Category: SoundOut Tools

Impacts of Students on School Boards

Post author By Adam F.C. Fletcher
Post date March 6, 2023

For more than 20 years, SoundOut has been studying the roles of students on school boards. Based on our own experiences and on research about the practice, we have found many impacts from this type of Meaningful Student Involvement.

Impacts affect primarily four different audiences. Students on school boards can affect the student representative themselves; adult school board members; students throughout the affected education system, and; the larger communities that the schools serve.

Following are some of the impacts of students on school boards. These are drawn from the first significant research on the impacts students have on adults and organizations when they are involved in significant decision-making roles, as well as decades of research from education researchers.

Impacts on Student Members of School Boards: Students on school boards can impact the student representative members.

Meaningful Student Involvement in school board decision-making “provides them with the essential opportunities and supports (i.e. challenge, relevancy, voice, cause-based action, skill-building, adult structure, and affirmation) that are consistently shown to help young people achieve mastery, compassion, and health.”

Impacts on Adult Members of School Boards: Students on school boards can impact adult school board members.

Adults experience the competence of students first-hand, and can perceive
students as legitimate, crucial contributors to education system decision-making
processes.
Working with students serves to enhance the commitment and energy of adults to K-12 schools.
Adults feel more effective and more confident in working with and relating to students.
Adults can grow to understand the needs and concerns of students, and become more attuned to K-12 school issues, making them more likely to reach outside the
school board and share their new knowledge and insights with the broader community. They can gain a stronger sense of education community connectedness.

Impacts on School Boards: Students on school boards can impact students throughout the affected education system.

The principles and practices of Meaningful Student Involvement can become embedded within the culture of the education system.
Most school boards find that students can help clarify and bring focus to the board’s mission, and some boards make this a formal role of students.
The adults and the school board as a whole can become more connected and responsive to students throughout K-12 schools. This investment and energy can lead to school improvement.
School boards place a greater value on inclusivity and diversity. They can come to see that their decision-making benefits when multiple and diverse student voices are included in school boards.
Having students meaningfully involved as decision-makers can help convince voters, state agencies, and other funding sources that the school board is serious about promoting student success for every learner.
Including students in decision-making can lead school boards to reach out to communities in more diverse and effective ways including community advocacy, policy-making, and direct service.

Impacts on K-12 Schools: Students on school boards can impact the larger educational communities that the school boards serve, including every K-12 school within their districts.

The culture of schools can reflect Meaningful Student Involvement more substantively.
The likelihood of students in elementary, middle and high schools of all academic achievement levels being meaningfully involved increases substantially, allowing more students to experience the benefits.
Classroom teachers, school counselors, building administrators and other educators are more likely to experience the impacts of Meaningful Student Involvement in their roles.

You can see our sources at the end of this page. To find more information, visit our pages about our projects. For more information, contact us »

SOURCES

“Elevating Student Voice in Education” by Meg Benner, Catherine Brown, and Ashley Jeffrey for the Center for American Progress on August 14, 2019.
“Few Student Board Members Can Vote. Should That Change?” by Stephen Sawchuk for Education Week on June 11, 2019.
“The Student Voice Is Back Where It Belongs in Philadelphia” by Jared Brey for Next City on October 5, 2018.
“Philly Appoints 2 Students to Its School Board as Students Nationwide Fight to Be Heard” by Mark Keierleber for The 74 on September 25, 2018.
“Schools creating new structures to encourage student voice” Linda Jacobson for Education Dive on November 6, 2017.
“Students on school boards bring unique perspective in K-12 direction” by Rafael Guerrero for the Elgin Courier-News on August 9, 2017.
“Why Do American Students Have So Little Power?” by Amanda Ripley for The Atlantic on March 12, 2015.
“Should Students Sit on School Boards? Advocates say teenagers deserve a say in policies that affect them” by Jacoba Urist for The Atlantic on April 23, 2014.
“Youth-Adult Partnerships in Decision Making: Disseminating and Implementing an Innovative Idea into Established Organizations and Communities” by Shepherd Zeldin, Julie Petrokubi and Carole MacNeil in the American Journal of Community Psychology 41:262–277 in 2008.
“Youth In Decision-Making: A Study on the Impacts of Youth on Adults and Organizations“
Historical Student Involvement Bibliography
Meaningful Student Involvement Bibliography

SoundOut Tools

Working with K-12 students, educators, administrators and community partners across the United States and around the world, SoundOut has created many tools throughout the years. Following are some of them.

