A new toolkit from REL West at WestEd helps educators productively engage students in school improvement efforts, including generating and analyzing data. The Speak Out, Listen Up! toolkit offers strategies for eliciting student voice, or perspective, about education challenges — a perspective that is beneficial in rethinking policies and practices.
The toolkit provides instructions and materials for three data-related activities. One tool leads students to analyze and interpret local data; a second tool organizes a “fishbowl” through which students and educators trade roles as speakers and listeners while grappling with a topic of mutual concern; and the third tool guides students to create a “digital story” that presents the challenges they face and what they think they need from educators in order to be successful. Each tool generates student ideas for solutions to local school challenges.
Nevada’s Washoe County School District partnered with REL West to develop the toolkit and has been using it to draw out student perspectives on a number of district challenges, among them high school dropout. For example, returning dropouts produced a video that describes firsthand accounts of why students quit school and what is needed for them to return and earn a diploma. The district has come to appreciate more fully from the video that returning dropouts need personalized supports—for example, credit recovery options, mental health services, and caring relationships with teachers – and is using this information, supplied by the students, to identify policy and practice priorities.
View the toolkit at: http://1.usa.gov/ZovsvK
