agency-scaffold-generator

The saved excerpt is a snapshot from review. The external source remains the complete and most current version.

---
# AGENT SKILLS STANDARD FIELDS (v2)
name: agency-scaffold-generator
description: "Generate scaffolds that gradually increase student choice, voice, and ownership within a learning task. Use when students depend heavily on teacher direction and need to develop autonomy."
disable-model-invocation: false
user-invocable: true
effort: medium

# EXISTING FIELDS

skill_id: "wellbeing-motivation-agency/agency-scaffold-generator"
skill_name: "Agency Scaffold Generator"
domain: "wellbeing-motivation-agency"
version: "1.0"
evidence_strength: "moderate"
evidence_sources:
  - "Zimmerman (2002) — Becoming a self-regulated learner: an overview"
  - "Deci & Ryan (2000) — The 'what' and 'why' of goal pursuits: human needs and self-determination"
  - "Reeve & Tseng (2011) — Agency as a fourth aspect of student engagement"
  - "Manyukhina & Wyse (2019) — Learner agency and the curriculum: a critical realist perspective"
  - "Mercer (2011) — Understanding learner agency as a complex dynamic system"
input_schema:
  required:
    - field: "current_task"
      type: "string"
      description: "The learning task or activity where agency will be scaffolded"
    - field: "student_level"
      type: "string"
      description: "Age/year group"
    - field: "current_agency_level"
      type: "string"
      description: "Where students currently are — e.g. dependent on teacher direction, some independence, mostly self-directed"
  optional:
    - field: "subject_area"
      type: "string"
      description: "The curriculum subject"
    - field: "learning_objective"
      type: "string"
      description: "What students should learn"
    - field: "student_profiles"
      type: "array"
      description: "From context engine: class data, prior independence levels, specific needs"
    - field: "agency_dimension"
      type: "string"
      description: "Which dimension of agency to focus on — choice of topic, process, product, criteria, or timeline"
output_schema:
  type: "object"
  fields:
    - field: "agency_scaffold"
      type: "object"
      description: "A progressive release scaffold from teacher-directed to student-directed in specific, named steps"
    - field: "choice_architecture"
      type: "object"
      description: "Structured choices at each level — not open-ended but increasingly open"
    - field: "safety_nets"
      type: "array"
      description: "What happens when students make poor choices — how to recover without removing agency"
    - field: "teacher_role_shifts"
      type: "array"
      description: "How the teacher's role changes at each level — from director to facilitator to consultant"
chains_well_with:
  - "motivation-diagnostic-task-redesign"
  - "self-efficacy-builder-sequence"
  - "self-regulated-learning-strategy-selector"
  - "metacognitive-prompt-generator"
teacher_time: "3 minutes"
tags: ["agency", "student-voice", "choice", "autonomy", "self-regulation", "gradual-release"]
---

# Agency Scaffold Generator

## What This Skill Does

Generates a structured scaffold for progressively releasing decision-making to students — moving from teacher-directed to student-directed learning in specific, manageable steps across five dimensions of agency: choice of topic, choice of process, choice of product, choice of criteria, and choice of timeline. The critical principle is that agency is not binary (teacher controls vs. student controls) but a continuum that must be scaffolded — giving full agency to students who have never had it is as counterproductive as never giving agency at all. The output is a progressive release scaffold showing exactly what choices to offer at each level, how to structure those choices so they are meaningful but manageable, and what to do when students make poor choices (recover without removing agency). AI is specifically valuable here because scaffolding agency requires balancing two competing demands: enough structure that students don't flounder, and enough freedom that the choices are genuine —