Building Agency-Driven School Cultures: A Unified Framework

If schools aspire to nurture lifelong learners who take ownership of their growth, they must go beyond equipping students with individual skills. They must design school cultures and systems that develop agency at all levels—students, educators, and leadership—through structures that reward collective growth, collaboration, and purposeful autonomy.

This article presents a unified framework for cultivating agency-driven school cultures, grounded in three complementary bodies of work:

• Hunt and Baumber’s (2024) Habits of High-Agency Learning

• Mullen’s (2025) Five Foundations of Learner Agency

• *Analysis of incentive structures and their impact on transparency and collaboration in organizations (Exploring the Core, 2025)

Together, these sources highlight how habits, instructional practices, and system incentives can align to create environments where both educators and students thrive as high-agency learners.

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🏫 A Unified Framework for Agency-Driven School Cultures

1️⃣ Develop Agency Habits in Both Students and Staff

Effective agency-building requires embedding habits and capacities into daily practice.

• For students, Mullen (2025) proposes Five Foundations of Learner Agency:

  • Intentional Learning Planning

  • Self-Regulated Progress Tracking

  • Strategic Use of Learning Resources

  • Learning-Style Awareness & Collaboration

  • Versatile Demonstration of Mastery

These capacities are observable, coachable, and map to academic standards without sacrificing rigor or accountability.

• For staff, schools should mirror these foundations through professional learning communities that:

  • Engage educators in co-designing goals

  • Encourage progress tracking of instructional strategies

  • Promote collaborative resource-sharing

  • Value diverse instructional styles

  • Support multiple ways to demonstrate instructional mastery

Hunt and Baumber (2024) reinforce this through 11 habits that embed agency into school culture, such as fostering deep work, mentoring, curating quality information, and organizing community learning events.

2️⃣ Redesign Incentive Structures to Support Collective Agency

Research highlights that traditional incentive structures focused on individual performance can erode psychological safety, collaboration, and transparency (Edmondson, 1999; Exploring the Core, 2025).

• Balance individual and team-based rewards so both personal growth and collective success are valued (Huselid, 1995).

  
  

• Incentivize mentoring, collaboration, and knowledge-sharing as essential contributions to school improvement (Gratton & Erickson, 2007).

  
  

• Integrate team contributions into evaluations, so performance reviews reflect both individual excellence and collaborative impact (West, 2002).

  
  

• Foster psychological safety by creating conditions where discussing challenges is seen as strength rather than weakness (Edmondson, 1999).

Use Rubrics to Build Agency-Driven Incentive Structures in Schools

Schools can use adapted rubrics to assess and strengthen systems that promote both student and staff agency by rewarding collaboration, transparency, and purposeful action.

These rubrics provide clear criteria for evaluating and improving (Exploring the Core, 2025):

✅ Collaboration and Teamwork – Assess the quality of teamwork, shared responsibility, communication, and conflict resolution to ensure collective success is valued alongside individual achievement.

✅ Psychological Safety – Measure how well leaders foster open dialogue, inclusivity, and a growth-focused approach to mistakes, creating conditions where agency can thrive.

✅ Mentoring and Peer Support – Recognize and incentivize knowledge-sharing, mentoring, and peer coaching, embedding collective growth into school culture.

✅ Problem-Solving Contributions – Ensure that both individual and team problem-solving efforts are central to evaluations and rewards, aligning agency with meaningful impact.

These rubrics can guide reflection, coaching, team goal-setting, and performance evaluations—helping schools align incentive structures with the values of collective progress and high agency for all.

3️⃣ Align Systems, Culture, and Practice

To truly embed agency into the fabric of a school or district, schools must ensure that systems, culture, and day-to-day practices all reinforce one another, rather than working in isolation. This alignment ensures that agency is not just an instructional trend or isolated classroom effort—but a shared value that permeates the entire educational ecosystem.

🌟 Make agency a shared goal in mission, policies, and daily operations

✅ Why it matters: When agency is enshrined in the school or district mission and reflected in policies, it signals to students, staff, and families that ownership of learning and collective progress are central to the community’s identity—not optional add-ons.

