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
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.
The Student Voice movement of the United Kingdom influences discussion across various levels of education. Equally, international responses to Student Voice extend the debate and movement further. This text locates Student Voice within wider debates around empowered citizenry and the 'big society'.
This book examines the importance of exploring the varied and diverse perspectives of student experiences. In both academic institutions and everyday discourse, the notion of the ‘student voice’ is an ever-present reminder of the importance placed upon the student experience in Higher Education: particularly in a context where the financial burden of undertaking a university education continues to grow. The editors and contributors explore how notions of the ‘student voice’ as a single, monolithic entity may in fact obscure divergence in the experiences of students. Placing so much emphasis on the ‘student voice’ may lead educators and policy makers to miss important messages communicated – or consciously uncommunicated – through student actions. This book also explores ways of working in partnership with students to develop their own experiences. It is sure to be of interest and value to scholars of the student experience and its inherent diversity.
With a successful career as a singing teacher for more than a quarter of a century, author Colin Baldy has been frustrated by the lack of suitable reading materials aimed specifically at the student of the singing voice. Therefore, he has provided a useful resource with The Student Voice. Primarily designed for undergraduate and graduate level students, the book will also benefit mature singers, teachers, and those already in the singing profession who simply want to keep their technique and knowledge alive. The Student Voice includes some physiology, with suggested exercises and methods for developing the correct use of the student's physical instrument. It suggests a suitable repertoire to run alongside the exercises and contains a large amount of trouble-shooting advice. The author's intention is to encourage singing students and to assist them in avoiding common pitfalls. The book will also help singers identify vocal problems which they may already have developed.
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.
Across the globe, students are speaking up, walking out, and marching for social and ecological justice. Despite deficit discourses about students, youth are using their voice and agency to call forth a better world. Will educators respond to this call to stand with students in relational solidarity as co-constructors of a new tomorrow? What is possible when teachers and students engage together in new ways? Pedagogies of With-ness: Students, Teachers, Voice and Agency offers insight into the transformative possibilities of education when enacted as the art of being with. Driven by student voices and their experiences of marginalization, this text takes a clear ethical stance. It asserts that students are both capable and competent. Taking a narrative approach, this book honors academic work that is rooted in educational practice. Expanding beyond traditional conceptions of student voice, chapters engage in meditations on three themes: identity, pedagogy, and partnership. This book is an exploration of with-ness, a way of knowing, being, and acting. By centralizing the all-too-often suppressed wisdom of youth, teachers and researchers engage in new forms of critique and possibility-making with students. Editors reflect on this central theme, exploring the dimensions of such pedagogies of with-ness. Through this book, teachers are invited to imagine pedagogy under this new framework, actively committed to students, their voice, and mutual engagement. Click HERE to watch the editors discuss their book. Perfect for courses such as: Social Foundations | Student-Teacher Partnerships | Secondary Methods | Service Learning Leadership Ethnic Studies | Democracy and Civics | Social Justice and Education | Student Voice in Classrooms/Education | Ethical Issues in Education | Leadership for Social Justice
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.
Student Voice Revolution: The Meaningful Student Involvement Handbook is the brand new mastery guide focused on student voice, student engagement, student/adult partnerships and more. Containing tons of details, this book is focused on engaging all students in every school as partners in every facet of education for the purpose of strengthening their commitment to learning, community and democracy. There are more than 75 examples from the author's experience and research throughout education literature. Never before published tools, new models and useful tips are featured, along with hundreds of citations, dozens of current and historical anecdotes and more. This book also highlights unique approaches, detailed assessment and critical examinations of school activities, all of which make this unlike anything else available today. It was written for educators, students, teachers-in-training, school leaders and advocates for education reform. Student Voice Revolution is an optimistic, realistic and practical wake up call for the future of schools in democratic society. Are YOU ready for the revolution?
Equipping students for their future begins by helping them become digital leaders now. Students need to learn how to leverage social media to connect to people, passions, and opportunities to grow and make a difference. Social LEADia offers insight and engaging stories to help you shift the focus from digital citizenship to digital leadership.
