5 AI Activities to Build Student Agency

Psychological hope is present when a student can set a goal, can create a pathway, and has the agency to follow that pathway until they reach the destination, no matter what bumps in the road they face. After watching educator Cathleen Beachboard’s Tedx Talk on hope, I wanted to figure out how to more effectively build this kind of agency to succeed in my own students.

I’ve used the following five activities to do just that—create a classroom culture where every student feels like they can succeed. While it may sound like a daunting task to build such a level of agency in elementary and middle school students, it isn’t as hard as it seems with the support of artificial intelligence (AI) tools.

Fostering STUDENT AGENCY

The following activities can help you empower your students to take ownership over their learning experiences and feel capable of succeeding this school year. 

1. Building collaborative classroom norms. Often, it isn’t far into the school year before students start pushing on the boundaries. Rules they help create are harder to push up against, and cocreating classroom norms gives students voice, a key component of agency.

In my class, we started off with a think-pair-share about what makes a great classroom community (e.g., respect, responsibility, creativity). Then, in small groups, the students brainstormed a list of norms. I compiled their responses into an AI app to identify the 10 most common norms that students proposed. 

I then posted the list of norms, and we voted as a class to narrow it down to six. Next, we asked Canva’s AI tool to draft a vibrant poster that captured these norms. We printed it, hung it in our room, and reviewed it weekly.

By working collaboratively with students, and encouraging them to work with one another to develop our classroom norms, I was able to ensure that everyone felt like they had a voice in how our classroom would function. Leveraging AI tools meant we could work together more efficiently and have a ready-to-hang poster by the end of the activity.

2. What’s my superpower? Most students can tell you what they are bad at, but not all of them can tell you their strengths. Classrooms that build agency focus on the assets a student comes in with. This activity helps kids see their strengths and make a plan to fend off their kryptonite.

I asked students to brainstorm at least five strengths, passions, and favorite objects, and one weakness (their “kryptonite”). We worked on using descriptive language to put this information into an AI image generator (like Dall-E or Canva) that re-created each student as a superhero—students entered prompts like “Create an image of me as a superhero who loves books, basketball, and solving puzzles. I wear a cape covered in symbols of creativity and carry a pencil staff. My kryptonite is procrastination.”

Once students had their images, they shared them with the class and discussed ways to fend off their kryptonites throughout the year.

Not only did this activity bring smiles and laughter to the room, but also it brought confidence. You could see students sit up taller as they felt like their assets made them an important part of our classroom community.

3. Strength spotter. Think about how powerful it is when someone points out a strength you possess. In this activity, students interviewed a peer using an AI app that helped them identify each other’s strengths.

Students started by interviewing a peer using a Strengths Builder app. The app prompted them to dive deep into their interviewee’s interests and strengths and then returned a list of strengths it identified in the person.

The interviewer used this information to create an artifact about their classmate. This could be an image, a Canva creation, a drawing, or anything their creativity came up with.

After completing this activity, my students felt more empowered to be successful because they felt like their peers viewed them as capable of achieving a lot that school year.

4. Predict my future. Some students feel like they know their future destination, but many don’t. This activity opens their minds to who they could become.

First, students created a list of five personal traits, interests, or goals (e.g., “I love animals, I’m organized, I’m interested in law”) and fed them into an AI app trained to predict their future selves in 10 years.

Next, students picked their favorite parts of what the bot returned, and created a slide showing who they would become. Each student shared their slides and wrote a short reflection on what they needed to do this year to get closer to their “future me.”

5. Hope map. We know all students have goals, but too often they run into obstacles and give up. Hope is what keeps them from giving up. To help build students’ hope throughout the year, we created a hope map as a class.

Using Charles Snyder’s Children’s Hope Scale, I measured my students’ level of hope. After that, my students went to an app that guided them through goal setting and pathway creation for the goals. Students entered a goal for the year and asked the bot to return steps they could take to achieve that goal.

Students then wrote their first step toward achieving their goal on a note card, and we posted the note cards around the room. We called this our hope map because it created a visual representation of the steps that students could take throughout the year to achieve their goals, inspiring and motivating them with hope.

Throughout the year, I encouraged students to replace their index cards once they had completed a step on their path with their next action toward achieving their goal.

These activities help students feel like they are not only part of the classroom community, but cocreators of the space whose strengths add to that community in a meaningful way.