Special Agents
In the era of agentic AI, students need to know what doing feels like
When the mayor of Newark walked into our meeting hall in March to speak with the seniors in my program and I shook his hand, it was the first time I had spoken with him or anyone on his team about the visit. Two seniors had taken care of everything. After I greeted the mayor, I took my place on the side of the hall while those two students walked the mayor to his seat in the front row. They then stepped to the podium to open the program.
“Agency” is a recurring headline in both the AI conversation and the AI-in-education conversation.
For many, agents have replaced chatbots as the state-of-the-art in the AI world. Agents can be set off to complete tasks on their own, ideally without human intervention, and come back with the results. The theory, to state the obvious, is that AI is better off when it has agency.
Education has long held a similar theory about students. Recently, though, agency has taken on new urgency as those of us in schools try to ensure students can be actors, not spectators, in their careers to come.
I worry that the aspirational talk of “orchestrating agentic workflows” will in practice mostly mean people watching AIs doing things. That’s why I think it’s important to help students try to do things in real life, learning from both what they can and can’t make happen. Young people need to know what it feels like to succeed and to fail and to know that both are a kind of accomplishment. They need to know doing is something people do too.
The two students who organized the mayor’s visit showed me what that can look like this year. Watching them do things and fail to do things, and reflecting on how I had and hadn’t supported them effectively, helped me explore a pedagogy for agency.
Russell and Andrew (pseudonyms as always) came into senior year with something to prove, though they may not have realized that themselves until later. They wanted to show themselves and the people around them who they were becoming, not who they had been.
They started the year in the purpose-development and career-connected learning program I run exploring careers in law enforcement, first local police and then potentially FBI. Students test-drive careers in three-week loops in our program, and for the first loop the two young men just wanted to get in (even) better shape.
In their career research they had found that the Newark police academy has fitness requirements for enrollment, so they would often head into the hallway during my class to work on their one-minute pushups. One mistake I made during that time was to presume they were focused on the “one-minute” part of the pushup, but of course like many teenage boys (including me at that age) they were just worried about how many total push-ups they could do.
I only realized my mistake too late when the loop was over, but it became a reminder for me that authentic work towards career goals needs to actually be authentic. Otherwise students are exercising their agency in a kind of zero-gravity environment, with no real sense of whether they’re moving in the right direction.
Later, in our penultimate loop, Russell and Andrew had their first failure in the program. To start our second semester, they wanted to launch a “police academy” club in our school. For days, they used our class’s AI assistant to help them iterate on a club proposal and semester-long plan. I deliberately stayed mostly out of the way, so they could experience that process themselves.
They then pitched it to the club director at our school. He denied their request. His points were well taken; the students hadn’t made clear what the club would accomplish by the end, and it also wasn’t clear what made it a “police academy” and not a place to work out and watch police-related media.
They were discouraged. They had spent a few hours total working on the club idea. I was discouraged too, by the fact I had gotten the space-scaffolding ratio wrong.
The final loop was the mayor loop. Over the course of the year, Russell and Andrew had come to realize that police work happens within the context of city government and city policies. Russell also discovered he had a family connection to someone who works at city hall. (A good lesson in the power of personal networks.)
They leveraged our AI assistant again, this time to write the initial outreach email. They and I talked first through their goals for the email, then used the prompting and context skills we’ve been practicing to explain everything to the AI, then reviewed the AI’s output before sending it. They got a response, sent an AI-assisted reply they ran by me first, and got another response. A few days later they told me they had a date: March 3rd.
They then worked with AI to design the program for the mayor’s visit. It helped them draft questions about public safety and career exploration and helped them refine — but not write — their opening remarks.
The week before the mayor arrived, Russell and Andrew spent several class periods in a row rehearsing the entire visit with our network’s communications director. They told her their vision, and with her they practiced each part of it. AI had helped them make a map, but to learn the territory they had to walk through it.
The morning of March 3rd, seniors were abuzz. Mr. T, why are you wearing a suit? Russell and Andrew actually got the mayor to come? This is really happening today?
I assured them it was — I had pulled them all out of 4th period, 5th period, and lunch and ordered 17 pizzas for the occasion — but that I didn't know much about what would happen. Russell and Andrew were in charge.
The two young men greeted the mayor at the entrance and walked him to our meeting hall. I met him outside the hall. As he walked up with them I had my first moment of realizing the mayor was really here. I said, “Hello. Thank you for being here, Mr. Mayor. I’m the teacher of the class.” I stepped aside and gave Russell and Andrew space to walk by. They took it from there, going way past what any AI could do for them.
If you’d like to read more about what students asked and the mayor shared, here’s a local news story from later that week.
For me, the pedagogy story was that building student agency specific to the AI era means three things:
We need to help students experience authentic progress in an activity that has relevance for them, with success defined by those who specialize in that activity.
We need to balance space and scaffolding as students undertake long-term projects, so that they experience formative but not summative failure.
And we need to show students how to use AI tools to achieve personal goals while also showing them where the AI’s work stops and theirs begins — and how teachers and other mentors can walk that final mile alongside them.
When you put all those moves together, which takes as much trial and error by us as by students, you end up with the kind of reflection Andrew shared in that article:
“It made me feel like I’m capable of so much more,” he said. “People didn’t believe we could get the mayor to come speak in our school, and we did it.”