We offer training, tools and technical assistance to support each of these tools. Contact us for details »

You Might Like…

Articles Examples

U.S. Office of Students and Youth

Post author By Adam F.C. Fletcher
Post date November 21, 2022
No Comments on U.S. Office of Students and Youth

The Office of Students and Youth is a former program of the United States Office of Education, now known as the United States Department of Education. Launched in 1969, the first leader of the office was Toby Moffet.

Activities

the office was created for several reasons:

To seek technical and financial assistance for innovative student-run programs
Keep USOE tuned in to students, and
Present a national overview of school tensions and ways of dealing with them
Run the Student Information Center in Washington, D.C., staffed mainly by local students, the center collects information on innovations in public high schools, especially those started by students; student rights; and participation in governance.

The Student Information Center also established a clearinghouse of information on secondary school issues, especially student-initiated reforms.

Citations

Moffett, A.J., Jr. (May 1970) “Youth Gets a Voice in New Student Center,” Nation’s Schools, 85(5). pp. 57-59.

You Might Like…

Student Voice in U.S. Education Agencies

History of Student Voice in the United States by Adam Fletcher for SoundOut

Articles

Every Student in Every School All of the Time

Post author By Adam F.C. Fletcher
Post date September 13, 2022

There are almost countless ways that every student shares student voice everyday. Are adults ready to listen? This article shares what student voice is, what student voice does, and whether student voice can make a difference in learning, teaching and leadership.

SoundOut defines student voice this way:

Student voice is any expression of any young person about anything, anytime, anywhere for any purpose as it relates to learning, teaching and education.

That means student voice is not the same as student leadership, student engagement, or other student activities. While all of those are some of the ways student voice is shared, they are not the only ways.

There are so many ways student voice happens. When a young person participates in class, they are sharing student voice. If they etch graffiti onto a hallway locker, they are sharing student voice. If they put on a suit and present at a school board meeting, they are sharing student voice. Here are some more ways students share student voice:

Attendance or skipping class
Submitting assignments or cheating and plagurizing
Completing group projects or not completing group projects

Voting or abstaining from voting
Complying or complaining
Joining clubs and teams or leaving fast
Mentoring or bullying

In some schools, student voice is treated as a synonym for student leadership. Only students who follow adult agendas, behave in ways adults approve, and decide things the ways adults would present student voice that is accepted by adults. In other schools, no student voice is ever valid, and every adult is always presented as having all authority over student expressions, no matter what they are. Neither of these is a true reality though.

Instead, as the list above shows, every action by any student, anywhere in school for any reason constitutes student voice—whether or not adults approve of it. With student voice constantly present, the question is not whether students are ready to share student voice—its whether adults are willing and prepared to listen to it.

There are many ways adults can embrace, engage and infuse student voice for students of all ages and all abilities for any purpose. Freechild’s sister program, SoundOut.org, shares the following as ways to do this:

Teach students about their voices: Rather than simply going through their days without consciousness, educators can teach every student about student voice
Teach students about schools: Many students spend 13 years in schools without ever understanding what it is they are part of. Help students understand the purpose, structure, activities, and outcomes of education
Teach students about improving schools: Share with learners how they are part of a system that includes grades, assessments, projects, reports, and democracy. Show them who affects them and what they can do to affect others, and engage them in activities to improve learning, teaching and leadership
Teach students about Meaningful Student Involvement: It is one thing to know about all of this, and another thing to actually do something about it. When student voice is activated for the purpose of connecting students to education, community, and democracy young people can learn most effectively

There are many other steps to take and a lot of examples available. For more information on engaging student voice, contact us today!

You Might Like…

Articles

Teacher Mindsets About Meaningful Student Involvement

Post author By Adam F.C. Fletcher
Post date May 1, 2022

Over the last decade, there has been a lot written about growth mindsets. There has been a lot said for adults learning about the concept, and teaching students about the idea. Here I want to elaborate on the role of growth mindsets for meaningful student involvement.

This graphic shows the differences between the growth mindset and the fixed mindset.

In the 1990s, Carol Dweck started writing about growth mindsets. Centered on students’ perceptions of failure, Dweck found that some students came back quickly from failure and some students were devastated by failure. By studying their perceptions of failure, Dweck identified that the difference was that some students had a growth mindset and believed they could get smarter, while others had a fixed mindset and thought they would never succeed.

