The Five Foundations of Learner Agency
- Greg Mullen
- Jun 25
- 8 min read
Imagine ending every school day with two simple questions: “What did you set out to discover today, and how did you steer your own path?”
Those questions surface a truth teachers already sense: real growth happens when learners are trusted to chart the course, gauge their progress, enlist the right help, and showcase what they know in ways that matter to them.
Traditional school structures rarely make that trust in learning explicit. We issue assignments, keep the timeline, and judge final products. Then we wonder why students struggle to act independently when the guardrails disappear.
This article offers a practical remedy: the Five Foundations of Learner Agency.
Drawn from classroom experience and a broad research base, the foundations are not another add-on program or challenge to teacher authority. They are a lens—five coachable habits that weave through every subject, grade level, and learning environment:
Intentional Learning Planning
Self-Regulated Progress Tracking
Strategic Use of Learning Resources
Learning-Style Awareness & Collaboration
Versatile Demonstration of Mastery
When students are coached to practice these habits, they move from passive recipients of content to active designers of their own learning both inside and outside the classroom, online and off, today and for life.
The sections that follow translate each foundation into observable indicators, grade-band progressions, and a step-by-step classroom scenario that shows how a single project can ignite agency without sacrificing academic rigor or teacher authority in the classroom.
🧭 The Five Foundations of Learner Agency
Foundation | Skill Summary + Evidence Link |
1. Intentional Learning Planning Students identify what they want/need to learn through reflection and frameworks. | |
2. Self-Regulated Progress Tracking Students monitor their growth, adapting goals across time and development. | |
3. Strategic Use of Learning Resources Students evaluate and apply tools and supports that benefit their learning. | Information-literacy courses significantly increase student retention and average GPA in courses.
Information-literacy programs consistently raise critical-thinking and employability indicators.
Increases ability to responsibly identify, locate, and critically evaluate sources after instruction.
|
4. Learning Style Awareness & Collaboration Students recognize and respect diverse learning approaches in themselves and others. | |
5. Versatile Demonstration of Mastery Students showcase what they know through formats suited to purpose, audience, and content. |
Why These Five?
When I first began mapping out the Self-Directed Learning Cycle in the compass-shaped infographic that appears in my book, Creating a Self-Directed Learning Environment: Standards-Based and Social-Emotional Learning (Corwin, 2019), I was a classroom teacher with upper elementary and middle school students struggling with students who had little to no authority or responsibility for their learning. My classroom at the time had walls with whiteboard paint that let me write on the entire wall so I began sketching the process for learning I had been coaching them to practice and internalize from principles and practices I had learned from my years of classroom teaching. Soon, I had five recurring moves: leveraging personal strengths, setting SMART goals, gathering resources, practicing and reflecting, and producing/sharing work. That visual wayfinder (the image above) has since become the seed for my Five Foundations of Learner Agency supported by years of research from around the world (of which the chart above provides a small sample).
Just as the 2019 graphic showed each step feeding the next, these Five Foundations act as connective tissue between isolated content standards and the evolving needs of learners in a fast-paced, tech-saturated world. They aren’t merely distance-learning tricks for isolated online learning; they’re very real-life skills that correlate with how students thrive in college, careers, relationships, and real-world problem-solving.
Yet, in many traditional systems, these capacities are assumed to be learned passively through experiences with explicit, direct instruction of academic content.
What if we explicitly taught these strategies as coachable and measurable skills for learning, and let students use academic content as the vehicle by which they exercise these skills?
Observable Indicators for Each Foundation
To move from theory to practice, each Foundation includes observable indicators of growth.
Note: these are not rigid “grades”—they’re indicators of development that may ebb and flow (progress and regress) for different students and different classrooms.
Foundation | "Emerging" (Teacher-Led) | "Developing" (Teacher-Guided) | "Proficient" (Student-Centered) | "Advanced" (Student-Led) |
1 · Intentional Learning Planning | Identifies a topic of interest when prompted | Chooses goals (list may be provided) and gives reasons | Sets relevant goals with a scaffold or planner | Designs custom learning plans driven by internal motivation or inquiry |
2 · Self-Regulated Progress Tracking | Asks for help, when needed. | Tracks assigned milestones with support (i.e. templates) | Adjusts given timeline based on progress and feedback | Creates personal benchmarks; reflects on effectiveness and adjusts |
3 · Strategic Use of Learning Resources | Uses resources when directly assigned | Explores different formats (video, peer, text) | Selects tools aligned to goals and explains their value | Evaluates resource effectiveness and pivots when needed |
4 · Learning-Style Awareness & Collaboration | States a personal learning preference (e.g., “I like pictures”) | Describes how they and a peer learn differently. | Adapts approach to work with others’ styles | Designs team processes that leverage diverse learning styles when available |
5 · Versatile Demonstration of Mastery | Completes assigned presentation tasks (posters, slides) | Chooses among given formats to show understanding | Selects or proposes a format suited to goal & audience | Synthesizes knowledge with mixed formats (e.g., video + written + dialogue) |
Blended Proficiency Maps: Growth Across Grades
Unlike siloed, grade-bound metrics, this model supports (encourages!) a spiraling continuum across the K-8 grade levels and up through High School and Higher Education.
