Work Conducted by:
Restructuring Collaborative
c/o School Improvement Program
Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory
101 SW Main Street, Suite 500
Portland, OR 97204
(503) 275-9629
| Acknowledgments | i |
| Contents | iii |
| List of Tables | vi |
| Chapter 1. Learning What Students Think About School Restructuring
Robert E. Blum, Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory |
1 |
| Becoming A Learning Community | 1 |
| Purpose and Organization of the Book | 13 |
| Chapter 2. Children’s Voices From the Rainbow School
Shirley M. Hord & Harvetta M. Robertson, Southwest Educational Development Laboratory |
17 |
| Setting the Stage | 17 |
| Working With Students | 21 |
| What We Learned From Students | 22 |
| What Happened With Student Data | 27 |
| References | 27 |
| Chapter 3. Research in the Hands of Students
Joan Shaughnessy & James W. Kushman, Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory |
29 |
| Setting the Stage | 29 |
| Working With Students | 33 |
| What We Learned From Students | 34 |
| What Happened With Student Data | 38 |
| Chapter 4. Speaking with High School Students in the Southwest
Shirley M. Hord, Southwest Educational Development Laboratory |
41 |
| Setting the Stage | 41 |
| Working With Students | 45 |
| What We Learned From Students | 45 |
| What Happened With Student Data | 57 |
| Chapter 5. Middle School Reform from the Students’ Perspective
Bruce Wilson & Dick Corbett, Research for Better Schools |
59 |
| Setting the Stage | 59 |
| Adult Interviews | 61 |
| Student Interviews | 65 |
| Student Interviews and Observations | 68 |
| Student Open-Ended Surveys | 71 |
| What Happened With Student Data | 84 |
| Summary | 84 |
| Chapter 6. What Students Think of Restructuring: Student Views of Systemic Reform in California
JoAnn Izu, Far West Laboratory |
87 |
| Setting the Stage | 87 |
| Working With Students | 95 |
| What We Learned From Students: | |
| Common Experiences and Perspectives of Students | 96 |
| What We Learned About Capturing Student Voices | 99 |
| What Happened With Student Data | 103 |
| Chapter 7. Northeast Educators Inquire: What Do Students Think About Learners and Learning?
Pat L. Cox & Jill Mirman Owen, Northeast and Islands Regional Laboratory |
105 |
| Setting the Stage | 105 |
| Working With Students: | |
| The Research Effort in the First Year | 109 |
| What We Learned From Students: First Year | 111 |
| What Happened With Student Data: First Year | 115 |
| Working With Students: The Research Effort in the Second Year | 115 |
| What We Learned From Students: Second Year | 117 |
| What Happened With Student Data: Second Year | 118 |
| What We Learned Overall | 120 |
| References | 122 |
| Chapter 8. What Students Think About Kentucky Reform
Sandra R. Orletsky & Gregory Leopold, Appalachia Educational Laboratory |
125 |
| Setting the Stage | 125 |
| Working With Students | 128 |
| What We Learned From Students | 129 |
| What Happened With Student Data | 135 |
| Chapter 9. Common Themes and Learnings From the Case Studies
James W. Kushman, Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory |
141 |
| What We Learned From the Student Data | 141 |
| What We Learned About the Process of Asking Students What They Think | 149 |
| References | 161 |
| Chapter 10. Finding Out What Students Think: One-Day Methods Schools Can Use | 163 |
| The Restructuring Collaborative Planning and Preparation | 164 |
| Focusing and Designing the Research | 166 |
| Collecting Data | 170 |
| Analyzing Data | 172 |
| Developing Feedback | 173 |
| Using Student Data for School Improvement | 175 |
| Appendix A. Interview Protocol Used in Dickinson Elementary School | 179 |
| Appendix B. Survey Instrument Used in Eastern Middle School | 197 |
| Appendix C. Interview Guide Used in California Schools | 211 |
| Appendix D. Contact Information for Authors | 215 |
Robert E. Blum
Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory
So you want to know what students think? A group of us – staff from regional laboratories, teachers, administrators, students and, in a small way, university professors and parents – have been learning how to find out. Over a six-year period, we have become a collaborative, a team of people spread across the country working to bring students and their voice into school restructuring efforts. Students, teachers, administrators, and regional laboratory staff have all been involved at various times and in various ways.
