Honoring Voices of Young People as Truth: Centering Student Voice as a Driver of Instructional Change

• In Event: Transforming Students' Daily Experience of School: Using Student Experience Data to Improve Educators' Classroom Practice

Abstract

This session, informed by the work of three teams, will highlight the practice of centering the voices of young people to both understand the impact of current instructional practice and to uplift areas of focus rooted in culturally responsive teaching. The objectives of the session will be: to discuss approaches for helping teachers think about student voice data in a constructive way and to highlight one way to use this data to shift instructional practice as a team or school community.
To edge closer to an educational approach that truly honored the voices of young people as truth, it was necessary to name and address the slippage between student experience data and what educators believed about their own instructional practice and classroom communities. Teachers were invited to name those emotions and work collectively to identify the experiences and biases that caused those reactions. By being allowed the time, space, and guidance to work through these emotions and reframe student feedback, teachers were better able to approach student voice data as truth. Rather than dismiss this data as a lack of understanding on the part of young people or to resist it with a list of current practices or student behaviors, teachers were able to look differently at their own practice and plan for focused change.
Each team was then able to leverage student experience surveys as a way to focus their instructional improvement efforts around answering the question, “What are young people saying they need us to do differently?” Teachers looked at both individual and collective data, chose an area of focus, and selected an instructional practice on which to iterate.
In one team, this looked like recognizing that young Black men did not feel affirmed in their classrooms. Responses included learning around supporting their identities, researching and uplifting the voices of young Black activists in the curriculum, and honoring identity by inviting Black male students to share family recipes.
Other teams recognized the need to provide more specific feedback to young people and built plans to hold weekly one-on-one conferences. Evidence of their implementation was then brought back to the team space in the form of reflections, peer observations, student surveys, student work, around which teams engaged in reflective dialogue.
These focused changes guided by student experience data not only resulted in positive gains in subsequent student experience data but also shifted how teachers thought about building their classrooms and instructional practices. When planning to support the instructional work of the school community, teachers asked how to identify areas of focus and methods of monitoring progress that are responsive to student voice data. The success of this project—both in reframing student voice data to teachers and letting data from student experience surveys guide improvements in the classroom—highlights how we can actionably let student voice guide instructional and institutional change.

Author

• Jessica Bunzol, Network for College Success
  Presenting Author