode right now. Um, but I, you know, tomorrow maybe I'm tired or my parents were in a fight. I didn't get a lot of sleep. But tomorrow I want to show up and really dig in. What are those steps they have to do? Um, and that would, I think, keep it safe from sort of a high stakes accountability, um, measure. I think it would be disastrous if we measure student

engagement the way that's any anywhere at all linked to high stakes accountability. I think it would defeat the entire purpose. I wanted to turn to a different question. Are you okay or did you want to talk about measurement? There are like a thousand things I want to talk about, but I'll listen. >> To it. Well. Well, I wanted to turn to the where did it go? These questions are moving around. Um. Well, I was going to. There was. No, I can't read. Go say what you want to say. Go for it. Agency. Panelist. Agency. I

want to link that to self-efficacy and how hard it is to change cultures in schools, and that everything has to start with the leaders and with the teachers and teachers seeing themselves as leaders who can create change. It has to start with them. And I mean monitoring. We can because I one thing that we need to to evaluate, even with questionnaires that you can self-reflect Or you can try to evaluate your peer and say who you look up to the most. Or you can have your teacher assessing you and seeing how, um, how much agency

you have. And we try to do that all the time. We try to triangulate, um, methods and everything, but I see a very strong link with first how people see themselves. It's not it's not an easy task to have students who have always been told to shut up, stay, obey. Uh. You're not. They don't even see their lives matter. They don't think their lives matter, you know? How are we going to out of them? Just sit by the side and say you can be an agent of change, especially the ones that are shyer and that

have been so oppressed that they feel it's it's not like they they they understand that they can have an opinion. It's not something that is going to happen out of a sudden. And so I think we as educators and school leaders and school teachers, that we are also leaders. The first thing is we have to understand that we need to inspire them, and we need to understand ourselves as people who can make change. Because I think that the schools here in the US, in Brazil, other countries, they could be doing a much stronger and a

much more potent work of creating impact in society. And what we have been doing is just reacting to whatever people talk about. Education is this and educators are that, and teachers and this is teachers are guilty and this we just we've just been reacting. Whereas we should switch to our other mode that is not only explorer but as real leaders of transformative and transformative change and start creating experiences in schools that we experienced this democracy experience. What participating in social social change looks like and making people believe that they can do that is not something

easy. Great. Nadeem, I wanted to come to you. You can add on to that, but I wanted to come to you around this question from the audience, which I actually do hear a lot on this topic, which is, um, is an agency really for the rich and privileged kids. And how do you make sure if you do offer student agency, it doesn't help those rich kids or not rich, but privileged in whichever ways, go farther, faster and leave others behind. So could you talk to that? I will try, But I do want to build. Go

ahead. Go ahead and add on. Yeah. What Rafael said, which is I mean, I've come to appreciate the importance of leadership, but in a very particular way, I don't subscribe to like, you know, if we have the right leaders, everything will change. But there is a role modeling that is so that I found to be so critical when we, as outsiders trying to help, showed up to the principles with total respect and modesty. And like, we're here to know what you want to do. That's sort of like, you know, up to the agency. But then

part of what we did and we did some work on that with the principles on leading their schools from a place of humility and, um, sort of distributed leadership and inclusive leadership. And I think that when people see that more than get lectured at that, that gives them permission to have to feel like their agency can flourish, I think. I mean, again, we didn't do any studies on this. And so to answer your question, though, Rebecca, so this is really about creating a culture. There's a question about strategies. It's not about strategies. It's creating a

context and a culture for agency to flourish. In my view, at all levels. The principal, the teacher, the student. In the case of NAFTA schools, by the way, this was I mean, we we focused not on a few of the elite schools in the country. This was schools in very marginalized communities all across the country. And I don't I think, you know, I think the question of building agency is totally orthogonal to the the question of privilege. Um, I don't see how that influences one way or the other, in my view. I do think there

is one skill, not skill, but one element that is critical for enabling agency, which is building confidence among students. And that kind of reminds me of one of the keynote speakers that talked about the tiny experiments as ways to build confidence, and I think that that might be an important aspect. So you answered the question around skills. This is great. Go ahead and add on. Yeah, I wanted to answer this. I think the most important skill actually is something that you said, that it's the self-perception that if you can see yourself as in the in

place of very oppressed, marginalized people, as someone who matters is equal and has the right and you deserve respect, then that is the most important skill. In fact, that's what turns the key. I know it turned it for me in my life when I saw myself as an equal person. And we do that with our girls in terms of the one about, you know, more privileged students. Will they become stronger and will they become more repressive? The one way to avoid that is that when you're building agencies also to build empathy, and for them to

be able to see that their privilege really is unearned, but for the grace of God, they could have been there. And we find when we engage in those dialogues with them, they actually learn that they could be using their privilege. They could be sharing that. And then that helps. And helping other people build agency that they have. Great. There I want to you have one minute to think about it. Final question. There was a question about AI. Does AI help student agency? Does it make it worse? You can say whatever you want, including you don't

know. And it's the jury's out. But that will be our final round here before I do, there were several questions. One was around. Um, the four modes. Are there different strategies for, you know, helping kids engage, engage and have agency in the different modes? And the answer is yes, there are. The whole second half of the book is an engagement toolkit with very practical strategies around each mode, and some of them cut across everything. But I won't take up time going through those right now. So, um, I will kick off on the AI question and

then we can go down the line. I we are running a Brookings Global Task Force on AI in education at the moment, really looking at what are the potential risks. Get those all out on paper. And what are, you know, knowing those, what can we do today to mitigate those risks and harness the benefits? And one of the things that I'm most worried about is AI being deployed in a way that moves every kid into passenger mode and just we get an army of passengers, which I think is very, very dangerous for our kids. I

think it's dangerous for our communities and our society. So I am actually quite worried about that. That is not mean. It's inevitable. There's ways we could deploy. I, I think that could really get them into explorer mode, but that is um, you know, it's undefined as of yet. I'm curious. Raphael, what's your take? My take is we can use AI either to oppress or to emancipate, to free and to create critical thinking. So it's a tool that it's very much going to depend on how we're going to use it. And that has to do with

algorithm literacy, AI literacy, media literacy, and how our teachers are prepared to lead this the way that AI is used in the classrooms. And just another thing, I think one thing that is really nice happening in Brazil right now is that, for example, indigenous people are using it to recover and to make memory of 1002 hundred languages that have almost disappeared. Okay, you guys each have 15 seconds. >> So I think if. The general pedagogy in a school is a critical one, then that flips over. Even when you use AI because AI works for you,

depending on the questions you ask, it will. And you know, one important lesson is that the box is not intelligent. You are how you use it. I love that. Thank you. Last word. Nadine. I'm going to pass on AI. It's above my pay grade. But I do think that we have a huge asset in students in society that we are not using. And we need to do that. Thank you very much. Perfect ending. Thank you. Thank you. Rebecca.