Student Voice

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I want to work harder at including students' voices into the process of designing and implementing projects in my class. One way I have tried doing this recently is through comments.

At HTH, semester grade reports are accompanied by teachers' narrative comments about each student - usually consisting of a brief summary of the work our team did that semester, a few comments about the students' strengths and areas for improvement, and then a goal or two that the student should consider for the future. For many teachers, this process feels a bit like writing notes next to the letter grade on the last page of an essay: the student is going to look for the letter grade, knowing that he doesn't have the opportunity to revise his work, and he will possibly never read the comments. The comments, then, feel pretty meaningless.

The way my partner and I make comments feel more meaningful for us and for the students is to have "student-led comments," in which the students write some notes about their progress and performance over the course of the semester and then we augment them with our own observations. Having the students take this opportunity to reflect on the work they've done is useful not only to us as teachers but also to their parents, who (in some cases) rarely get to hear their children talk about school in quite this way.

The process of including student voice in our comments doesn't end there. Today, as a warm-up activity at the beginning of the period, I gave everyone back their comments and our responses so they could read them before their parents get them in the mail. Then I asked them to write their responses to our responses to their comments. Some students took the opportunity to challenge the constructive critiques we had offered; some asked questions of us; and some thanked us for the complimentary things we had written. One student said, "I appreciate the opportunity to hear your perspective on my work ethic, because in general I'm a pretty self-conscious person." Another said, "I disagree that I've become more mature since last year; I know I need to keep working on my school attitude." A third student said, "You wrote...the best things I've ever read about myself. I stand complimented."

The exciting glimpses that comments have allowed us to see of our students on a truly personalized scale have helped us to know their aspirations, their motivations, and the way they really see themselves.

Other ways I've been working to incorporate student voice in my practice include student-generated rubrics (which my partner Anne and I have done this week with great success), one-on-one conferences to set project expectations/goals, and discussions with my classes about issues concerning the school outside my classroom. Usually, it is during these activities that I feel the most connected to the students and the most effective in teaching them the skills/information that will be useful to them beyond high school.