This book, a product of the collaborative, has a focus on students – what they think and how they can become leaders and participants in school reform. The book also tells the story of how the collaborative evolved, including what we did and what we learned. It is a rich source of information for anyone interested in bringing students into their school improvement processes, or wanting to know what students think, or wanting to learn how to collaborate.
The story began with staff from each of ten regional educational laboratories coming together to clarify thinking about school restructuring, a hot topic in the fall of 1988. Two-and-a-half years later, the first student appeared in the group. When this student started to work at our sides, we began to see our own work from a new perspective. We came from two different worlds, but we learned from one another, and our joint work was richer. This first direct involvement of a student in collaborative planning was a turning point for us. Here is how that experience is remembered, first from a student’s perspective, and then from the viewpoint of a regional laboratory staff member. Dan, now a sophomore in college, recalled the meeting he attended in May, 1993:
My senior year they [the collaborative] flew me to Boston where all the regional labs were meeting. All the big mucky-mucks were in this board room with the big table and the oak paneling. They were all there, and we went to the Harvard Club for dinner. You have to be a graduate of Harvard to be there, and I was there, too. Coat and tie required, and I didn’t even know how to tie a tie. I had my mom do it so I could just pull it up when I got there. So there I am sitting around with the mucky-mucks eating dinner at the Harvard Club in Boston, and I have my hair down to here [shoulder length], my blue blazer, and my tie. I was totally out of my league, and I heard people whispering, ‘Is he the student?’ I was terrified.
I started asking people questions of my own. ‘Where did you start as a teacher?’ ‘Who decided to get you into education?’ And one of the guys said he was planning to work road construction, and then decided to go to college. And everyone has had those teachers, those leadership experiences, that brought them up to the level they are at.
[referring to the next day] And they were all sitting around arguing about something, arguing about how to implement some program. I said, ‘I have an idea. It’s called sticky-dot voting, where you take all your ideas, you get them all up, and you paste them all over the room. I learned this in leadership camp. You take the sticky dots, and everyone votes, and the most votes wins.’ And they’re like, oh, that’s a good idea. Good ol’ sticky-dot voting, junior year leadership council, and these education mucky-mucks hadn’t heard of it. So we did sticky-dot voting, and it was great.
I learned that student leadership is about students bringing a fresh perspective, an incredibly fresh, new perspective about leadership. . . .
Joan, one of the researchers at the same meeting, remembers Dan’s involvement:
One of our group had this brainstorm that it would be wonderful to hear first-hand from a student. We invited Dan, who had been working on a district leadership team in Washington State, to come to Boston with us. At first it was a little awkward to have him be part of the group. I was concerned that we were either boring him or were using too much jargon. But I found that we explained ourselves more when he was there, and being clear was an excellent grounding for all of us as well.
In the middle of our second day together, we had brainstormed so many ideas and were just not coming to closure. It was a frustrating moment for the group. We were trying to take into account the perspectives of all the schools and district staff and the labs from different parts of the country. Dan and his sticky-dot activity helped us reach agreement. He led us through the activity, which helped us state our preferences in a non-threatening and participatory approach. It was perfect. Dan was proud of his contribution. As a result, he also was more willing to share his perspective as we finalized our research design. I think we all left that meeting with a new awareness about what student participation can mean.
Dan’s involvement in the Restructuring Collaborative was a beginning. It was not easy, and it took way too long to get to the point where students became regular participants in collaborative work. Ironically, even though participants in the collaborative agreed early on about a focus on student learning, no students were involved for well over two years.
Collaboration is about people with diverse goals, work, backgrounds, and values coming together around a good cause. When staff from the regional laboratories first met in the fall of 1988 to think together about school restructuring, there was no history of collaboration among the organizations. In fact, there was a 25-year history of regional laboratories competing with each other. Regional laboratories had learned how to compete very well. Collaboration seemed out of the question.