✅ What this looks like:

• Agency-focused language in vision/mission statements (e.g., “We nurture self-directed, collaborative learners prepared to shape their future.”)

• Policies that prioritize student voice in decision-making (e.g., student-led conferences, participatory governance).

• School routines that invite teacher and student agency (e.g., flexible scheduling, choice-based assignments, collaborative planning time).

📚 Align professional development, student learning goals, and leadership practices around agency-building

✅ Why it matters: Teachers and leaders must experience and practice agency themselves in order to model and cultivate it in students.

✅ What this looks like:

• PD structures that promote teacher agency: choice-based workshops, collaborative inquiry cycles, teacher-led coaching models.

• Student learning goals that integrate agency capacities (e.g., goal-setting, reflection, self-regulation) alongside academic standards.

• Leadership practices that prioritize distributive leadership, teacher voice in decisions, and collaborative problem-solving structures.

🎉 Celebrate both process and outcome

✅ Why it matters: When schools only celebrate end results (test scores, awards), they unintentionally undermine agency by focusing on products rather than the learning journey. Recognizing how teams work together reinforces the value of collaboration, reflection, and perseverance (Gallup, 2017).

✅ What this looks like:

• Publicly recognize teams of teachers or students for innovative solutions, inclusive collaboration, or resilience—not just high performance.

• Share stories in newsletters, assemblies, and board meetings that highlight the learning process: challenges overcome, adjustments made, lessons learned.

• Use reflection protocols in classrooms and staff meetings that focus on both what was achieved and how it was achieved.

🔍 Use regular reflection tools to monitor culture shifts and adjust supports

✅ Why it matters: Sustainable culture change requires ongoing assessment and adaptation. Reflection tools help schools track progress, identify gaps, and refine strategies to keep agency at the forefront.

✅ What this looks like:

• Use staff and student surveys to assess perceptions of agency, collaboration, and psychological safety.

• Facilitate team reflection using adapted rubrics (e.g., on collaboration, mentoring, problem-solving).

• Regularly review data (e.g., student-led project logs, PLC meeting notes) to gauge alignment with agency goals and adjust supports as needed.

When systems, culture, and practice are aligned:➡ Agency becomes a living value rather than a buzzword.➡ Students, educators, and leaders experience school as a place where they can meaningfully shape their learning, work, and community together.➡ The school becomes resilient, adaptive, and committed to continuous collective growth.

🔑 Why This Matters

Schools that implement this unified framework can expect:

• Increased student ownership of learning, as students see learning as a process they can direct (Mullen, 2025).

  
  

• Empowered educators who model agency through collaborative, reflective practice (Hunt & Baumber, 2024).

  
  

• Stronger organizational health, with improved collaboration, innovation, retention, and performance (Huselid, 1995; Gallup, 2017).

When structures, incentives, and culture align to promote agency at all levels, learning becomes something that happens anywhere, anytime, for life.

✉ Make the Call

It’s time for school leaders, educators, and communities to build systems where both staff and students can thrive as high-agency learners. Let’s co-create these environments—because the future of learning depends on it.

Greg Mullen

July 2, 2025

General Consult

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📝 References

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

Exploring the Core. (2025). How incentive structures can foster a culture of individuality and fear of transparency. [Unpublished internal analysis]. Exploring the Core LLC.

Gallup. (2017). State of the American workplace. Gallup Press.

Gratton, L., & Erickson, T. J. (2007). Eight ways to build collaborative teams. Harvard

Business Review, 85(11), 100–109.

Hunt, S., & Baumber, J. (2024). The habits of high-agency learning. https://medium.com/@serjsolarpunk/the-habits-of-high-agency-learning-703f6c11b73d

Huselid, M. A. (1995). The impact of human resource management practices on turnover, productivity, and corporate financial performance. Academy of Management Journal, 38(3), 635–672. https://doi.org/10.2307/256741

Mullen, G. (2025). Learner agency: Five foundations. Exploring the Core LLC. https://www.exploringthecore.com/post/learner-agency-five-foundations

West, M. A. (2002). The psychology of teams and innovation. In M. A. West & J. L. Farr (Eds.), Innovation and creativity at work: Psychological and organizational strategies (pp. 210–234). Wiley.