Student Voice

From A Principal's Reflections blog are some comments from a Skype conference that was conducted between a school in Ohio and New Jersey. They challenged the students to openly discuss and develop strategies that addressed increasing academic rigor/accountability and improving learning environments:

• Having a passionate teacher who makes the course challenging from beginning to end is essential. We want higher expectations set.
• Relationships between teacher and student are key.
• Instruction caters to all types of learners.
• Homework needs to be meaningful, regularly assessed, and directly linked to class content. Too many teachers give homework that is not relevant to the lesson and does not tie in at all.
• We learn more through interactive projects and our own successes/failures than through traditional means of assessment (i.e. note-taking, quizzes, tests, etc.).
• The learning process is a partnership between teacher and student. The students want and need a voice in how they learn and how they demonstrate their learning. 
• An interesting sidebar that came out of this was how the teachers dress impacts how seriously students take them.
• Students have to see a purpose to using technology tools in the classroom. They want to create content using technology.

The student-driven conversation left Dwight and I inspired to continually seek out the student voice in an effort to transform the teaching and learning cultures of our schools. As we learned, students want to be challenged, have high expectations set, and be provided with meaningful learning opportunities.

Do the students in your school have a voice? Are their ideas respected and acted upon?
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A short video from the Starkville Mississippi School District: