Agency & Instruction -Essential For Young Writers

 'Agency is about having control over your choice of writing topic and ownership over how you go about writing it. Agency helps create a culture of writers with self determination.'

Ross young and Felicity Ferguson

'Real World Writers-A handbook For Teaching Writing With 7-11Year Olds'

Across the years I have worked with many teachers who constantly strived to provide young writers in their care with a genuine sense of agency. They worked respectfully to develop a classroom culture where every writer was encouraged and supported to make informed decisions regarding writing projects they wished to pursue. Many of these teachers were operating from this position before the term -agency, ever came into vogue.

Agency produces great results. It's presence leads to the  successful producation of meaningful writing pieces. Writers with a strong sense of agency frequently exceed expectations, improve their academic outcomes and exhibit increased engagment and motivation for writing. They are writers who are more likely to persist. They are embued with 'stickability.' These writers tend to display greater satisfaction with their written efforts.

If we want to have young writers believing they can act on their own writing intentions, make informed decisions and take suitable actions to reach an identified goal, then our interactions with them need to reflect a sense of a shared vision. 

When writers are afforded freedom to choose writing subjects and structures in which they have interest and knowledge, their writing pieces exhibit enhanced organization, logic and accomplishment.

It is also interesting to note the findings of A.Fletcher (2016) who not only found that children with agency pursuing self selected writing projects are more highly committed to completion, but they are more likely to seek and accept advice from a teacher during conferencing conversations.  

When a teacher helps to instill a sense of agency through their words and actions, it has a positive bearing on learning outcomes. Research further indicates that having a sense of agency improves the performance of low achieiving writers in particular. This has been borne out in research by Peter Johnston (2004). 

While agency is a vital piece in developing a positive view of one's self as a writer, it does not guarrantee the emerging writer will derive genuine pleasure from writing.

The young writer needs to be provided with regular, mindful instruction in order to use their agency in ways that contribute to meaningful writing development across time. 

It is therefore crtiically important that agency sit comfortably alongside mindful instruction. Instruction providing support for the writer's self efficacy and self regulation. The teacher must play an active role in teaching the young writer how to write and how to understand and negotiate the processes of writing. 

One of the best ways for a teacher/writer to do this is to model and demonstrate aspects of one's own writing process. The young writer is given explicit instruction in a range of craft strategies and techniques they can employ to impact their writing. In this scenario, agency and instruction are presented in combination. While agency is a vital component in ensuring engagment and improved performance, it benefits greatly from the partnership with focused instruction concerned with, how to write.

As part of this approach, the teacher works with the writer to help establish agreed writing goals. As young writers gain experience, they begin to better understand their own personal writing processes and how certain strategies work best for them. This self awareness allows the less experienced writer to successfully complete a writing project they have chosen to follow.

The end result from all this is that the nurturing of agency coupled with powerful instruction teaches young writers how to develop control over the writing and its accompanying processes. In classrooms where this approach is the driving force for teaching writing, young writers will be more inclined to take writing risks and more likely to write with honesty regarding topics and ideas that are meaningful to them. Now that's an outcome worth our time and energy.