The Well-Educated Child

A New Path toward Real Learning

I’ve been following the remarkable progress of Deborah Kenny’s Harlem Village Academies—a network of charter schools—for about 20 years now. And I’ve watched her develop a theory of K-12 education that transcends Harlem, that is nothing less than a major rethinking of how children—your children (I wish mine had had the opportunity)—can grow into thoughtful, ethical and, best of all, passionate citizens.

Dr. Kenny began by starting a middle school, notorious among educators as the most daunting project —the transition from pre-teen to teen, hormones beginning to run rampant, bad habits inculcated by early school “training” in many cases and, of course, a more challenging curriculum. She did this in one of the poorest neighborhoods of New York City. Her first school was a triumph—within a few years, her students’ test results were among the best in New York State. And then she expanded, with the support of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein. She added a pre-K Montessori program, two elementary schools, two more middle schools, a high school where students earn the difficult International Baccalaureate degree. All her schools were excellent by most traditional measures.

But Kenny wasn’t satisfied. She wanted her graduates to not only test well—100% go on to college—but also to think well, and behave well, and to have an ethical sense of community. The Well-Educated Child is her account of how she created a curriculum to achieve those goals over the past ten years. She has developed strategies and techniques that can improve education for every child, including those not on the college track. (I’d love to see Dr. Kenny try her hand at schools that focus on tech and trades, skills like electronics, computer science and welding, where—according to recent studies—we have severe employment deficits.) The joy and excitement—and humanity—I’ve seen in her schools would work in any educational setting. Her students make a commitment to participating in their own education. This is the opposite of rote learning. Her schools are an adventure in self-discovery.

The Well-Educated Child is a jolt of good news. It should be required reading for every American teacher, and for every School Board member…and for every politician who claims to care about this issue. It provides potential answers to rectify the slow-slide toward incompetence of American education in the digital era. It is a vibrant demonstration that great education can be brought to all students, despite the incandescent temptations of 21st century social culture.

Dr. Kenny’s vision isn’t an easy one. Her students come to her, semi-randomly, by lottery. She requires parental involvement. Most of all, she requires dedicated, brilliant teachers—teachers who are empowered to come up with their own study plans, teachers who are obsessed with the success of every child, who are willing (and happy) to have their classroom work reviewed constantly by their peers, and who are available for their students and families after school hours.

As always, the question is can Kenny’s model be replicable on a grand scale? Probably not, she admits in her Epilogue, not until the status—and remuneration, and accountability—of teachers changes fundamentally. Not until teachers are regarded as crucial to our success as a society as doctors, tech engineers, research scientists and other professionals. Our failure to pay sufficient attention to this issue is, to my mind, the most infuriating scandal of American public life.

Changing the culture of education will take some doing. But there are lessons that can be learned from the strategies Dr. Kenny has developed—and I’m privileged to excerpt one of the chapters of her new book here, one that concerns the very first lesson that children need to learn: how to behave in school. But not just how to behave: how to commit themselves to becoming part of a learning community, how to regard their fellow students, how to have—in Dr. Kenny’s term—agency in their own educations. If this basic trait can’t be taught, it’s very hard for schools to do the other things they need to do. If it can be taught, a new generation of involved, caring, rigorous citizens will be the result.

Deborah Kenny has succeeded in this threshold task. And in this chapter, she shows how she did it:

AGENCY

Students cannot learn to think independently in schools that do not allow them to act and work independently, that is, to exercise agency

Agency is the capacity to be self-directed. Students with agency take initiative and push through difficulties, going beyond what is required. They are self-motivated: on fire to achieve their goals, read more books, pursue more challenging work.

Yet the defining feature of urban schooling is the antithesis of agency: extremely tight management of students. New teachers are trained to micromanage students with techniques like snapping, clapping, chanting, doling out verbal rewards for correct answers (“bonus!”), and using color-coded charts to keep track of student behavior. There is incessant praise for basic actions (“I like how Sam is silently waiting. I like how Britney is silently waiting. I like how Rodney is silently wait-ing.”). There is rapid, staccato narration (“Your thinking job is character motivation. What’s your thinking job? Track Caylee! Rudy’s hands are locked tracking Caylee! Elijah’s hands are locked tracking Caylee! Glory’s hands are locked tracking Caylee!” Finally, Caylee answers: “Character motivation.” The teacher says, “Nice job, Caylee!” The class repeats, “Nice job, Caylee!”). Schools use classroom rugs with predesignated squares to prescribe exactly where each student should sit and tactics like “magic five” to prescribe exactly how they should sit (rigidly upright in pin-straight rows, hands clasped or “locked” at all times). Teachers are told to control their students’ every move, counting down after each direction (“Trade papers with your partner in ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, and three, and two, one, and zero”). Jumbo timers are the focal point of the classroom, beeping throughout the lesson. Students hear these inane directives, countdowns, and beepers in class after class, day after day—stifling their independence at every turn and sending the message, clear as can be, that they are incapa-ble of managing even the simplest tasks.