Testing whether those mindsets could be changed for the positive, Dweck and other researchers discovered that fixed mindsets could be changed with specific interventions.

I began learning about mindsets a decade ago. Applying what I found to the K-12 schools I worked in, I found that educators’ mindsets often determined which student voice they would listen to, which students would be meaningfully involved in schools, and which students would be focused on to engage. These seemingly innate perceptions about students were routinely informed by student identities and performance in schools, and were far from the equity that many educators say they aspire to.

Fixed Mindsets about Students

I quickly found that student involvement in traditional school activities, such as extracurricular clubs and athletics, was predicated on whether teachers thought the students who were involved deserved to be involved. If they deserved it, they let the students know. I call this gatekeeping. Gatekeeping allows certain students to be involved and keeps roles for teachers as gatekeepers. Gatekeepers decide which students can be involved according to various spoken and unspoken factors, including:

Academic achievement
Likeability
Compliance

Race
Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation
Socio-economic background

These “gates” are predicated on bias, allowing and disallowing some student voice to be valued while other student voice is silenced. It is the educators’ mindset or the join mindsets of several educators or school administration that permits, accepts and sustains this bias. This fixed mindset about students believes:

Students have to deserve or earn the right to have student voice heard
Only certain students selected by adults should be heard and other students should not be heard
There is a “perfect” or “right” type of student voice, and every other student voice is imperfect or isn’t right
Student voice should reproduce teacher voice
Only certain students have innate abilities to share student voice, and other students do not have this ability

Growth Mindsets about Students

A growth mindset about student involvement, student voice and student engagement allows and encourages all students to experience Meaningful Student Involvement whether adults accept them or not. Educators see that all learners have student voice, and all students understand they deserve to be involved — not because they’re particularly special, but because they are learners, and all learners should be heard, seen, acknowledge, and empowered.

When educators have growth mindsets about students, they…

Believe every student voice deserves to be heard
Make space for students to share what they want to, rather than just what adults want them to share
Work to deliberately engage every single student every single day in every single way possible
Teach students to focus on improving how they share student voice, not which students share or what they share
Focus on why student voice matters and why students share how they do
Believe in increasing others teachers’ capacities to meaningfully involve students

Decades ago, Dweck and her colleagues showed that teacher mindsets directly and deeply impact student mindsets. One of the informal findings from my work has been that when teachers think students are capable of positively transforming schools, students think they are positively capable of transforming schools. While their actions are (luckily) not contingent on adults believing in them, more students are going to become more active in education transformation when we check ourselves.

How do adult mindsets affect student voice, student engagement, and Meaningful Student Involvement in your school? Leave your thoughts in the comment section!

Meaningful Student Involvement Guide to Students as Partners in School Change

Post author By Adam F.C. Fletcher
Post date April 28, 2022
No Comments on Meaningful Student Involvement Guide to Students as Partners in School Change

This e-book describes the elements of meaningful student involvement in the context of school change efforts. It presents a five-step cycle of listening, validating, authorizing, mobilizing, and reflecting on student voice; a tool to measure the quality of activities involving student voice; and several examples of what students as researchers, planners, teachers, evaluators, decision-makers, and advocates look like in practice, at elementary, middle, and high schools. These tools include student-created district budgets, decision-making roles for students on committees for hiring teachers and principals, and student-led forums and conferences. Additionally, it presents barriers to implementing this type of reform and possible strategies to meet these challenges.

(28 pgs, 2005, FREE)

Download the Meaningful Student Involvement Guide to Students as Partners in School Change.

Articles by SoundOut

Following are articles written for SoundOut about a variety of topics related to Meaningful Student Involvement. These publications cover student voice, student engagement, student/adult partnerships and more.

Articles on Meaningful Student Involvement

Articles on Student Voice

Articles on Student Engagement

Articles on Barriers to Students

Articles about Student/Adult Partnerships

Articles for Understanding the Education System

Articles about Students on School Boards

Reviews

Meaningful Student Involvement in 21st Century Community Learning Centers

Post author By Adam F.C. Fletcher
Post date April 21, 2022

For more than 20 years, the US Department of Education has been funding a program called the 21st Century Community Learning Centers across the country. Focused on supporting student learning during out-of-school time (OST), the program has a lot of students of color, low income students, and other learners who face disparities in learning, teaching and leadership throughout their educational experiences. This article is about the role of Meaningful Student Involvement in these programs.