But many of the individuals who attended the first meeting knew one another.
They believed there was a good cause: clarifying ideas about school restructuring as a service to the education profession nationwide. There was also a short-term, common objective to develop a two-hour presentation on school restructuring for a national convention. The stage was set for collaboration.
Participants began the process of coming together by talking about the school restructuring work of their regional laboratory. The discussion turned quickly to our short-term objective: the presentation. It wasn’t long, though, before our personal rather than organizational beliefs about learning, teaching, schooling, and restructuring emerged. We found that we held many beliefs in common. For example, we all believed that restructuring should focus on student learning rather than simply providing the opportunity to learn.
In this one-day meeting, we outlined our presentation and assigned follow-up tasks. Over the next several months, participants added detail to the presentation through a write-review-rewrite process. Everyone contributed and everyone critiqued the work. As the final step in fine-tuning the presentation, we rehearsed. This was risky business. Asking nine people whom you did not know well to critique your presentation was threatening. The rehearsal put us all on equal footing. We worked as a team to weave nine individual presentations into a cohesive whole. People learned a lot about each other and we began to develop trust through the process of working together.
The presentation was a success. We agreed to continue working together to expand the ideas into a longer, more in-depth workshop. We set another short-term objective, a one-day institute at another national convention.
Developing a day-long institute was more challenging. We had to find common ground on restructuring issues at a deeper level. We agreed on four key questions to guide our thinking and provide structure for the institute:
1. Why restructure?
2. What is restructuring?
3. How can restructuring happen?
4. How can the progress of restructuring be assessed?
Discussions resulted in agreement on key points related to each of the four questions. For example, the group agreed that restructuring begins with students, although no students were in the group. This raised additional issues and questions. What knowledge, skills, characteristics, and qualities should students develop through their schooling experience? How should day-to-day teaching and learning practices change to align with such goals? Finally, how should school culture change to align with student learning goals and day-to-day learning and teaching practices? We believed that all decisions in a school and/or school district should be guided by what is intended for students to learn. These common beliefs about restructuring continue to guide the work of the collaborative.
More happened during the year-long planning process. The ideas of all presentation team members blended into a unifying whole. Trust among team members increased. No one promoted a personal or organizational agenda. Meetings shifted from hotel and institutional settings to homes. The interaction, while intense, became more informal and comfortable. Everyone contributed, took on assignments, and completed them. Social activities became more important, sharing meals and having time for more personal conversation. The group became a team.
During this year, we recorded another success. The first product of the collaborative was completed: a set of training materials that could be used by collaborative members and others interested in bringing clarity and focus to school restructuring efforts.
While we did not recognize it at the time, completion of the institute became a transition point for the collaborative. We agreed that developing and conducting single-event institutes, presentations, and workshops would not produce continued growth for the collaborative or individual members. On the other hand, we were not sure of next steps. We brainstormed in a debriefing session following the institute. Should we develop multiple event training programs? Should we shift from training to studying restructuring schools to gain new insights into the change process? We knew we had made good progress in becoming a collaborative.
After several months, about half of the members met to discuss continuing the work of the collaborative. Two key agreements were reached by the core group. First, we agreed to invite all regional educational laboratories to participate in the collaborative. However, we also decided that our work would continue regardless of how many accepted the invitation. Second, we agreed to study restructuring schools rather than continuing to work on training. We planned a meeting to design our new work and invited each regional laboratory to send one or more staff members to the next meeting.
The composition of the group changed at the next meeting. The group was larger and included several individuals from some laboratories and none from others. The team-building process began again: introductions, sharing the work of each organization, brainstorming, and agreeing on key ideas. We presented a history of the collaborative for the new participants and agreed to build from the basic ideas developed by the original group. We reached several key agreements and identified three broad areas for study:
1. Beliefs about what students should do and learn in school, including beliefs about learners and learning;
2. Daily life of students in schools and districts, with a focus on student perceptions; and
3. Cultural norms in schools and districts, including the history of school restructuring efforts and conceptions of change and change processes.
