Learning from the Student's Perspective

A Sourcebook for Effective Teaching

Alison Cook-Sather, Brandon Clarke, Daniel Condon, Kathleen Cushman, Helen Demetriou, Lois Easton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781594516948
• eBook ISBN: 9781317256731
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Much has been written about how to engage students in their learning, but very little of it has issued from students themselves. Compiled by one of the leading scholars in the field of student voice, this sourcebook draws on the perspectives of secondary students in the United States, England, Canada, and Australia as well as on the work of teachers, researchers, and teacher educators who have collaborated with a wide variety of students.Highlighting student voices, it features five chapters focused on student perspectives, articulated in their own words, regarding specific approaches to creating and maintaining a positive classroom environment and designing engaging lessons and on more general issues of respect and responsibility in the classroom. To support educators in developing strategies for accessing and responding to student voices in their own classrooms, the book provides detailed guidelines created by educational researchers for gathering and acting upon student perspectives. To illustrate how these approaches work in practice, the book includes stories of how pre-service and in-service teachers, school leaders, and teacher educators have made student voices and participation central to their classroom and school practices. And finally, addressing both practical and theoretical questions, the book includes a chapter that outlines action steps for high school teachers, school leaders, and teacher educators and a chapter that offers a conceptual framework for thinking about and engaging in this work. Bringing together in a single text student perspectives, descriptions of successful efforts to access them in secondary education contexts, concrete advice for practitioners, and a theoretical framework for further exploration, this sourcebook can be used to guide practice and support re-imagining education in secondary schools of all kinds, and the principles can be adapted for other educational contexts.

Part I

Students’ Perspectives on Effective Classroom Practice

This section features the voices and perspectives of students. Many of the statements come from conversations among high school students who have participated in Teaching and Learning Together, the project based in my secondary general methods course, which I discuss in detail in Chapter 13. Since 1995, Teaching and Learning Together has put high school students in partnership with prospective teachers and positioned them as teacher educators: asking them, both in weekly meetings facilitated by a teacher at their school and in weekly e-mail exchanges with preservice teachers enrolled in my course, to talk about what works for them in terms of pedagogical style, classroom management, and other dimensions of classroom practice, what does not work, and why. Their statements are complemented by student statements drawn from ten other sources—texts in which researchers, teachers, and other authors have consulted students about their experiences of school.¹

Taken together, these statements are a generally representative sampling of students’ perspectives, but as indicated in the introduction to this book, they are not intended to describe or reflect all learners or their needs. While students’ statements over the years that I have maintained Teaching and Learning Together have been strikingly consistent across grade level, assigned track in school, and even school itself, it might well be the case that other educators would find that some of these issues resonate more deeply than others for them and their students depending on such factors as age, specific populations, and world events. These students’ statements reveal patterns and tendencies that I therefore encourage educators to explore in relation to their own students’ experiences and perspectives.

In keeping with the premise of this book, I invited two students, Jessica Mitra Mausner and Jossi Fritz-Mauer, seniors at Haverford College when I began writing this book, to assume the primary responsibility for reading through all the data I had gathered—both published and unpublished—and for identifying, selecting, organizing, and framing the chapters and their subsections. They began by reading a variety of methods texts, looking for student voice and the way the texts framed students’ input. They then read the transcripts of all meetings of high school students through Teaching and Learning Together, read the transcripts a second time, pulled out every quote from students, and coded them all, initially separating the students’ words into meta-categories (e.g., classroom management, relationships). They then assigned different statements to different sections and then read other texts focused on student perspectives to see if their categories remained valid. Drawing on all these data, they read through, coded, and assigned quotes from both my data and the other ten sources to different chapters and sections. Jessica Mitra Mausner, Jossi Fritz-Mauer, and I met regularly to discuss issues, patterns, themes, and organizational questions, but I felt strongly that their perspectives as students should significantly influence the shape of this section of the book.

Each chapter in this part opens with and is punctuated by short framing statements written by Jessica, Jossi, and me. These sections are intended as frames to support the main text, which is composed of high school students’ own words. Our goal in writing these was to orient readers to the issues addressed within the chapter, and in particular we highlight words that recur across student statements. We hope readers will pay special attention to these words, as they not only signal what matters most to students, they highlight meanings of terms that might have different associations for adults and for young people or among differently positioned young people.

Chapters 1 through 3 focus on some of the most basic practices upon which students feel teachers should focus: getting to know students, creating and maintaining a positive classroom environment, and designing engaging lessons. The final two chapters in this section (Chapters 4 and 5) focus on less tangible issues that students nonetheless feel are critical to—indeed, underlie—good teaching: respect and responsibility.

Each chapter concludes with a case study that focuses on the theme of the chapter and that draws on a preservice teacher’s analysis of what he or she learned from participating in Teaching and Learning Together. Thus each chapter ends with a student’s perspective—in this case a prospective teacher’s perspective—on learning from the student’s perspective. With these case studies we hope to illustrate the dynamic exchanges out of which many of these student perspectives emerged.

Note

1. See the Introduction for a complete list of these sources.

1

Knowing Students

with Jossi Fritz-Mauer and Jessica Mitra Mausner

You always learn in school…. But [what] you’re going to remember is going to be all the relationships.