These methods have become so common that they are not even recognized as inferior but simply accepted as normal, even great teaching.

This is not great teaching. It reduces learning to rote repetition, impedes critical and logical thinking, undermines emotional intelligence, and shapes young minds to value conformity and compliance. It is incongruous with a century of scholar-ship on learning theory and cognitive science.

Agency is also central to the International Baccalaureate [the degree received by graduates of Harlem Village Academies], which designed its entire approach “to empower students to become self-regulated learners.” Students educated in this way—with agency as a core pedagogical value—learn to be self-starters who seek out knowledge, sustain focus, monitor their own progress, and persist through setbacks.

The development of agency requires a shift in school culture as well as an infrastructure of classroom practices that can teach the skills of self-direction.

Our original routines were designed to foster kindness and respect. Each year a new cohort of fifth graders arrived from other schools that tolerated poor behaviors, which then developed into habits: fidgeting, shuffling, tapping, humming, mumbling, slouching, facing sideways, playing with belong-ings, clicking binders, and in some cases teasing, cursing, refus-ing to work, or disrupting lessons. Back then it was a real problem.

We developed a three-day student orientation for the beginning of each school year. It consisted of a series of lessons to teach and practice routines so they would become habits. We created routines for homework folders, notebooks, lunch and recess, arrival and dismissal, entering and exiting the class-room, disagreeing respectfully, being courteous in the hallway…Something as simple as arrival, for instance, is an opportunity to teach courtesy. We teach students to look behind them when they enter the building so they can hold the door open if some-one is entering after them, and we teach them to greet the security guard with kindness and respect rather than just pass-ing by. The expectation of timely arrival is also an opportunity to teach responsibility and time management. We give students a detailed “backward planning” lesson that starts with figuring out what time they need to go to bed in order to get enough sleep, and what time they will get their materials organized in the evening so they will not forget something in the morning rush.

We created fifteen lessons altogether, and to make them fun, the teachers created skits and songs and even some practical jokes.

But there was a problem with our approach, though we didn’t realize it at the time. The adults were doing all the work. The adults were designing classroom management plans, telling students how to follow them, evaluating students, coming up with ideas to solve problems when they arose, revising plans, and pushing for excellence. Because they had ownership of all this work, the adults were committed and energized; the students were just following along.

If students are told precisely what to do and when and how, then we are depriving them of the opportunity to become self-directed, to learn how to figure things out on their own. And most importantly, to care about how they comport themselves. Some of the high school teachers were also advocating for student independence—and they were right.

So ten years ago we elevated the way we spoke about ideal classroom culture from respectful to respectfully independent. In the new version of our routines, students did more of the work. Now, they would be the ones to deliberate about how to build a caring community, craft a routine, write out their ideas, synthesize the best ones, self-assess and course correct, and set goals for the next day—all the things that teachers and princi-pals had been doing.

Good teaching holds students accountable, I explained to our teachers and leaders, but great teaching leads students to hold themselves accountable. Instead of training students to behave as if they are focused, we should design learning experiences that are so compelling that they genuinely are focused.

It is relatively easy to manage students, but much harder to teach students to manage themselves. Some teachers did well, but others reverted to what they did in their old schools: sneaking in techniques like countdowns or color-coded charts. When I asked them why, they said that our approach was too difficult. Couldn’t they work on independence later? After all, they said, their kids were behaving. Wasn’t that the point?

And that’s when it hit me. We had said that our culture would be designed around respectful independence, but we were still thinking only in terms of behavior. What we needed was a fundamental shift in the entire way we thought and talked about school culture. We needed to insist that good behavior at the expense of student agency is in fact a form of failure. We needed good behavior, while important, to be seen as a bare minimum, not the focal point. The focal point around which school culture revolved had to be student agency.