This is the logo for the 21st Century Community Learning Centers.

The 21st Century Community Learning Centers, or 21st CCLCs, are working in almost every state across the country to help students in high-poverty and low-performing schools get more academic enrichment. Focused primarily on providing a safe and supportive learning environments, the 21st CCLCs focus on STEM, or science, technology, engineering and math. 21st CCLC also help in other subject areas in schools, including language arts, social studies, heath and art, as well as other topics, too. All of this is intended to improve student learning,

One of the most ambitious aspects of some 21st CCLCs are their efforts to foster student-centered learning. Student-centered learning often includes student-driven interests, personalized learning, and other strategies that place students in the middle instead of educators. There are missed opportunities hiding in plain sight that can enhance 21st CCLCs though, and one of them is Meaningful Student Involvement.

Meaningful Student Involvement is the sustained systemic infusion of student voice throughout education in order to foster student engagement in school, communities, and democracy. Meaningful Student Involvement can be a key to successful 21st CCLCs. Since 2008, I have worked in dozens of schools across Washington state and beyond, including supporting the Washington State Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction and the New York State Student Support Services Center as they implement their 21st CCLCs programs in the past. All of my work through SoundOut has focused on Meaningful Student Involvement.

In each of these programs, I have taught educators of all stripes different ways Meaningful Student Involvement can improve their programs. This includes…

Meaningful Student Involvement in learning and teaching
Meaningful Student Involvement in program design
Meaningful Student Involvement in program staffing
Meaningful Student Involvement in program evaluation, and
Meaningful Student Involvement in the climate of 21st CCLCs

Each of these has allowed educators in these programs to improve student-driven learning in many ways. For instance, actively fostering Meaningful Student Involvement can empower learners of all ages with the skills and knowledge they need to investigate, engineer, and implement solutions as they create new knowledge and learning for themselves and their peers. Implementing Meaningful Student Involvement to improve the climate of 21st CCLCs can look like embracing social-emotional learning through practical steps reflecting the values and perspectives of schools, families, and communities students belong to.

I have discovered that embracing Meaningful Student Involvement doesn’t always come easily to 21st CCLCs staff though. Despite their best intentions, it can be an uphill climb for educators who’ve never experienced positive, proactive Meaningful Student Involvement to do the same.

That’s why SoundOut provides a variety of tools and supports to scaffold educators’ learning to support Meaningful Student Involvement in 21st CCLCs. Through my workshops and keynote speeches, 21st CCLCs staff can find practical ways of understanding Meaningful Student Involvement, effective implementations of Meaningful Student Involvement in programming, and powerful ways to measure the impact and outcomes of Meaningful Student Involvement in 21st CCLCs.

Contact SoundOut today to discuss how to bring us to your area for a workshop on Meaningful Student Involvement in 21st Century Community Learning Centers.

Student Burnout and Student Voice

Post author By Adam F.C. Fletcher
Post date April 20, 2022

The COVID-19 pandemic has ravished K-12 schools across the United States and around the world. After months or years out of physical school buildings, students have been brought back into classroom learning. However, a new epidemic has emerged throughout schools, and it is best summarized as student burnout. This article is about the connections between student burnout and student voice.

Student burnout happens when learners of all ages have had enough. Consciously or unconsciously, they’ve surrendered their will to learn. In response, they have become apathetic about learning and disconnected from school. Student burnout can be obvious or subtle, intentional or accidental, incidental or sustained.

When students throw trash around bathrooms, fight on social media posts, run out of classrooms, or skip school, they are being obvious. However, missing assignments, staring out the window and answering questions with rote memorization instead of thoughtful replies can all be indications of student burnout, too.

At SoundOut, we’ve discovered there is an intersection between student burnout and student voice. Working with more than 500 schools globally over the last 20 years, we’ve found the ability of students to express themselves about learning and schools is key to retaining positive possibilities for education. When students have authentic opportunities to share their knowledge, ideas, opinions, and concerns about education, they stay engaged in learning, teaching, and leadership throughout schools. When students feel compressed, repressed, or oppressed within schools, they disconnect from the teachers with the best intentions, the classes with the finest honed curriculums, and the most supportive learning environments to be crafted.

