Every student has unique potential, with their own combinations of strengths, interests, talents, desires, and challenges to overcome. How do we, as educators, participate in driving academic success and helping students reach their full potential on a holistic scale? At New Beginnings High School in Lakeland, Winter Haven, and Fort Meade, the solution is helping students take control of their destinies by supporting ownership and self-efficacy to empower individual agency.
Fostering Autonomy
The most capable students are those who feel confident making their own decisions and taking responsibility for their actions. This is not an easy thing to teach.
At New Beginnings High School, empowering student agency starts with creating space for autonomy or the power to self-govern. Students must be allowed to make choices and, sometimes, mistakes. They must also be provided with the resources and support to learn from successes and failures alike.
Giving students choices, encouraging them to set goals and take calculated risks, helping them problem-solve and overcome challenges, and increasing their responsibilities over time can help them build confidence, autonomy, and agency.
Encouraging Self-Efficacy
Confidence is born not only from being allowed to make one’s own decisions but believing in one’s ability to make the right choices and achieve personal goals. This is known as self-efficacy, and it starts with students believing they can succeed in the classroom setting and, by extension, in their professional and personal pursuits beyond school.
At New Beginnings High School the teachers play an important role in the process of developing self-efficacy by encouraging students to set achievable goals, providing opportunities for problem-solving, and utilizing targeted peer modeling to display what students can accomplish if they try. Even if it involves failure, assessment, and pivoting to new approaches.
Developing Goal-Setting Skills
Setting goals to foster agency can be a tricky task. On the one hand, students must be challenged to develop a sense of accomplishment, but tasks can’t be so difficult as to cause repeated failure, which could have negative effects.
A part of how New Beginnings High School educators empower their students is helping them understand how to set realistic goals. This includes clearly articulating goals and desired results, breaking them down into manageable segments, and creating a plan to achieve the ultimate goal of graduating.
Students must also develop a timeline for completion and assess progress along the way. Those familiar with the SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-bound) model for goal setting will recognize the basic format.
Why Empowering Student Agency Is So Important
When students have a sense of agency, they become invested in their interests, actions, and outcomes. They develop accountability and are motivated to succeed in both their academic and personal pursuits.
Programs at New Beginnings High School are designed to help students develop autonomy, self-efficacy, and goal-setting skills, empowering student agency and opportunities for growth, success, and fulfillment.
About New Beginnings High School
Launched in 2011, New Beginnings High School is a non-traditional charter school based in Central Florida that offers personalized academic options for students aged 15-24 who want to earn their high school diploma. New Beginnings High School in Lakeland, Winter Haven, and Fort Meade serves over 1,000 students.