When you design systems and practices from this perspec-tive, everything changes. I think of a little third-grade girl in a jumper and white ankle socks I noticed one day getting up from her desk to go to the supply corner. Along the way, she did a little dance with a sparkle in her eye, exuding carefree confidence. Heading back, she did the same five-second dance, disturbing no one. I smiled and thought to myself: She is a little rebel, and I am here for it! I flashed back to a memory of being a little rebel just like her, trying to sneak in a little danc-ing in elementary school. Part of great schooling is notcrushing that innate spirit of independence and exuberance, which is the foundation of independent thinking and thus of intellectual sophistication.

Fostering that independence starts with structures for stu-dents to self-direct their behavior. At the beginning of the school year, we lead students through a protocol to create class commitments, which are agreements about how to self-govern their class community. If they create their commitments together, they will care about upholding them for one another.

Class commitments don’t replace school rules. We have a complete set of strict rules—no cell phones, no tardiness, no fighting (of course), and so on—with associated consequences that are clear and consistent. And we make a point of providing students the rationale for those rules. Sometimes we ask them to determine the rationale for themselves through ques-tions like “How does this rule help me academically or emotionally?” or “How does this rule help our school?” or “Why do you think we have this rule?” These questions help students to understand the value of the rules, and the fact that we are eliciting their thinking makes them feel respected and empowered, thus self-motivated to behave well.

We begin the class commitment protocol by gathering students in a circle and asking them to write responses to the following questions: “How do I want to feel at school? How do I want to be treated?” They think and write in silence for a while, then go around the circle sharing their thoughts as the teacher (or one of the students) writes their ideas on chart paper. Students in a seventh-grade class I taught one year (so we could videotape my lessons as a professional development tool for teachers) said things like “I want to feel like I fit in,” “I want to feel comfortable and protected,” “I want to feel like I can be myself,” “Like I’m not afraid to say the wrong thing,” “Like I’m important.”

Next, I asked them to take a moment to look at the chart. As they gazed at their responses, it slowly dawned on them that they all wanted essentially the same thing. This awareness engendered empathy for one another, and they began to bond as a group. As they were focused on the chart, I asked: “If this is how everyone wants to feel, then how do we need to treat each other so that we will all feel this way?” Again I asked the students to silently think and write for a few minutes. Then we went around the circle to hear their ideas. As they spoke, I encouraged them not to reply to me but to look at and talk with one another. Some said, “We need to act mature” or “Don’t laugh if someone makes a mistake.” But most said something like “We need to be respectful” or “We need to be kind.”

Anticipating this, I was prepared with the next question: “A lot of kids talked about respect and kindness. But those are general words. How do you know if you’re being kind—what does it look and sound like? What does it really mean to be respectful; what would someone say or do?” This got the students thinking. They said things like “To be kind is to listen to someone and to care about their feelings,” “Respect is like when the teacher says to do something, you do it,” “Kind is never teasing, and I agree to never tease any of you,” “Yeah, we need to trust each other,” “Include everyone,” and “Yeah, like, treat each other like a family.” As they brainstormed, I could sense the feeling of intimacy that was emerging among them. Meanwhile, I wrote their ideas on a new chart titled “Class Commitments.”

The next day, the students circled up again, this time to review and refine their list—eliminate redundancies, clarify language, and so on. Their sense of agency continued to grow as I asked them questions like “Does everyone agree with this edit?” Once the commitments were finalized, the next lesson was a big one. “These are your commitments to one another,” I said. “They are beautiful. But right now they are still words. So now talk among yourselves and work together to figure out: How will we hold ourselves accountable to uphold our commitments? What will we do when someone breaks a commit-ment?” Students came up with ideas such as “We will apologize to the other person” and “We will have a discussion with the teacher.” A student’s outlook and comportment are trans-formed when they are asked to reach that level of maturity, when they are trusted to create something important.

Class commitments become moral touchstones for the students. They will reference them throughout the school year when they offer acknowledgments and apologies at the end of each school day. One afternoon, I observed this in one of our fourth-grade classrooms. “Who has an acknowledgment or apology?” the teacher asked. A boy started: “I want to apologize to Brandon. In math, I broke our commitment to not laugh when someone makes a mistake.” He looked at Brandon and said, “I’m sorry.” “That’s okay,” Brandon replied. Another student offered, “I apologize to you, John, for when we were supposed to find partners in PE and I moved away from you. I didn’t mean anything bad to you, I just didn’t want to be in the game.” John replied, “Thank you.” Last, a girl said, “Sharice, I acknowledge that you took feedback well today and made your work better.”