5 Steps to Fight Student Burnout

While we continue to move into this post-pandemic reality of educating students in highly compromised classrooms, we should center all of our work on engaging students by empowering authentic student voice. Here are some ways you can do that.

If you see the potential and possibilities for student voice to combat student burnout but you’re not sure where to start, contact us today. SoundOut is excited to partner with K-12 educators and schools that are committed to Meaningful Student Involvement — find out why!

You Might Like…

Articles

Indicators of Student Engagement

Post author By Adam F.C. Fletcher
Post date January 24, 2022

In more than 20 years of academic research on student engagement, scholars have constantly tried to identify what reflects student engagement. Some studies have focused on teachers’ reflections about student engagement, while others have fixated on supposedly objective perspectives on students’ time-on-task and other observable phenomenon.

When I became Washington state’s first-ever student engagement specialist in 2000, I conducted a three year action research project to identify and advocate for the active, intentional, and practical engagement of every learner throughout K-12 schools. Since then I have supported more than 2,000 schools in their efforts to foster, expand, and sustain student engagement.

These are Adam F.C. Fletcher’s five indicators of student engagement for SoundOut.org.

SoundOut’s Indicators of Student Engagement

Following are the the five main indicators of student engagement I have identified through my work with SoundOut and beyond.

Academic engagement is repeatedly choosing connection with curriculum, learning, and assessment within schools. Frequently positioned as “book learning” or “classroom learning,” academic engagement is shown through formal, structured, and specific activities and demonstrated through similar outcomes;
Emotional engagement happens through Social Emotional Learning in classrooms and beyond. Emotional engagement is demonstrated through increased emotional intelligence, or EQ, and isn’t simply attached to curriculum. Instead, EQ is reflected in the interplay between classroom, climate, community, and interpersonal / intra-personal exhibition;
Social engagement is reflected in connections students make through peer-to-peer relationships as well as with younger and older students, teachers and administrators, student support staff, and the broader school community. Again reflecting intra-personal engagement, the social indicator of student engagement is a direct reflection of culture and climate throughout the school environment;
Cultural engagement is demonstrated through the continuous connections a student makes to language, history, dance, clothing, songs, and other types of cultural learning experiences within schools and beyond. Its obvious display isn’t the only way cultural engagement happens; rather, it is through stated, obvious, and demonstrable connectivity that students make their engagement known;
Personal engagement is shown through students’ repeated connections to what matters most within themselves and throughout the world around them; and many other forms of student engagement. This is a largely interpersonal indicator, apparent only in the focuses of learners as they demonstrate interest, show consistency, and practice any given area of personal engagement.

All of these types of engagement happen within schools right now. However, with the exception of academic engagement, they are often treated as coincidental to the schooling experience. Research and practice reflected in literature from the last 20 years shows that quite the contrary, these indicators of engagement are essential for learner success in many ways.

With the breadth of student engagement clearly understood, it becomes easier to understand the rampant reality of student disengagement in schools today. This is what makes it essential to radically rethink how students are engaged throughout the education system.

What do you think of these indicators? I would love to read your thoughts and ideas, so share them in the comments. Interested in learning more? See the links below or contact SoundOut right now!

Impacts on Student Members of School Boards: Students on school boards can impact the student representative members.

Impacts on Adult Members of School Boards: Students on school boards can impact adult school board members.

Impacts on School Boards: Students on school boards can impact students throughout the affected education system.

Impacts on K-12 Schools: Students on school boards can impact the larger educational communities that the school boards serve, including every K-12 school within their districts.

You Might Like…

Students on School Boards in Canada

SOURCES

You Might Like…

Activities

Citations

You Might Like…

Student voice is any expression of any young person about anything, anytime, anywhere for any purpose as it relates to learning, teaching and education.

You Might Like…

Fixed Mindsets about Students

Growth Mindsets about Students

You Might Like…

You Might Like…

Articles on Meaningful Student Involvement

Articles on Student Voice

Articles on Student Engagement

Articles on Barriers to Students

Articles about Student/Adult Partnerships

Articles for Understanding the Education System

Articles about Students on School Boards

Reviews

Related Content

You Might Like…

Elsewhere Online

5 Steps to Fight Student Burnout

You Might Like…

SoundOut’s Indicators of Student Engagement

You Might Like…