Student Voice In School Reform

Download or read book Student Voice in School Reform written by Dana L. Mitra and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2014-03-14 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: High schools continue to be places that isolate, alienate, and disengage students. But what would happen if students were viewed as part of the solution in schools rather than part of the problem? This book examines the emergence of "student voice" at one high school in the San Francisco Bay area where educators went straight to the source and asked the students to help. Struggling, like many high schools, with how to improve student outcomes, educators at Whitman High School decided to invite students to participate in the reform process. Dana L. Mitra describes the evolution of student voice at Whitman, showing that the students enthusiastically created partnerships with teachers and administrators, engaged in meaningful discussion about why so many failed or dropped out, and partnered with teachers and principals to improve learning for themselves and their peers. In documenting the difference that student voice made, this book helps expand ideas of distributed leadership, professional learning communities, and collaboration. The book also contributes much needed research on what student voice initiatives look like in practice and provides powerful evidence of ways in which young people can increase their sense of agency and their sense of belonging in school.

Download or read book Student Voice written by Russell J. Quaglia and published by Corwin Press. This book was released on 2014-08-06 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meaningful school reform starts with your most powerful partner—your students! When you take time to listen, you’ll find that students’ aspirations can drive your school toward exciting new goals—and when students know they’re being heard, they engage meaningfully in their own academic success. Using examples drawn from student surveys, focus groups, observations, and interviews, this groundbreaking book presents a blueprint for a successful partnership between educators and students. You’ll discover how to: Ask the right questions—and understand how to build from the answers Engage students in decision-making and improvement-related processes Implement the Aspirations Framework to guide students toward their full potential

Download or read book The Power of Voice in Schools written by Russ Quaglia and published by ASCD. This book was released on 2020-05-26 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For nearly four decades, Russ Quaglia has been laying the groundwork to inform, reform, and transform schools through student voice. That deep commitment is reflected in this inspirational book. Quaglia and his coauthors at the Quaglia Institute for School Voice & Aspirations deftly synthesize the thoughts and feelings of hundreds of thousands of stakeholders and offer a vision for schools where everyone's voice matters. They posit that students, teachers, administrators, and parents must work and learn together in ways that promote deep understanding and creativity. Making this collaborative effort successful, however, requires widespread recognition that all stakeholders have something to teach, and they all have a role to play in moving the entire school forward. We must abandon the "us versus them" fallacy in education; there is only "us." To that end, The Power of Voice in Schools offers a way forward that can be used in any school and * Addresses the importance of everyone's voice in the school community. * Articulates the lessons learned from listening to these voices over the past decade. * Suggests concrete, practical strategies for combined teams of students, teachers, parents, and administrators to make a difference together. This book reflects the dream of a true partnership in listening, learning, and leading together. When the potential of voice is fully realized, schools will look and feel different. Cooperation will replace competition and conflict, collaboration will replace isolation, and confidence will replace insecurity. Most important, the entire school community will work in partnership with one another for the well-being of students and teachers.

Download or read book Addicted to Reform written by John Merrow and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2017-08-15 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The prize-winning PBS correspondent's provocative antidote to America's misguided approaches to K-12 school reform During an illustrious four-decade career at NPR and PBS, John Merrow—winner of the George Polk Award, the Peabody Award, and the McGraw Prize—reported from every state in the union, as well as from dozens of countries, on everything from the rise of district-wide cheating scandals and the corporate greed driving an ADD epidemic to teacher-training controversies and America's obsession with standardized testing. Along the way, he taught in a high school, at a historically black college, and at a federal penitentiary. Now, the revered education correspondent of PBS NewsHour distills his best thinking on education into a twelve-step approach to fixing a K–12 system that Merrow describes as being "addicted to reform" but unwilling to address the real issue: American public schools are ill-equipped to prepare young people for the challenges of the twenty-first century. This insightful book looks at how to turn digital natives into digital citizens and why it should be harder to become a teacher but easier to be one. Merrow offers smart, essential chapters—including "Measure What Matters," and "Embrace Teachers"—that reflect his countless hours spent covering classrooms as well as corridors of power. His signature candid style of reportage comes to life as he shares lively anecdotes, schoolyard tales, and memories that are at once instructive and endearing. Addicted to Reform is written with the kind of passionate concern that could come only from a lifetime devoted to the people and places that constitute the foundation of our nation. It is a "big book" that forms an astute and urgent blueprint for providing a quality education to every American child.