Here’s a simplified example of this idea across K- grades for one foundation:
Foundation 2: Self-Regulated Progress Tracking (K–8 Snapshot)
Grade Band | Observable Growth |
K–2 | Draws a picture of a goal. Uses stickers/checkmarks to track tasks. Tells adult “I’m done” or “I need help.” |
3–5 | Writes simple goals. Keeps a weekly log or checklist. Begins noticing pacing (“This took longer than I thought”). |
6–8 | Uses planner or digital tracker. Adjusts goals when behind or ahead. Reflects on what helped or got in the way. |
This progression allows teachers, students, and parents to see how far they've come, not just what level they've "passed."
Now imagine similar spiraling maps for all five Foundations, tied to your school’s own academic standards. Math, ELA, Science, and Social Studies still matter—but they're woven through this lens of agency development as a lifelong learner.
How It Works in Practice
Here’s a real-world scenario using the Five Foundations:
Jaden, a 5ᵗʰ-grader who is caught up with all of his assigned work, asked to learn more about endangered animals. The teacher, interested in incorporating more student agency into the classroom, decides to follow the five foundational principles of learner agency to help Jaden with his request.
The chart below describes how Jaden's actions can be identified by each foundational principle and scaffolding tips that frame each action so Jaden is learning how to learn and not just how to be taught.
This shifts the concept of ownership for learning from the teacher to the student without placing external pressure on students to develop instrinsic motivation for learning (which has been shown to be ineffective across all grade levels -- preschool, elementary, higher ed).
Foundation | Student-Led Moves | Light-Touch Teacher Support (only if requested) |
1 · Intentional Learning Planning | Jaden has five curiosities but really wants to know why sea turtles are endangered. | Offer a SMART-goal template only if Jaden asks how to tighten wording. Suggest writing their goal down and adding "Why is this important to me?" to help keep their focus on what they want to explore. Advise resources to access for information specific to their interest. |
2 · Self-Regulated Progress Tracking | Jaden sketches out some information and is excited to present their learning, but it is a bit chaotic and haphazard. Frustrated by the quality (and confused response from peers), they revise their presentation to focus on clarity of message. | Offer reflection on student frustration, asking open-ended questions to spur deeper student thought about strategies and techniques for improving their presentation (and the information within it). |
3 · Strategic Use of Learning Resources | Upon further reflection, Jaden visits websites, documentary clips, and various nonfiction books. | Suggest rating each source (👍 👎) in a simple T-chart based on how helpful the information is to them. Model a single example of the rating process if Jaden hits a dead end. Suggest writing down questions they have for later to keep their attention focused. |
4 · Learning-Style Awareness & Collaboration | Jaden's classmates talk about what they know about the animals in his presentation. One asks if they can help Jaden. They decide how to split tasks to avoid duplicating work. | Offer a Collab Contract example only if they can’t decide how to split tasks. Suggest they talk about what resources they prefer accessing to further benefit from each others' strengths and prior knowledge. |
5 · Versatile Demonstration of Mastery | Jaden and classmate sketch three presentation ideas - animated slideshow, mural, peer Q&A They discuss how each format has certain benefits and decide which one they want to use. | Offer a presentation format idea relevant to their information not yet suggested. Suggest a rubric for what they want the presentation to do, further clarifying which format is best (even if it isn't the students' personal preference). |
Why It's Important to Make This Student-Led
By subtly helping Jaden manage his learning, Jaden doesn’t just learn facts about endangered sea turtles, he internalizes the learning process itself. This kind of ownership, grounded in planning, monitoring, collaborating, and reflecting, is the very essence of learner agency and the best predictor of lifelong, self-directed growth both personally and professionally*
Scaffolds are self-generated. Instead of receiving premade tools, Jaden constructs them based on prior home or school experiences with opportunities to use (or ask to use) resources provided by their teacher or peers.
Help is opt-in, not automatic. The teacher functions like a “learning concierge” who steps in only when students seek assistance or visibly stall in their learning process.
Peer resources first, adult expertise second. Jaden looks to classmates before turning to the teacher, fostering a community of interdependence rather than the traditional authority-driven dependence for learning.
Reflection loops are student-scheduled. Jaden sets the pace for learning. The teacher does not dictate deadlines for learning. Interest from student and peers drive motivation for learning as well as presentation of learning.
By the project’s end, Jaden and his classroom didn't just learn about sea-turtles and their endangerment, they experienced learning as a process they can replicate as a set of self-scaffolding strategies for future learning.
*Mortimer, J.T. (2021). Agency, linked lives and historical time: evidence from the longitudinal three-generation Youth Development Study. Longit Life Course Stud. 13(2):195-216.
*Kim, H.Y. (2018). The Effect of Self-Directedness in Learing on Employment Readiness of Undergraduates in South Korea. Journal of Education and Learning. 7(3) 125-133.
All of this is then mapped to science standards on ecosystems and research standards in ELA—while also generating evidence of learner agency.
Why This Matters for Schools
When students grow in the Five Foundations of Learner Agency:
They take ownership of their learning.
Teachers become facilitators of deeper inquiry, not just managers of content.
Parents learn to celebrate growth, not just grades.
Schools develop learners ready for any path they choose.
And perhaps most importantly?
Learning stops being a place you go, and becomes a thing you do—anywhere, anytime, for life.
Ready to Try It?
If you’re an educator, parent, or school leader interested in piloting this framework, let’s co-create tools, reflection templates, and coaching strategies that bring it to life.
Because this isn’t just a new set of skills—it’s a new way of seeing what learning can become.
Let’s build it together. Reach out. Start small. Watch them grow.
Greg Mullen
May 15, 2025 Instructional Coach | Advocate for Self-Directed Learning Founder, Exploring the Core LLC
