Teaching for the Age of Agency (Eric Johnson); American Lesson Plan: Teaching US History in America’s Secondary Schools (A Report of the American Historical Association); Giving Kids Some Autonomy Has Surprising Results – The New York Times
Teaching for the Age of Agency – Eric Johnson – The Dispatch
In an era increasingly shaped by AI, there is a growing recognition that education must move beyond grades and performativity toward something deeper: agency. The book reviewed in this article explores what Winthrop and Anderson call the “Age of Agency,” arguing that schools must evolve to empower students with the skills and self-knowledge necessary to navigate an uncertain future.
“To thrive in the Age of Agency,” they write, “our kids will need to not only identify where they want to go but also be able to drive their own learning to get there.” This aligns directly with my own research, which contends that history pedagogy must be refreshed to cultivate student agency. As AI takes over many traditional knowledge-based tasks, the future will favor not compliance, but the kind of self-motivation and autonomy that comes from genuine intellectual engagement. “The AI-dominated future will favor not apathy and compliance, but the agency that comes from self-knowledge and the motivation to act.”
This necessary shift requires significant transformation in school design. While I do not fully agree with the idea that the best classrooms are Socratic – flipped approaches, to me, provide a more structured and effective alternative – I do agree with the broader argument that we must rethink our approach to education. “Less high-stakes testing, less pressure to cram seven different subjects into the school day, more emphasis on group work and long-term projects instead of sprinting through textbook content.” These principles align with my vision of history education as an active, inquiry-driven practice rather than a passive accumulation of facts.
Beyond structural reforms, the book highlights the importance of teaching students about stress and resilience. One of their key recommendations is to teach students that stress is normal and should be harnessed, not treated like a disorder. “There are times in life when the stress is truly unmanageable, and that’s when children need help,” they write. “But most of the time stress is just uncomfortable. That’s okay. Life can be that way sometimes.” This understanding is essential in helping students develop the kind of resilience needed to thrive in an unpredictable world.
Another critical insight revolves around the students we often consider most successful—the high-achievers. “Achievers love guidelines. They don’t love freedom.” This speaks to what I have often heard described as the ‘fragile thoroughbred’ phenomenon: students who excel at meeting externally imposed expectations but struggle when required to take ownership of their learning. “The students we most expect to be running the country often have the least comfort with self-direction or deeper sources of flourishing.” Many of these students falter when they reach university, where the rigid structures of school fall away, leaving them to grapple with the existential challenge of determining their own paths.
This failure to cultivate self-reflection among high-achieving students has profound consequences, not only for individuals but for society at large. “That absence of a deep and self-reflective inner life among our academic strivers has a corrosive downstream effect on public life, producing an elite caste that values career success and little else.” The author refers to David Brooks who has critiqued the ways elite education institutions reinforce this instrumentalised and perhaps performative view of success, where students are trained to ask, “How can this help me succeed?” rather than “How do I become a generous human being? How do I lead a life of meaning? How do I build good character?” This question is central to history education as I see it—not just a means of transmitting knowledge but as a discipline that fosters the skills and dispositions necessary for civic life.
This theme extends to a broader critique of how societal pressures shape educational values. “The restless unease that unsettles our political and personal lives derives in part from a failure to understand ourselves, and to think well about the objects in which a human being might reasonably invest the hopes of a life.” A true education, in this view, is not simply about job preparation but about providing students with the intellectual tools needed for a meaningful and engaged life. Yet too often, the pressure-cooker environment of high-achieving schools prioritises conformity and performance in high-stakes assessment over true intellectual exploration. “The pressure-cooker conformity that high-achieving students feel comes as much from home as from school, with anxious parents concerned that anything less than academic perfection will cast their children into the outer darkness of an admissions waiting list” and perhaps miss a prestigious university position (where the culture of performativity continues!
This article echoes the book’s vital call to rethink what we value in education. In an age where AI will increasingly automate traditional measures of academic success, fostering student agency is not just beneficial – it is an imperative. Schools must move beyond a narrow focus on performativity and toward a model of education that equips students with the skills, motivation, and self-awareness needed to chart their own paths in an uncertain world.
American Lesson Plan: Teaching US History in America’s Secondary Schools (A Report of the American Historical Association)
In the evolving landscape of history pedagogy, Australian education stands as a hybrid of American, British, and Canadian influences. This makes it particularly valuable to examine how the American Historical Association’s (AHA) comprehensive report on history teaching reflects on the discipline. The American Lesson Plan offers a broad survey of history education across the United States, and while much of it is contextually American, many of its findings resonate with global conversations on the purpose and practice of history teaching.
Something that strikes me about this report, however, is the complete lack of mention of the use of educational or digital technology in education. While I can forgive the lack of AI reference in a report dated one year prior to the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, I do find it difficult to digest that such a high-quality report does not incorporate a significant section on the role that digital technologies might play in history education.
One of the most strikingly positive conclusions of the report is its skepticism toward reforms that rely too heavily on standardised instruction and micromanagement. This is a trend in a great deal of literature. “The AHA’s research raises skepticism about reforms that rely on overbearing standardisation or micromanagement of instruction.” This echoes ongoing discussions in Australia, where the tension between structured curricula and teacher autonomy continues to shape history pedagogy. The report justifies a call for “history-rich professional development,” reinforcing the argument that teachers benefit most from substantive engagement with historical content, rather than what the report sees as compliance-focused training models.
