The Urgency of Agency

Artificial intelligence does not wait for curriculum committees to update their scope and sequence. It is already reshaping our world. If we do not reshape how our students learn, work, and think, they will be left unable to lead in an AI world. Change is happening faster than our current meeting schedules allow us to respond. Most schools remain built for a world that no longer exists: organised around subject silos, standardised testing, and a model that measures what students can recall rather than what they can do with what they know. The world has changed. Has your school’s teaching and learning?

That mismatch is the real crisis facing school leaders today. It is not a technology problem. It is an evaluation problem. We have long talked about shifting from content coverage to competencies, focusing on critical reasoning, systems thinking, ethical reasoning, and civic agency.  Little has been actually done. AI has simply made the shift non-negotiable. If a chatbot can produce a passable essay in seconds, then knowing content is no longer the differentiator. The differentiator is whether a learner can reason with AI, question it, and know when to trust it.

This means teachers, too, must relearn their craft anew. Assessing what a student has memorised is straightforward. Assessing whether a student can think deeply, ethically, adaptably, across disciplines, is much harder, and it is exactly the skill our profession now needs to build. Learning how to support students so they themselves can assess if they are thinking deeply is an additional challenge.  As the ACE Learning white paper on preparing learners for a complex world puts it, the shift ahead is one from “content as the end point” to “content as the vehicle for developing transfer skills.” That is a profound change in what teachers evaluate, and how.

Agency: the engine behind competency

Competency based evaluation of learning only works when learners are given real agency — voice, choice, and responsibility over their own learning. Agency is not a soft add-on to rigorous teaching; it is the mechanism through which competencies are actually built. As NEASC's ACE Learning Principle 5 states, learners should have “age-appropriate, goal-oriented autonomy over their learning” and should “exercise voice and choice in what they learn, how they learn it, and how they demonstrate what they have learned.” Teachers need new skills to facilitate this learning.

Agency and self-efficacy work together. Self-efficacy is the belief that you are capable; agency is the room to act on that belief — to set goals, make choices, and be answerable for the outcome. Leadership's job is to make sure both are structurally in place, not left to chance or to the occasional inspired teacher. This is not simply good pedagogy. It is a democratic imperative: when we limit a young person's agency, we treat them primarily as recipients of knowledge, thus preventing them from developing as an agent capable of evaluating and shaping their own future.

Learning To Judge Your Own Learning

Voice and choice are only half the story. The other half, and arguably the more urgent half in an AI-saturated world, is teaching learners to evaluate the quality of their own learning. If AI can generate a plausible-looking answer instantly, the premium shifts to a learner's capacity for self-awareness: can they judge whether their thinking is sound, their sources trustworthy, their reasoning complete? The ACE Framework names this directly: learners need to “engage with digital and interpersonal feedback that promotes self-awareness, improvement, and mastery,” demonstrating growth “in a variety of forms” beyond a single test score.

This is a skill, and like any skill it must be taught deliberately through structured reflection, portfolios, conferencing, and genuine feedback loops, not assumed to develop on its own.

The Ask Today

This is the work in front of us: understanding what agency looks like in practice in our own school contexts, examining the structures and cultural norms that either enable or quietly suppress it, and building a shared, context-specific way to both grow it and evaluate it. It means deliberately shifting responsibility, albeit gradually, from teacher-directed instruction toward learner-directed ownership. It will require rethinking and building the evaluation tools, alongside our teachers, to know when that shift from teacher centred teaching to student focused learning is actually working.

It is demanding work. But it is an ethical responsibility we have for our learners. If we don’t take on this challenge to rethink learning and teaching, and fail to develop agency and evaluation of competencies rather than predominantly building skills in content focused exam, we will be responsible for limiting our learners’ futures.  So let's work to support educators rethinking learning, and fight for the future of our independent learners because in the world of AI, they are the ones who will need every ounce of agency and critical thinking we can help them develop.