We also agreed to the following concepts about our work together:
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At the next meeting, we devoted two days to learning a technique for mapping the history of restructuring efforts. In addition, we learned how to analyze the work in relationship to a framework for thinking about organizational development. This marked the first time school and district staff participated with laboratory staff in an activity of the collaborative. Participants were asked to write one positive comment and one suggestion for improvement as an evaluation. While the overall tone of the comments was positive, they indicated that school practitioners are action oriented and want to learn from each other about their restructuring efforts.
“The mapping exercise gives us a sense of what we have accomplished,” noted one participant. “Also, being with schools across the country really points out that we all share or are wrestling with a lot of similar problems.”
Having time to reflect on one’s work was also time well spent. “Reflecting back was a wonderful way of looking forward,” another participant said. “I had forgotten many things and was at the wall. Now I’ve gotten around it and am ready to move forward again. Milburn School, watch out!”
Participants also were eager to share information with a wider audience. “Spend some time letting states and schools intermingle and discuss what is working or not working for them,” said one. In other words, share ideas.
Through a series of meetings, the collaborative moved toward common work. Staff members from each laboratory continued their work, keeping what they learned from meetings of the collaborative in mind. Experimentation with questions to ask and data collection techniques to use was under way in each participating laboratory. Sharing approaches to studying school restructuring focused increasingly on direct interaction with students. Surveys, interviews, and observations were the most commonly cited approaches to collecting data from students. Direct interaction with and involvement of students was here to stay, and group members continue using ideas and techniques learned from others in the collaborative.
In an April 1993 meeting, the group moved a step closer to broadening regular participation by school practitioners. Collaborative members agreed to invite one or two practitioners from selected schools and districts to participate in a meeting in May. It worked to a limited extent. A student, Dan, two teachers, four district administrators, and a university professor joined regional laboratory staff and shared research questions and methodologies. The group had a serious discussion about bringing student voices into school restructuring efforts.
The collaborative moved a step closer to common work: each organization agreed to use a common set of questions to collect data from students. The questions had a clear focus on students as learners and teachers, and schools as supports for student learning. The questions were:
1. Do you consider yourself a successful learner? In school? Out of school?
2. How do you learn best?
3. What are teachers/schools doing to help you learn?
4. What do you wish teachers/schools were doing to help you learn?
While direct interaction with students had increased, their primary role was as subjects of research. Students provided input through surveys, interviews, and observations. In the May meeting, this began to change. Dan was the first student member of the planning team. He made important contributions and gained from the experience. Having Dan in the room made the adults more aware of students and their potential as partners in the work.
The role of students and practitioners in the work of the collaborative began to broaden. In addition to participation in Restructuring Collaborative meetings, some students became researchers. In two participating schools, they asked the agreed-upon questions and added locally important ones. Students, with support from school and laboratory staff, designed the research, and collected, analyzed, and reported the data. This became a real-life learning experience and helped school and regional laboratory staff understand how to support students as researchers.
Products resulted from both student research efforts. In one district, a videotape describing restructuring efforts included information from the student research effort. At a high school, student researchers presented their findings to the school site council and influenced at least one major decision to move from a traditional six-period day to a block schedule.
The collaborative continued work on a common product: a series of case studies describing the student-focused research efforts.
In December 1993, participants shared their research in detail with each other. Preliminary findings from a study involving 450 middle school students by one regional laboratory showed the following:
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The findings indicate that students have different mindsets about what success means in school and what it will mean in their future lives.
Findings by another laboratory through interviews with more than 400 students across all grade levels were similar to the above findings:
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Two student researchers from a high school reported that student views of success ranged from coming to school, to being motivated, to balancing school and work. They also found that learning depends largely on how well teachers motivate students. In addition, students said they learn best when teachers relate content to their lives through personal stories rather than recite facts, when teachers understand what they are teaching, and when teachers really care.