A key theme emerging from the AHA report is that history education must extend beyond basic historical thinking skills to foster meaningful engagement with history’s purpose. The authors argue that history should “instill in students a sense of belonging to the nation and to prepare them for participation as citizens.” This is crucial, as historical thinking alone does not necessarily cultivate civic agency. My own research contends that history education should be reparative, generative, and future-oriented – helping students to not only understand the past but also see their role in shaping the future.
Another notable insight is the tension between inquiry-based history education and content knowledge. The report celebrates the development of history as a discipline-specific inquiry process but warns of the collateral costs when content becomes secondary to skills-based abstractions. “When content (names, dates, places, stories) are blurred in favor of skills-based abstractions, teachers may have more difficulty defending the integrity of history against politicised accusations that what they’re teaching is nothing more than a ‘biased,’ ‘divisive,’ or ‘problematic’ opinion.” This is an important warning – while inquiry and historical thinking are foundational, students still need a firm grasp of historical narratives to engage meaningfully with them.
Perhaps most encouraging is the report’s revelation that American history teachers overwhelmingly prioritise critical thinking, democratic citizenship, and connections to the present. “Surveyed teachers almost unanimously see the goals of critical thinking (97 percent), democratic citizenship (94 percent), and making connections to the present (93 percent) as central to their approach to teaching US history.” This finding affirms the broad commitment of American history educators to fostering analytical and civic-minded students. However, the regional disparities in the role and purpose of the study of history do worry me. For example, apparently 36 percent of Texan, Alabaman, and Virginian history teachers see it as important to emphasise the role of God in American’s “national destiny”. (That is not a typo: 36%). While this high percent is not matched in other states or regions of the US, it does highlight some ideological fractures in how history is understood and taught in America. The role of religion in the history classroom stands in contrast to Australia’s generally secular approach to history education.
Ultimately, the American Lesson Plan reinforces the need for an active, inquiry-driven, and civically engaged model of history teaching. As history educators, we must be mindful of both the affordances and the limitations of inquiry-based approaches, ensuring that they are grounded in meaningful historical knowledge and appropriate research. Above all, the AHA report reaffirms the critical role of teachers as the principle architects of history education. The article makes a strong case for strong professional learning and intellectual engagement with the discipline.
Opinion | Giving Kids Some Autonomy Has Surprising Results – The New York Times
As education wrestles with the challenges of an AI-driven future, a pressing question emerges: Are we equipping students with the agency they need to thrive? The New York Times article by Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop highlights a growing crisis in student preparedness, with a recent survey showing that nearly half of Gen Z respondents do not feel ready for the workforce. Employers corroborate this, noting that young hires struggle with initiative, problem-solving, and resilience. These gaps, the article argues, stem from an education system that too often prioritises compliance over autonomy.
This issue is not just a matter of workforce readiness – it is an indictment of how education has drifted from its core values. As I have long argued, history pedagogy must evolve beyond rote content delivery and toward a reparative, generative, and future-oriented model. The current performative culture of education, obsessed with rankings and standardised measures, is failing both students and society. As the article powerfully states, “Maybe it’s time to define a higher ideal for education, less about ranking and sorting students on narrow measures of achievement and more about helping young people figure out how to unlock their potential and how to operate in the world.” The challenges of our time – AI, rising authoritarianism, digital disconnection – demand that students learn far more than how to follow instructions.
Agency is at the heart of this transformation. The article cites the work of Johnmarshall Reeve, who has spent decades studying what happens when students are given some degree of control over their learning. In a wide-ranging piece of research, he and his colleagues found that when students had opportunities to take initiative, they were more engaged, mastered skills more effectively, achieved higher grades, had fewer peer conflicts, and were happier overall. With effect sizes between 0.7 and 0.9, this is not just an anecdotal observation – it is a statistically significant transformation. If we want students to take ownership of their learning, they must be given opportunities to do so in meaningful ways.
This applies beyond the classroom. John Hattie’s meta-analysis of nearly 2,000 studies, covering over two million children, found that parental approaches to autonomy play a crucial role in student success. Parents who default to “do this now” language and micromanagement see diminished learning outcomes in their children. This aligns with Reeve’s findings in the classroom: when students feel they have a stake in their own education, they engage more deeply, develop intrinsic motivation, and perform better. (Perhaps there are messages in this for some of those running schools or managing sections of them in this research too!)
The consequences of neglecting agency extend beyond personal development. A system that prioritises performative success produces high-achieving students who struggle with self-direction. As the article notes, “Many recent graduates aren’t able to set targets, take initiative, figure things out and deal with setbacks – because in school and at home they were too rarely afforded any agency.” This research reinforces what I have argued in my work: history education must do more than cultivate disciplinary skills; it must prepare students for active, agentic citizenship. The performative, compliance-driven model of education is not just bad for learning – it is bad for democracy, bad for business, and bad for student wellbeing. Schools must create spaces where students are empowered to think critically, set meaningful goals, and develop the skills they need to navigate an uncertain world. As the article makes clear, this is not just a theoretical ideal – it is an urgent necessity.
Disrupted History 