Polling Student Voices For School Improvement

The purpose of this book is to help secondary school principals and college faculty fulfill their key role for continuous improvement planning of educational practices and safety at their institution. Rapid social and technological advances have motivated the consideration of student voice in schools across the United States. By merging student voice and educator expertise, an intergenerational perspective can emerge that more accurately portrays the strengths and limitations of a school. Strom and Strom began their research on student voice by partnering with adolescents and principals from several schools to identify topics they saw as appropriate for polling to improve schools. This effort led to the development of ten polls on school stress, career exploration, time management, attention and distraction, tutoring, peer support, school cheating, frustration, cyberbullying, and Internet learning. Every poll contains 15 to 20 multiple-choice items. The process model for polling includes a step-by-step procedure that educational leaders can use to plan and implement school improvement. Different methods of data analysis and ways to report overall evidence-based school results are presented by age, gender, grade and ethnicity. Student polling is distinctive from other assessment strategies because the target for data gathering is a single school, without comparison to other schools. This narrow base to assess student voice ensures poll results are anonymous and have local relevance to guide stakeholder responses. The results of polling can provide data-based evidence that can be used for continuous education improvement planning. An additional benefit is to separately assess students in special education, gifted and talented programs, and second language acquisition learners. Our web site at learningpolls.org is intended to further inform educational leaders and invite their collaboration.

The purpose of this book is to help secondary school principals and college faculty fulfill their key role for continuous improvement planning of educational practices and safety at their institution. Rapid social and technological advances have motivated the consideration of student voice in schools across the United States. By merging student voice and educator expertise, an intergenerational perspective can emerge that more accurately portrays the strengths and limitations of a school. Strom and Strom began their research on student voice by partnering with adolescents and principals from several schools to identify topics they saw as appropriate for polling to improve schools. This effort led to the development of ten polls on school stress, career exploration, time management, attention and distraction, tutoring, peer support, school cheating, frustration, cyberbullying, and Internet learning. Every poll contains 15 to 20 multiple-choice items. The process model for polling includes a step-by-step procedure that educational leaders can use to plan and implement school improvement. Different methods of data analysis and ways to report overall evidence-based school results are presented by age, gender, grade and ethnicity. Student polling is distinctive from other assessment strategies because the target for data gathering is a single school, without comparison to other schools. This narrow base to assess student voice ensures poll results are anonymous and have local relevance to guide stakeholder responses. The results of polling can provide data-based evidence that can be used for continuous education improvement planning. An additional benefit is to separately assess students in special education, gifted and talented programs, and second language acquisition learners. Our web site at learningpolls.org is intended to further inform educational leaders and invite their collaboration.

People generally acknowledge the superiority of adolescents in using technology tools needed for learning in the future. The purpose of this book is to describe an online polling strategy that allows adolescents to make known how they view conditions of learning at their school. A school improvement model illustrates how to combine results of student polling with stakeholders' perceptions in the scheme of school reform. Student polling differs from other strategies because the target for gathering data is a single school. This deliberately narrow base for sampling student opinion ensures poll results have local relevance that can motivate stakeholder involvement and guide their response. Over 14,000 secondary students have completed polls examined in the text. These ten polls include: career exploration, time management, selective attention and distraction, motivation for Internet learning, tutoring, peer support, cheating, frustration, cyberbullying, and school stress. Students are the stakeholders with the most to gain or lose in efforts to keep American education competitive. Accordingly, their views should be sought as part of decision making about reform. When student opinion and adult observation are considered, an intergenerational perspective can emerge that more accurately portrays institutional strengths and limitations. School principals, superintendents, and state department of education leaders are invited to consider a collaborative project with the authors. Software offers administrators rapid feedback on whole school results. Finding out how special education, gifted and talented, and second language acquisition students view their conditions of learning gives additional insight about school improvement.

