The Empowerment Fear

We talk about the magic word of engagement a lot these days in schools. Engage teachers in Professional Development, engage students in the classroom, engage parents as part of the school community; all great ideas and schools everywhere are doing a great job of finding new ways to engage teachers, students and parents in learning.

Let's for a moment, take a look just on the horizon of engagement.  If you look out there you may just see engagement's even more elusive cousin: empowerment.  If you hold still, do nothing and stare at empowerment it tends to shrink and disappear, so be careful in how you approach it. Empowerment is something we want to lure out of the distant horizon and provide to our teachers, students and parents. We want to give the power of control to those whom we control.

For now, let's talk about empowerment in terms of our students. We have long tried to engage our students and provide for them the atmosphere where they can do, where they are engaged in learning. Student engagement is indeed powerful when it comes to learning, and for the vast majority of our students we engage them and they learn. If they are not engaged, we find interventions that will help to engage them. That is the system we have established and that is how it works. An engaged classroom has students working, collaborating and learning; students are at the heart of the engaged classroom, and engagement is good. But, in that great scope of engagement, have we not just created a different form of compliance? Are we not just setting the stage for another act in the play of school? Engagement is a way to achieve the goals we set tuned in to our own motivations, so when students engage in our activities are we engaging students in compliance, or are we empowering them to learn?

Empowerment in learning is allowing students to determine for themselves the best course of learning for them. Empowering students in the classroom grants them the autonomy to make responsible decisions for their own learning. Students in an empowered classroom are still working, collaborating and learning. They just have an intrinsic motivation to do so, not a motivation born out of compliance. If we want our students to want to learn we need to empower their learning instead of asking them to comply with our learning plan.

Easier to say than to do, of course. So what holds us back? Fear of losing control? Fear of not meeting learning objectives? Fear of what this classroom may look like?

To be a teacher means you need to have a bit of control. For most teachers that bit is a lot. We don't see it as control, only keeping order for learning to occur, for engagement to happen. There are classroom rules designed to have an orderly classroom, there are due dates and grades designed to ensure learning requirements are being met. There are modeled student expectations of what learning, studying and classroom actions look like. All compliances designed to achieve learning. Let's be honest though; these are all designs to keep control of the classroom so chaos doesn't break out, we are said to have a wild class that doesn't learn.

How, then, do we go from engagement and compliance to engagement and empowerment? How do we break the fear of empowerment and losing control over learning?

Educators need to do all they can to give up some power, a little at a time even. Show yourself that the students can take the power and be responsible. Have them choose how to learn tomorrow, ask them when work should be completed, ask them what the classroom and learning should look like. Start small and allow yourself to grow with them. By empowering students to learn, educators empower themselves to be part of the learning process instead of the master controller.

We must create an atmosphere where our target is not compliance but empowerment. We need a classroom where students are provided choices of learning and the tools and opportunities to engage in learning. We must provide students with enough power in the classroom so they can choose their path for learning and then stand as a focusing check to that power so they indeed complete the learning targets we found together.

Fear of empowerment is a great force. If we look out there, isn't controlled engagement enough? Not anymore. Our students are empowered in so much more of their lives experiencing autonomy from their daily routines to organizing, controlling and curating their own digital image on social medial.
The sun is not setting on engagement, but the need to empower is a light we cannon shy away from.

Our students need us to step out of the shadows of control over their learning and provide them with the tools to find success in learning, not to drive them there, but to show them the path.