Student Voice and Engagement: Promising Practices from Odds-beating Schools

By Aaron Leo

Student engagement falls dramatically from 74% in fifth grade to only 34% by the senior year according to a 2016 Gallup Student Poll that surveyed nearly 1 million students throughout the United States. These findings should give educators pause as declining engagement is linked with a variety of negative attitudes towards school and poor achievement outcomes. For example, as the poll data demonstrates, students who report higher levels of school engagement are 4.5 times more likely to be hopeful about their futures and 2.5 times more likely to agree that they do well in school. Unsurprisingly, actively disengaged students are half as likely as engaged students to plan to attend a four-year college after high school.

Leveraging Student Voice

How, then, can educators manage to keep students engaged?

One answer to this question is offered by writers at the Center for American Progress who argue that increasing student voice is crucial to maintaining engagement throughout high school. Student “voice” can be defined broadly as students’ active participation in their education which can range from input into curriculum, pedagogy, and school policy as well as opportunities to spearhead changes and initiatives in schools oftentimes in partnerships with educators.

Creating opportunities for students to actively participate in their own education fosters greater motivation and encourages students to more highly value education. Such opportunities allow students to take ownership over their learning and connect school learning with topics relevant to their lives outside of school. The importance of students’ voice in curriculum and pedagogy was made clear by a 2006 Civic Enterprises report on high school dropouts which notes that nearly half of all participants responded that a main reason they left high school was because “classes were not interesting.”

Increasing Student Voice

The authors from the Center for American Progress report cite numerous ways to elevate student voice in schools. Some examples include:

• Administering student surveys to gather feedback
• Eliciting student perspectives on school, local, and state decision-making
• Empowering student organizations and student government bodies
• Democratizing classroom practices to give students choice and voice
• Personalizing learning to include students’ interests
• Creating opportunities for youth-led research

While these ideas may provide educators with some useful ways to increase student voice in their schools, the effectiveness of these strategies can vary depending on the school context. As the authors explain, implementing these techniques should prioritize incorporating the full diversity of student voices in the school and be supplemented by a strong vision from school leaders. Lastly, elevating student voice in schools should be seen a process which involves the building of trust between students and educators over time.

Student Voice in Odds-Beating Schools

In concert with the findings discussed above, NYKids researchers found that educators and leaders at odds-beating schools valued student voice and provided numerous opportunities for student participation in their education.

At Sherburne-Earlville Senior High School, for example, educators shaped their teaching strategies and curricula around their students’ needs and interests. Showing their commitment to take students’ voices seriously, educators at Sherburne-Earlville reinstated the Agricultural Science program and added new courses focusing on hunting and wilderness ecology. Educators at Sherburne-Earlville also professed the need for a more student-centered and hands-on learning experience for their students. As one teacher put it, “[Students] have to take initiative in their learning… I try to put the emphasis on them as the generators of knowledge.”

In alignment with the belief that students are not just students, but “kids”— kids with diverse interests that engage them, extracurricular involvement is also highlighted as a goal at Malverne Senior High School. As the superintendent explained, “What we did, in combination to that [raise academic goals], was to start to create a lot of clubs and activities that were interest-related to children, at all schools.”

In some cases, these clubs and activities were generated out of student interest and in others, as a solution to a problem. For example, reported a Malverne school leader, when confronted with a “huge amount of girl fights”, school leaders got together to “think out of the box,” asking, “What can we do to handle this?” They arrived at co-creating, with students at the center of the conflicts, a “Growing Into Responsible Leaders” (GIRLS) club, with the upper grade girls mentoring their younger peers in how to “exemplify the virtues of a woman.” They have since seen “a dramatic decline in the girl fights and the girl drama”.

Keeping with need to elevate student voice, NYKids is engaging in a second phase of our research on college and career readiness and will be returning to several odds-beating schools to speak directly with students about their experiences. We look forward to presenting the new findings in the coming months and sharing resources we have delved into to frame our study-stay tuned!