How teachers can support students’ agentic engagement

ABSTRACT

Agentic engagement represents students’ constructive contribution into the flow of instruction they receive, as students express their interests and offer their input. It is a purposive, proactive, and reciprocal type of engagement that is integral to promoting important student outcomes (e.g., learning, achievement), but its essential purpose is to recruit greater autonomy support from the teacher. We first highlight the different ways that teachers typically respond to student displays of agentic engagement (i.e., support, indifference, or control). We then recommend that teachers adopt an autonomy-supportive motivating style that will allow teachers to become increasingly in sync with their students as agents. Thus, the purpose of the article is to explain how teachers might best support students’ agentic engagement during classroom instruction.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional Resources

1. Bandura, A. (2006). Toward a psychology of human agency. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 1, 164–180.

As educational psychologists, we limit our discussion of student agency to classroom-based agentic engagement. In this conceptual article, Bandura provides a broader perspective on human agency to discuss how people intentionally improve their own functioning and proactively transform their life circumstances for the better.

2. Reeve, J. (2013). How students create motivationally supportive learning environments for themselves: The concept of agentic engagement. Journal of Educational Psychology, 105, 579–595.

This article introduced the concept of agentic engagement. It provides a definition for agentic engagement along with numerous classroom-based examples. The article includes a questionnaire to measure students’ self-reported agentic engagement, and it provides empirical evidence that students’ agentic engagement predicts both student achievement and changes in teacher-provided autonomy support.

3. Cheon, S. H., Reeve, J., & Song, Y.-G. (2019). Recommending goals and supporting needs: An intervention to help physical education teachers communicate their expectations while supporting students’ psychological needs. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 41, 107–118.

To help teachers learn how to become more autonomy supportive toward students, this article overviews a teacher-focused, workshop-based intervention. It identifies what autonomy-supportive instructional behaviors are, and it provides empirical evidence on the benefits of greater autonomy support. The article shows how teachers can offer a motivating style that is both highly structured (i.e., recommending teacher-valued goals) and highly autonomy supportive (i.e., supporting students’ psychological needs).