Download or read book Engaging with Student Voice in Research, Education and Community written by Nicole Mockler and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-10-09 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work interrupts the current “consulting students” discourse that positions students as service clients and thus renders more problematic the concept of student voice in ways that it might be sustained as a democratic process. It looks at student voice holistically across realms of classroom practices, higher education, practitioner inquiry and policy formulation. The authors render problematic the “empowerment” rhetoric that is the dominant and insufficient narrative justifying consulting children and young people. They explore the many contradictions and ambiguities associating with recruiting and encouraging them to participate and the varying impacts of different circumstances on the ways in which student voice projects are enacted. They perceive that it is possible for student voice projects to be subverted from both above and below as varying stakeholders with varying purposes struggle to manage and control projects. Importantly, the book reports on research that identifies and highlights conditions for initiating and sustaining student voice and include “beyond school” dimensions that consider young people as “audiences” who can inform community facilities, their development and design as well as undergraduate students in universities. These cases are not reported as celebratory, but rather act as narratives that illuminate the many challenges facing those who chose to work with young people in authentic ways. It both advances methodologies for engaging young people as active agents in the design and interpretation of research that concerns them and offers a critique of those methods that see young people as the objects of research, where the data is mined for purposes that do not recognise that students are the consequential stakeholders with respect to decisions made in their interests.​

Download or read book Inside Our Schools written by Brett Murphy and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this moving volume, successful and respected teachers from across the country reveal how recent top-down education policies have played out in their schools and classrooms in negative and counterproductive ways, and offer teacher-led alternatives for providing equitable, engaging, and empowering education. Framed by critical analyses of the major trends and policies enacted over the past fifteen years, Inside Our Schools adds to the understanding of unintended consequences of policy on classroom practice as well as the limits of current policies--uninformed by the actual conditions that teachers face--to improve teaching and learning. It also reveals the honest struggles of educators seeking to do the right thing for students in the face of enormous obstacles, underscoring the need to inject teacher voices and perspectives in education policy making going forward. "In this powerful collection, Brett Gardiner Murphy has gathered together an impressive group of teachers to reflect on the day-to-day challenges and joys of teaching within the current difficult sociopolitical context. Inside Our Schools provides sobering reflections of how our public schools have lost their way, and what needs to be done to restore hope and confidence in them. The book is a poignant reminder of the crucial role of public education in a democratic society." --Sonia Nieto, professor emerita, language, literacy, and culture, College of Education, University of Massachusetts, Amherst "What a relief--and how sadly unusual it is--to hear about education and reform from the people actually doing the educating. This book provides twenty-five sobering and enlightening accounts of teaching in our time, organized under five masterfully summarized themes. A valuable book for policy makers, practitioners, and parents." --Mike Rose, author of Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in America Brett Gardiner Murphy is the director of strategic projects at the Posse Foundation and a former New York City public school history teacher.

Download or read book Improving Learning through Consulting Pupils written by Jean Rudduck and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-11-21 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pupil consultation can lead to a transformation of teacher-pupil relationships, to significant improvements in teachers' practices, and to pupils having a new sense of themselves as members of a community of learners. In England, pupil involvement is at the heart of current government education policy and is a key dimension of both citizenship education and personalised learning. Drawing on research carried out as part of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme, Improving Learning through Consulting Pupils discusses the potential of consultation as a strategy for signalling a more partnership-oriented relationship in teaching and learning. It also examines the challenges of introducing and sustaining consultative practices. Topics covered include: the centrality of consultation about teaching and learning in relation to broader school level concerns; teaching approaches that pupils believe help them to learn and those that obstruct their learning; teachers' responses to pupil consultation - what they learn from it, the changes they can make to their practice and the difficulties they can face; the things that can get in the way of pupils trusting in consultation as something that can make a positive difference. While consultation is flourishing in many primary schools, the focus here is on secondary schools where the difficulties of introducing and sustaining consultation are often more daunting but where the benefits of doing so can be substantial. This innovative book will be of interest to all those concerned with improving classroom learning.