ELEVATING STUDENT VOICE IN IMPROVEMENT WORK

This is the ninth installment of Improving Improvement, our quarterly series focused on leveraging the power of research-practice partnerships (RPPs) to build schools’, districts’, and states’ capacity to improve. Previously, we shared feedback from current and past partners to determine to what degree their capacity to improve has increased over the last five years, and how we might engage in our own internal continuous improvement efforts to better meet their needs.  

In this installment, we share how we strategically embed empathy building activities and student voice to inform our improvement work – and why we are increasingly recognizing the importance of doing so.  

I want to share a recent experience that made an impact on me and affirmed the importance of involving students more deliberately in improvement work: At a recent conference I attended (the Impact Florida Education Summit), my personal highlight of the Summit was a student panel comprised of five high school students who shared their experiences and perspectives about what it is like to be a young person in public schools today. During the Q&A portion, an educator asked the students what advice they had for educators on how to connect with youth who may not be as engaged in school. One of the young people shared a response so simple, yet often neglected from a systematic perspective: “ask them”. Ask the student what is happening that may be preventing them from engaging and then offer them options for supports based on what they say.   

Involving students isn’t always at the forefront of improvement efforts. As referenced in our How to Know an Improvement Effort is Succeeding installment, our partners typically complete a continuous improvement self-assessment before beginning improvement work with us that asks respondents to reflect on how well, and how often their organization engages in various improvement activities, and which critical perspectives are included in the process (staff, families, students, community). The majority of partners report that students are “never” engaged in improvement activities (e.g., identifying root causes of identified problems or selecting and designing interventions aligned to root causes) or that students are “sometimes” engaged, but primarily to provide feedback after decisions have already been made.  

ELEVATING STUDENT EXPERIENCE AND STUDENT VOICE

In recent years, Proving Ground began utilizing design thinking more strategically throughout our improvement framework as a means for partners to develop a deep understanding of the experiences and needs of students and/or their families and to elevate their voice within the process. While we have encouraged including students and families in every step (root cause analysis, intervention selection, etc.), historically our partners have used two specific strategies to support the inclusion of students and/or family in intervention design and implementation: journey mapping and prototyping. 

Journey Mapping

The first of these strategies is to create a journey map that focuses exclusively on the experiences of the intervention recipients (typically students). The journey map we use is a graphic organizer that identifies the main events within an intervention that students will experience in chronological order. It prompts partners to think about how students may feel in each event, as well as how they want students to experience the intervention and the necessary planning to create that experience. For example, in a restorative/community building circles intervention, the first event students experience should likely be some notification or awareness building that they will be participating in a circle process. Students may feel a variety of emotions: curious, apprehensive, suspicious, or even uncertain about circles, so adults will need to intentionally plan when, where, how, the notification/awareness building event will happen and who will be involved so that students are reassured about the purpose, rationale, format, and structure of the circles and are comfortable participating.  

Prototyping

The second strategy used in the Proving Ground process is prototyping interventions. Once teams have created the intervention journey map, they use the journey map to create a brief “elevator pitch” describing the intervention along with a low fidelity prototype of it, such as a short story board describing the intervention events or a mockup of a tool or platform, to share with the intended recipients. Partners are guided to ask open-ended questions to potential intervention recipients about the things they like or don’t like about the interventions represented in the prototypes and their ideas for improving the intervention design. For many educators, these two activities are new ways of approaching intervention design. We frequently receive feedback from our partners about how much they appreciate the opportunity to intentionally design for the experiences they want students to have in the interventions they are offering and to have a structured format for getting student input into the design before implementing. Wanda Lash, Director of Student and Family Services for Akron Public Schools, shared: “Including students… around an issue that involves them allowed us to gain valuable insight from those for whom we were most trying to improve outcomes.”

New: Student Shadowing

For our newest Ohio improvement network, partners engaged in an additional empathy building step intended to inform their understanding of student needs and their experiences of school: Student shadowing. Each team member was asked to shadow a student who had membership in the population identified in their problem statement (e.g., chronically absent students in K-2) for a full day and to engage in the same assignments and activities as their identified student throughout the day. While this led to some humorous experiences for some partners, such as the recognition they were no longer able to sit “criss-cross applesauce” or strained muscles while playing at recess, it also led to intense insights about what it was like to be a student in their respective settings. 

The multi-tiered system of supports (MTSS) Coordinator for Euclid City Schools, Hendrik Wolfert, shared:

“The student shadowing experience was eye opening and allowed me to immerse myself into the students’ daily routine from their perspective. The lessons learned as an administrator were much different than a 10-15 minute observation walk through and provided insights such as how other students behaviors impact learning throughout the entire day, how students energy and attention levels drop during the day, the relationship between hunger and attention at various points of the day, how a substitute teacher can negatively impact the routine of children without intention, and the amount of ‘sit and get’ we are expecting our students participate in at such a young age.” 

He also noted that, “regardless of ability, we have amazing students at all grades levels that want to feel loved and want to be a part of an environment that equally loves and cares for them” and strongly recommends the student shadowing exercise take place in every district and building to allow adults to truly understand how students go about their daily routines and gain a more in depth understanding of what impacts student achievement. 

The intention of the shadowing activity is for the insights gained through observation, experience, and conversations with students during shadowing to inform future steps within the improvement process (e.g., root cause analysis, intervention selection). After each team member completes the shadowing activity, the team follows a structured debrief protocol to share experiences, develop a shared understanding, and identify common themes.

LOOKING AHEAD

While student shadowing, journey mapping, and prototyping are steps towards incorporating empathy activities and student voice, there is more work to be done. At Proving Ground, we will continue to provide our partners with efficient but impactful strategies to “ask them”- i.e., ask students and families about their needs and to elevate their ideas and perspectives throughout the entire improvement process. 

In our next installment, we will share the progress of the Ohio cohort and how their empathy building and “ask them” activities are informing their improvement work.

Amber Humm Patnode is Acting Director of Proving Ground.

Suggested citation: Humm Patnode, A. (2023). Improving Improvement: Elevating Student Voice in Improvement Work. NNERPP Extra, 5(1), 38-41. https://doi.org/10.25613/Q07E-8H49