How might kids remake learning for a post-pandemic future? What advice might they have for adults? What approaches and strategies might they want us to use as we build futures focused on them? We won’t know if we don’t include youth and their perspectives in our conversations and strategic planning for teaching and learning. If Read more about Forging Youth-Centered Futures: Bringing Youth Visions to Life[…]
A campaign by Transcend challenges communities to listen to students’ voices and use those insights to inform future innovations. In the words of one student, “As we consider what learning can look like for my generation and those to come, I hope more schools will take the time to walk a mile in the shoes Read more about Listening to Student Voices[…]
The Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), in partnership with the Reinvention Lab powered by Teach For America, gathered a “change-maker” group of students, educators, and education leaders. It was an intimate gathering of people committed to a learner-centered, radically different future of education. The question posed to the group was: How do we help Read more about “Creativity Requires Freedom”: What Will It Take to Create Space Within Our Education System to Think and Design Creatively?[…]
Recently, Turnaround for Children released a toolkit for elevating student voice by co-creating classroom community. The toolkit includes the following resources: Educator Reflection: Personal and Community Values The purpose of this tool is for educators to reflect on how their own values (shaped by their identity, culture, and experiences) show up in their classroom and Read more about How to Co-Create Classroom Culture with Students[…]
For almost two decades, Project Tomorrow has hosted a Congressional Briefing bringing the voices of K12 students, parents, educators, and administrators to Capitol Hill and sharing the findings of their research. The goal is to provide information critical to the development of sound education policy. This year the tradition continued with a virtual briefing enabling Read more about SpeakUp 2021 Virtual Congressional Briefing[…]
All students have unique strengths and needs that vary over time and are expressed differently. This year, persistent disruptions to learning, systemic racial oppression and the collective trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic have deeply affected the well-being of young people everywhere. To help educators assess student well-being directly, quickly, and frequently, both in-person and virtually, Read more about Understanding Well-Being Through A Whole-Child Lens: Introducing The Well-Being Index[…]
Writing for Brookings, Rebecca Winthrop explores the power of parent engagement in the transformation of schools. Excerpts from the piece appear below: School closures and remote learning have propelled children’s ability to learn independently to the forefront of every busy and stressed out parent’s wish list. This ability, often described by education experts as “student Read more about New forms of parent engagement as an education game changer post-COVID-19[…]
A new youth engagement guide, published by America’s Promise, contains actionable strategies that educators, program providers, coaches, mentors, and other youth-supporting adults can use to authentically listen to and engage with young people about how they experience social, emotional, and cognitive development. The guide features 10 steps for meaningful and mutually beneficial engagement, as follows: Read more about Youth Engagement Guide[…]
Writing for EdSurge, Chelsea Waite recently explored an approach to remote learning that has resulted in extremely high levels of student engagement at a time when some schools and districts are seeing half or less of their students participating in online instruction. Excerpts of the piece appear below: What’s behind this rare level of engagement Read more about How Student Agency Can Ease the Pain of Remote Learning and Teaching[…]
GripTape asserts that learner agency—defined as the ability to make intentional choices about and take an active role in the course of one’s own learning—is the key to a self-reinforcing cycle of learning and development. After two years spent working directly with more than 400 young people nationwide designing and testing approaches to solve this Read more about Griptape Releases Learner Agency Framework[…]
Listening closely to what students say about their school experiences can be beneficial to educators for understanding and addressing school-related topics and problems and for rethinking policies and practices. A new toolkit from REL West provides educators a purposeful and systematic means to gather and analyze local data by eliciting and listening to student voice Read more about Tools for Using Student Perspectives for School Improvement[…]
Students have the greatest stake in their education but often little to no say in how it is delivered. This lack of agency represents a lost opportunity to accelerate learning and prepare students for a world in which taking initiative and learning new skills are increasingly paramount to success-that’s where “student voice” comes in. The Read more about Elevating Student Voice in Education[…]
In 2015, an organization called GripTape began a new experiment to see what would happen if young people were put in the driver’s seat of their own learning. GripTape’s most recent learning report details the results of this bold experiment, among which are the following outcomes: Youth experience a powerful and sustained transformation in their Read more about In the Driver’s Seat: GripTape Learning Report[…]
Three years ago, TNTP set out to understand how so many students could graduate from high school unprepared for the lives they want to lead. To find out, they followed nearly 4,000 students in three large urban districts, one small rural district, and one charter network with three schools in separate cities to view school Read more about What Students Can Show Us About How School Is Letting Them Down-and How to Fix It[…]
If students are going to get the most out of school, they need to be engaged. Research shows, for example, that disengaged students are more likely to suffer a range of bad consequences, such as failing a course, repeating a grade, and dropping out. Yet however much rhetoric we may hear about building a “student-centered” Read more about How High School Teachers can Better Engage their Students, according to Teens[…]
Education Commission of the States recently released a new report exploring the design and impact of Creative Youth Development (CYD) programs and providing policy considerations regarding CYD for states looking for ways to narrow the achievement gap and support student success. In CYD programs, young people create original work through arts experiences and apply their Read more about How Creative Youth Development (CYD) Programs Support Student Success[…]