It is incredible to see these exchanges among nine- and ten-year-olds. This protocol starts in PreK and takes place all the way through high school. Amelia, a tenth grader, started one afternoon with an apology to the teacher: “I want to apologize for giving you a hard time yesterday about that homework grade.”

This practice of acknowledgments and apologies takes place in closing circle. The ritual of opening and closing each school day with a circle is another way we foster agency.

Circles helps students to feel deeply cared for and thus able to better focus on their studies. In a similar way, the practice of mindfulness empowers students to maintain emotional equi-librium, to feel calm, and thus, again, to focus on learning. Students in all our schools are given time for mindful breathing every day in every grade, from PreK through twelfth. We launch mindfulness at the beginning of each school year with lessons on brain science and the physiology of the nervous sys-tem. Students learn about neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to rewire itself, and the connection between breathing, feelings, and behavior. They come to understand when and why to employ mindful breathing. We keep it simple, with no gimmicks: just deep, slow, silent breathing. At first, teachers lead the practice. Then, after a couple of months, we teach our students to take turns leading. It’s quite something to walk into a high school classroom and see the serene faces of an entire group of teenagers practicing mindful breathing, just as it is adorable to see the little ones doing it in PreK. We start our teacher and leader meetings with mindful breathing as well, to connect with inner peace.

Michael, one of our fourth graders, told me his thoughts about the practice. “Mindfulness allowed me to release the anger I had bottled up for eternity since I was born,” he said. “I get angry a lot. I never had a way to do something about it. Last year I destroyed my own Lego that I had built for four months. So learning mindfulness at school, it gave me time to reflect on my emotions, and now I don’t get angry as much. It gives me a second to think. I breathe in, and when I breathe in that makes me calm and not explode.”

“I noticed from the first week of school that Michael was intelligent but also stubborn and angry,” said his teacher, Terry Washington. “He’s more advanced than the other students, but he feels self-conscious because he’s into things that other stu-dents aren’t. Mindfulness has helped him so much. When he gets angry, he knows to take a few minutes to breathe. He will say to me, ‘I just need to breathe.’ The kids understand that mindfulness is about releasing stress, releasing anxiety. I think it has made him feel better about himself.”

One day I heard a ruckus in the stairwell. Some fifth graders were being rowdy coming up from recess. Instead of reprimand-ing them, I tried something else first. “Let’s take a mindful moment. Everyone take a slow, calm, deep breath in. And a slow, calm, deep breath out.” They became calm and quiet. Their mindful breathing practice had become so internalized that they were able to immediately and independently self-regulate.

In designing our school culture, we look for every opportunity, large and small, to promote student agency. We give our kindergarten students blank paper for free drawing instead of pages from coloring books. Rather than asking first-grade teachers to create nameplates for their class, we have the chil-dren create their own. They are perfectly capable of writing their names, and that simple act, for a six-year-old, is one small step of independence that helps build the foundation for drive and confidence. At the beginning of the year, instead of having teachers set up their classrooms with teacher-created decora-tions and commercially produced posters, as schools typically do, we start with bare walls and empty bulletin boards. The classroom becomes a blank canvas. Within days, student think-ing starts to become visible. Students write about their goals and dreams, and these go up on the walls. They formulate their class commitments, and these go up on the walls. Soon, the learning environment is filled with their ideas, art, and writing.

A school’s approach to discipline itself can be designed to cultivate agency. We use restorative discipline, in which stu-dents must take responsibility for their actions, understand the harm they’ve caused, analyze their misbehavior, and take con-crete steps to “make it right” by repairing the damage they’ve done to the community.

There are a number of misconceptions about restorative discipline. One is that it is unstructured. Not so. It involves different kinds of structures. Another is that restorative means permissive. Not at all. We have exceptionally high expecta-tions for respect. When a teacher calls for attention, for exam-ple, we expect 100 percent of students to give their attention right away and all the way. A third is that restorative discipline is a substitute for consequences. Again, not so. Students who break a rule, such as behaving disrespectfully, will earn a consequence.