This unique text encourages young adults to reflect on their prospective longevity for setting goals and making decisions, become aware of the aspirations and concerns of other generations, and consider personal direction in relation to peer group norms. The sources for learning about mental health and relationships include a blend of academic research, insights from literature, student interviews with older and younger relatives, and personal observations. Stages of adulthood including early adulthood, middle adulthood, retirement age, and old age, are described showing how people can pursue individual growth and nurture the mental health of relatives throughout life. The main themes of younger and middle-aged adults include stress, parenting, peer socialization, family conflict, career readiness, domestic abuse, intergenerational relationships, and mental health. In addition, the educational needs of older adults focus on mental health, family caregiving, grandparenting, physical and social health, problems of younger generations, retirement, loneliness and social isolation, elder abuse, death, grief, and recovery. All chapters conclude with a section about Generational Perspectives Activities, assignments with agenda for class and family discussions, problem-solving scenarios, key concepts, and criteria for self-evaluation. This will be of interest to undergraduate and graduate college students enrolled in lifespan courses offered by family studies, educational psychology, human development, counselling, social work, gerontology, nursing, and business.

Most educators will agree that they would love to see each student and staff member in schools flourish. Furthermore, it would be great to see entire communities experience the transformative power of circumstances that feature happy and vibrant learning. However, what does it mean to experience flourishing in schools? What is the role of positive leadership in this process? What can we learn from inquiring into the positive emotional and social aspects of the work of school leaders? Building on our research on flourishing in schools, this book highlights the stories and perspectives of educators and school leaders at all levels of the school system and demonstrate the intricacies of how positive leadership contributes to well-being in schools and encourages flourishing in these schools. This book aligns with a growing shift in psychology and organizational studies to frame research using phenomena and constructs such as resilience, compassion, hope, efficacy, self-determination and meaningfulness at work and in other areas of life. Research findings from the disciplines of both positive psychology and positive organization studies bring these positive research intelligences into the field of education to study what works in school leadership practices, what goes well, what supports growth, and what brings vitality to people in school organizations. Research in positive psychology contends that attending to the strengths, positive outlooks, habits and mental models, as opposed to a deficit-oriented perspective, is beneficial to increasing subjective wellbeing, by increasing resilience, vitality, and happiness and decreasing stress, anxiety, and depression. How we imagine leading, teaching and learning in schools are implicated in these understandings and help us to contemplate the benefits of focus positive leadership in school organizations. Powerful insights into human inquiry and positive psychology are gained through qualitative study and most of the chapters of this book are grounded in such research. Importantly, chapters in this book provide a varied repertoire of answers to the question that underpins this shift in research toward a positive organizational perspective: How does positive leadership leverage what works well to instill in each community member a sense of their value and capacity to contribute, encourage wellbeing for all and create school contexts of flourishing? This edited collection provides many examples, invitations, and inspiration for readers to notice in their own contexts in ways that encourage them to shift and grow through moving toward appreciative, strengths-based, positive approaches to teaching, learning, and, especially, leading in all school contexts.

While student voice has been well-defined in research, how to sustain youth-adult leadership work is less understood. Students are rarely invited to lead school reform efforts, and when they are, their voice is silenced by the structural arrangements and socio-cultural conditions found in schools. This volume investigates problems with the neoliberal school reform movement, and how youth-adult partnerships have resulted in more effective reforms within schools and community organizations nationally and internationally. Stemming from an eight-year ethnographic study at a civic-themed public high school, the volume highlights the process of creating a school governance structure which produces active and informed citizens. Made up of executive, legislative and judicial branches, the program gives students the power to make, implement and review school policies and practices—a model that has found to effectively distribute leadership and trigger organizational learning, and is thus at the forefront of civic education.

This book explores the role of students’ involvement in teacher professional development. Building upon a research study whereby pupils instruct their teachers in the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), the author argues that using student voice in this way can result in transformational learning for all those involved. The author presents the processes and experiences of pupils taking on the role of educators as well as the experiences of the teachers receiving such professional development from their students. In doing so, he promotes the innovative use of a student voice initiative to support teaching and learning, with the overarching purpose of improving and transforming teacher-pupil relationships. This book will be of interest and value to students and scholars of pupil voice, teacher professional development and transformational learning.