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
The Guide to Student Voice is packed with the information students, educators, advocates, and others need to promote student engagement in schools. Featuring a professional, easy-to-read layout, this short book is packed with useful tips, powerful activities, and great guidance for anyone interested in student voice today!
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.
"New updated version. In The Google Infused Classroom, EdTech experts Holly Clark and Tanya Avrith provide a guidebook to help you use technology to engage your learners and amplify the learning experience in your classroom and beyond. The authors walk you through the process of designing instruction that allows students to show their thinking, demonstrate their learning, and share their work (and voices!) with authentic audiences."--cover
Student Voice: From Invisible to Invaluable is about why and how today’s leaders need to connect with students for success. The premise of this book is that student voice is often invisible and that is possibly why schools have changed little since the 19th Century. From digital citizenship to teacher evaluation, we submit that the voice of students can be and needs to be amplified. The authors wrote this book to help elevate the power and influence of student voice in the transformation and leadership of our schools. The authors provide context that helps frame where education has been, where it stands today, and where the authors propose we go in school leadership. To truly transform, schools leaders in the classroom, principal’s office, and district office need to elevate the voice of the student. There is no greater way to inspire our children than to let them have a say in their own education. We simply cannot create the leaders of tomorrow when we do not let them lead today. This book will provide examples of excellence, stories of success, and practical tips to help you move student voice from invisible to invaluable.
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.
When students have a voice, they are motivated to learn, exhibit greater self-worth, are meaningfully engaged in learning, and have a greater a sense of purpose. This handy guide, based on years of research and work in schools, describes a four-step process for fostering student voice. Teachers will learn Why student voice matters. How to get started. What instructional strategies to use. Do's and don'ts for supporting voice. This guide will help teachers promote authentic student voice in the classroom and engage students in building identity, agency, and purpose. 8.5" x 11" 3-panel foldout guide (6 pages), laminated for extra durability and 3-hole-punched for binder storage.
The way students learn changes when they have access to digital tools. The Digital Classroom demonstrates that using technology to enhance students’ learning is not dependent on a specific learning management system or software – it is about changing the pedagogy with the help of an arsenal of useful tools and methods. This practical book introduces easy to use methods to all teachers in digital classrooms with the intention to make it simple, accessible, and achievable for everyone. It is not only about the tools, and the how and why, but also about changing the pedagogy making the learning more relevant to the students. When you open the classroom to the rest of the world, the teacher becomes more important than ever. Topics in the book include: Technology and deeper learning Social media in the global classroom Building a personal learning network The flipped classroom and cooperative learning The use of iPads in primary and middle school Teaching with videogames Special education Digital citizenship Digital tools can play a key role in making learning happen and what the teachers know about the use of technology is key. The Digital Classroom will be of great interest to teachers and trainee teachers who wish to develop their digital competency by using the book as part of their professional learning.
For many of us, the drive to affect positive change--however vague or idiosyncratic our sense of this might be--has guided our work in higher education. We champion the pursuit of a college degree because few endeavors can match it in terms of advancing a person's economic mobility (Chetty, Friedman, Saez, Turner, and Yagan; 2017). Despite recent debates about the value of a college degree (Pew Research Center, 2017), the opportunities and financial stability awarded to those with college degrees remain apparent when they are compared to peers who have only graduated high school (Pew Research Center, 2014). And while more Americans have a college degree than ever before (Ryan and Bauman, 2016), access to a formal, post-secondary education continues to be elusive for some. Indeed, over the last ten years, analysts have projected that the cost of attending college would keep 2.4 million low-to-moderate income, college-qualified high school graduates from completing a college degree (Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance, 2006). During that same period, college students in the United States saw expenses related to tuition and fees increase by 63 percent, school housing costs (excluding board) increase by 51 percent, textbook prices increase by 88 percent (Bureau of Labor, 2016). Because few students can afford a college education by salary alone, 44.2 million Americans have sought financial aid via student loans. As a result, total student loan debt is now topping $1.45 trillion in the United States (Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 2017), and student loan delinquency rates are averaging 11.2 percent (Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 2017). The burden of a student's financial decisions extends beyond the mere individual: society will inevitably carry the weight of this debt for years to come.