But if we do not want misbehavior to keep occurring, stu-dents need more than a consequence. They need guidance. This is the brilliance of restorative accountable discipline: It maintains consequences and then goes beyond that, teach-ing and inspiring students to hold themselves accountable and to take responsibility for transforming their attitudes and actions. If students misbehave, in addition to earning a consequence, we have them engage in reflection and writing. The process has five steps, each with specific questions in a deliberate sequence. The first step is getting the story out. This is important, because students, especially adolescents, when they feel angry, have a hard time focusing on how to improve. Questions include “Describe in detail what hap-pened and your role in what happened.” Then, “What words describe how you are feeling?” (Some options are provided, including “angry,” “sad,” “depressed,” “frustrated,” “confused,” and “embarrassed,” followed by “Why do you feel this way?”) By taking a few minutes to identify how he or she is feeling and getting a chance to express in writing his or her version of the story, the student has a chance to let off steam and feel validated. This step has a calming and focusing effect, and the student is now in a mindset to be productive.

The next step is taking responsibility. Questions include “How did your actions impact your learning?” “In what ways did your behavior impact others?” and “What rules or expecta-tions did you violate?” Third comes problem-solving and mov-ing forward. The key question here is “When a situation like this comes up again, what do you want to pay attention to and do?” This question implies a high level of respect for the stu-dent and inspires him or her to want to live up to that respect. The fourth step is preparation and rehearsal. Here the question is “What might be some things you can say or do to restore your good standing in class and repair your relationship with the teacher and/or your peers?” This is where the student drafts what he or she will say and/or do upon returning to class, and the dean may provide feedback and coaching as the student rehearses this. (Depending on the severity of the infraction, the student may not be allowed to return to class that period or even for the rest of the day.) The fifth and final step is getting support and keeping on track. The student addresses two ques-tions: “What are two to three things that you can do to stay on track? What are one or two things that your teacher(s) might do to support you?” Figuring out how to get help for oneself is a key component of agency and a skill that students will need in college.

Once all this is done, the student is asked if he or she is truly ready. “Take some time and really look over what you have said. Ask yourself if your teacher will think you put 100 percent effort into your work. Get yourself ready to explain how you will fix your behavior so that you can return to class.” This entire process—going through the steps, considering how one’s actions affected others, strategizing and planning how to improve—reflects the central role of agency in restor-ative discipline. At the same time, the teacher’s authority is respected, and the student understands that we do not accept second-rate work of any kind, including with regard to behav-ior and discipline. In light of this, the teacher will review the student’s answers, hear anything that he or she has to say, and decide whether to accept the student back into class.

Ultimately, restorative practices support students to fulfill their innate potential. David is a high school senior who started at HVA in fifth grade. “I was living in the Bronx, surrounded by a lot of negative influences,” David said. “I was hanging outside with friends who were much older than me. There was a lot of violence. I lost a few good friends.” His mom was working the evening shift at the city housing authority.

“He is such an impressive young man,” said Yohana. “Very polished, sharp. His shirt is the whitest shirt of all the students. He’s very respectful. But—” Yohana continued, “his desire to be the best means that if he doesn’t get his way, if he believes someone has disrespected him in any way, he can get very confrontational.”

We do not allow cell phones at school. Students hand them in each morning at the front door. “One morning David told me that he didn’t have his phone,” Yohana said. “But later that day he got caught with it. The teacher confiscated it, and the dean, Henry, locked it up. After school. David thought that somehow he could sweet-talk Henry into giving it back. Of course, Henry told him that he would be calling his mother and she’d have to pick it up. David stormed downstairs. A stu-dent who saw him asked, ‘Are you okay?’ He pushed her aside and started yelling at me, ‘I need my phone! Can I get my phone? Can I get my phone?’ I said, ‘You know the rules,’ but before I could add anything, he turned around and went back upstairs to Henry’s office.”

“He burst into my office,” Henry said. “He was yelling at the top of his lungs, ‘This is not fair! Give me my fucking phone! It’s my fucking property!’ I told him to have a seat, and I went to close the door, but he blocked the door with his foot. Then he slammed his fist into the door. ‘Give me my fucking phone!’ Yohana came up to let me know what had happened downstairs. I called David’s mother to let her know that he had earned a suspension for egregious disrespect.”

Three days later, David returned to school for his restorative meeting with Henry. “I asked him, ‘Why do you think you got to that place of belligerence?’ And his reply was ‘I don’t even remember half of what I did.’ I’ve known him a long time, so I knew he was sincere. I went over all that happened, and as he heard it, he put his face in his hands. He was really upset with himself. I went on, ‘If you get this angry every time something doesn’t go your way, what will happen in your life?’ And he said, ‘People will not want to help me. I’ll push people away. They won’t see me for who I am. I don’t know why I flip out when I get mad.’ He could see that he was getting in his own way.”