—Student¹

Chapter Overview

Focus of this chapter: The importance of knowing students as individuals and as people with a range of both shared and different experiences

Discussed in this chapter:

• Personal connections

• Equality

• Relating as human beings

• Flexibility

• Recognizing individuals

• Learning styles

• Case study: Knowing students and their learning needs

When students argue that teachers need to know their students, they do so within the general frames of personal connections and learning styles. In other words, their comments tend to address their needs as social (not isolated) beings and as diverse (not uniform or monolithic) learners. Recognizing young people’s multiple identities—student, nonstudent, and others—can help teachers more successfully meet the profound challenge to know their students.

Within the general frame of personal connections, students address issues of equality, relating as fellow humans, flexibility, and being recognized as individuals. When they experience these qualities in their relationships with teachers, students build their self-esteem, which is essential to their engagement and success in school. For these students, caring equals high expectations and encouragement.

When we think of schools, we think of cinderblock hallways, classrooms full of rows or rings of desks, regulated curricula and hardbound textbooks, days divided by buzzers and bells. When we asked students to write about school, they rarely discussed these traditional features. Rather, their focus was on their relationships with the people who share and shape their schooling … Within the overarching theme of students’ relationships with others:

• Students want to have more human and humane interactions in school. They are looking for care, respect, and support from their teachers, peers, and others who influence their educational experiences.

• Students want to be their whole selves; they do not want to be fragmented, categorized, compared to and judged against one another, treated differently or discriminated against.

• Students want school to be engaging. Countering the stereotype of apathetic, disaffected, or otherwise recalcitrant teenagers, these student authors describe the ways that they want their teachers to make school interesting and relevant and invite students to actively participate in their learning.²

Personal Connections

Students suggest that personal connections can only be developed by fostering actual relationships (not simply by understanding that humans are relational). Students’ juxtaposition of “person” and “teacher,” the notion of an “encourager,” and the teacher’s demonstration of an obvious desire “to help” are all indicators, from these students’ perspectives, of teachers’ efforts to build personal connections.

[What] you’re going to remember is … [all] the different people you worked with and how to work with those people. You’re going to carry that a lot longer than you are how to find the area of a triangle or something.³

If you have a relationship with your students, they’re gonna trust you more and they’re gonna respect you more and then they’ll be nicer to you.⁴

It doesn’t work when a teacher tries to force the connection or try too hard to relate to us. When they say, “I understand what you’re going through,” we know they don’t.⁵

We’ve got some teachers we can walk up to, see them in the hallway, and start a little conversation with them. They tell us how we are doing in school, how we are doing in classes. I like that because it shows that the teachers really care about us—not just in the class but outside the class, too. They are leading me toward the right direction, making me want to go to class, and making me want to get those extra grades that I know I’m capable of.⁶

In my experience I found that a teacher who uses her position to be an encourager is most effective. ’Cause when a teacher goes out of her way to give you direction, or just to let you know that they really appreciate what you’ve been doing, even if you’re not the highest student in your class, even if you’re the lowest, if the teacher comes to you and says, “I really admire you for what you’re doing, you’re sticking with this,” or even if you’re doing great and the teacher comes to you and says, “This is great, I’m just really proud of you for what you’ve done.” Just having that extra boost of encouragement makes the difference.⁷

A lot of what the teachers do is become our friends and mentors and that helps us a lot … just listening to you and knowing a little bit about you, which helps you feel comfortable with them … you know that the teachers respect you so you kind of assume that students will also, just for that. And it really helps to have teachers as friends, I guess.⁸

There are teachers who give you the work and say, “Do it” and then those who will show you how. If you feel a teacher really wants to help you like after school then I make time for them and it will be an amazing outcome.

One of my teachers really push kids to do work. She is the most caring teacher. She really want you to do work. Sometimes that make me mad but I still try to do the work. It nice to know you got a teacher who cares.⁹

Equality

High schoolers necessarily negotiate their identities as students with respect to their relationships with teachers. Although high school students have different perspectives on the nature of the student-teacher relationship, they all speak to forming closer connections that also allow them to be contributors both to the relationship and to their learning that is supported by that relationship (or not). They use terms like “friendship” and “communicate,” regarding teachers who are “learning from” students as well as being “open to answering questions,” and being on the “same” personal “level.”

If you don’t have a friendship relationship with your teacher, or at least feel that you can talk to them or anything, then it’s not going to be like a good learning environment because you’re not able to communicate or think that you’re friends with your teacher. I don’t mean best friends. Like a friend you can talk to. Some people don’t feel like they can do that, then that could hinder their learning.

I want the teacher to be like a student, too. I mean, to not only be an instr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: Learning from the Student’s Perspective: Why It’s Important, What to Expect, and Important Guidelines
• Part I Students’ Perspectives on Effective Classroom Practice
• Part II Strategies for Learning from Students’ Perspectives
• Part III Listening in Action: Educators Learning from Students’ Perspectives
• Part IV Conclusions
• Appendix: Research Support for Consulting Students
• References
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• About the Author and Contributors