David is exceptionally bright. That self-awareness and intro-spection were precisely what the restorative process is designed to elicit.

Henry continued, “I said to him, ‘You have a learned behav-ior that you need to unlearn.’ He was really interested. He asked me, ‘How do I do that?’ I suggested that when he gets angry, he can take a pause. I could see that he really cared. ‘But when I’m in that angry moment, how can I pause?’ he asked. ‘When that happens,’ I said, ‘you can tell the teacher that you’re getting upset and you need a moment. Ask to be excused. Then come to my office.’ So, from that discussion, when he was upset, he would replace the outburst with the new habit of showing up in my office to sit down and breathe for a minute, get himself together.”

Meanwhile, David still had to restore his relationships with multiple people. He went to each person he had hurt. He went to the friend he’d pushed out of the way and said, “I’m really sorry, but I’m not just apologizing. I’m working on myself.” He also went to Yohana for a restorative meeting. “I realize that I have a problem,” he told her. “You don’t deserve the way I was speaking to you. I’m sorry that I didn’t treat you right. If I’m going to be the man I want to be, and keep having all these opportunities the school gives me, I know I can’t do that.”

“When I returned to school, I felt reminded of my poten-tial,” David said. “The school counselor recommended that I apply for a Columbia University precollege program. HVA offers us these summer opportunities, but I didn’t know if it was for someone like me. When I was accepted, I felt proud. Ecstatic, really. But also unsure of my place at a school like Columbia. My program was called Freedom & Citizenship based on the core curriculum at Columbia. We studied great thinkers like Plato, Socrates, and Frederick Douglass in a sem-inar format. We did a reenactment of The Trial and Death of Socrates. I was Socrates! We read the Constitution.” David said that the discussions outside of class were just as important as the discussion in class. “Now I have a friend from Germany, a friend from China. I met one student who was particularly extraordinary. I saw Kyle’s dedication to his own future. I now have a new mantra: Be like Kyle! I saw how hard people were working. It made me reexamine my life.” David just gradu-ated and started his freshman year at a selective four-year college.

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These practices and structures—a culture of caring, student-created routines, class commitments, opening and closing circles, mindfulness, restorative discipline—they all cultivate agency. When students have agency, they don’t just follow directions, they care about being a kind person; they don’t just do their assignments, they care about the quality of their work.

The results can be remarkable. Consider our morning routine:

Twenty-six kindergarteners are working independently as the school day begins in a classroom that radiates the soft hum of carefree childhood activity. The children are at once serious and serene. Several are looking at vocabulary words on the wall; one little boy is delivering plastic supply bins to each table; others are reading books or playing with blocks.

The teacher rings a chime. The class falls silent and looks at her. “Time to make our way to opening circle,” she says. The children start buzzing about, pushing in chairs, putting away papers, helping one another tidy up. The teacher spots two of them bickering. She does not issue demerits or change their behavior chart from green to yellow, nor does she solve their conflict for them. Instead, she walks over and firmly asks a guiding question—“How do you think you should handle this?”—and they figure out how to resolve the conflict for themselves.

Meanwhile, the class has gathered in a circle on the rug, chatting and giggling as children do. The rug is solid blue, without squares or circles (a decision we made so students would learn to independently navigate social norms). The last two kids approach the rug, but there is no room for them in the circle. The teacher stays silent, knowing what we taught about student self-management. Sure enough, the other kids shift around to make space for the latecomers, and the class reforms itself into a circle. A boy and girl stand up, beaming. They are this week’s circle leaders, a coveted classroom job. As they walk over to two tiny chairs by an easel, the class quiets down and looks at them. “Good morning,” the girl says to her classmates. She and the boy proceed to lead opening circle.

This morning routine, which might appear to consist of a series of minor miracles, was made possible by the agency-centered design we had undertaken in painstaking detail, and by the innate potential of the students themselves.

Excerpted from THE WELL-EDUCATED CHILD: How the Principles and Practices of Quality Thinking, Agency, and Ethical Purpose Cultivate Deeper Learning by Deborah Kenny. Copyright (c) 2026 by Deborah Kenny. Published with permission from Get Lifted Books, an imprint of Zando, LLC.