Students involved in the collaborative found the work rewarding. Maryanne, a student member from Oregon, noted:
“It was very flattering, but at the same time intimidating, to work so intimately with people who did this research as a career, people who had Ph.D.s and years of education under their belt,” she said. “After the San Francisco meeting, I realized that my opinion and results were important to the cause, I wasn’t just the ‘token student’ on a research team.”
At the December 1993 meeting, participants included four high school students, one teacher, six school building administrators, three district administrators, and nine regional laboratory staff members. Six regional laboratories were represented and there was at least one person from each of ten states.
During the December meeting, the group reflected on the benefits of the collaborative:
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The collaborative is bringing all key groups – students, school and district administrators, and laboratory staff -- together for direct exchange about use and benefits of research.
While the tone of the December 1993 meeting was positive, some students did not understand the purpose of asking questions and how the data would be used to improve schools. They indicated that the data needed to plug into school change and teachers needed to hear the results.
“I sometimes felt that our discussions were going in circles with no apparent end goal in sight,” Maryanne said. “We were throwing ideas around, but I didn’t see where we were trying to go, or that any progress was being made to get there.”
This concern was not limited to students, and in part led to two key decisions. The first was that a panel involving a student, a parent, a teacher, school administrators, and laboratory staff would present the work of the collaborative at the 1994 annual conference of the American Educational Research Association. This is in stark contrast to the presentation by the collaborative three years earlier at the same meeting. In 1991, only laboratory staff presented ideas and theories. By contrast, the 1994 presentation panel involved a wide range of stakeholders who provided the results of common work.
The second key decision was for the collaborative to hold the spring 1994 meeting in a school rather than at the offices of a regional laboratory. A Southwest high school agreed to host the meeting. Moving the meeting to a high school set the stage for true collaborative work. We had been using the collaborative to enhance our own work, and we continued to develop trust and confidence in the group. However, until the spring 1994 meeting, each laboratory and the schools they had brought into the collaborative continued to do their own work. At the high school in Texas, the collaborative moved into a new phase. We worked together rather than doing work independently and sharing results.
Early in the morning on the first day of the meeting in the Southwest high school, collaborative members – students, teachers, administrators, and laboratory staff – combined with students and staff from the host school to form the research team. After reviewing the questions, the team broke into groups of two or three and interviewed between one and three students. A few small groups of researchers conducted focus group interviews with up to six students from the school. The full research team reconvened and shared the results of their interviews. Analysis of the interview data was completed by sub-committees and shared with faculty and students from the school. The data collection, analysis, and reporting was completed before the day was over.
Key findings from the research effort included:
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Interview results indicated that students view success differently based on whether it has been achieved inside or outside the school. This finding seems to confirm preliminary findings reported from two research efforts at the December meeting.
Student roles in the work of the collaborative expanded again. Some students were subjects of the research, and some were research team members with school and laboratory staff. One student from outside the host school served as a recorder and reporter for one of the analysis groups.
The collaborative was still learning how to investigate the three areas agreed upon more than two years earlier: 1) what and how students learn, 2) day-to-day learning and teaching practices, and 3) school culture and climate. Most of the effort to this point had focused on talking directly to students and bringing their voices into restructuring processes. The Collaborative expanded its effort to include classroom observations with student interviews.
A high school in Oregon agreed to host the next meeting in the fall of 1994. The collaborative designed a process to observe classrooms, then interview between four and six students. Half of the students were selected because they seemed to be engaged in the classroom experiences; half were selected because they had not seemed to be engaged. A research team similar in composition to the one at the Southwest high school was formed. Sub-teams collected and analyzed data, and reported findings. Some key findings from this research effort were:
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We conducted one more research effort with another new twist. A high school in Arkansas served as host for a research effort that focused on school culture. The first step in this effort was to figure out what cultural elements were important to the school. This was done in an evening meeting conducted the day before the research effort. Focus group interviews with staff and students resulted in seven themes to guide data collection. The next day, the research team, similar in composition to the teams in the previous two efforts, completed data collection, analysis, and reporting. The data collection and analysis focused on looking for evidence of the seven cultural themes and examples of how they play out in daily school life.
The result of this research effort was to find ample evidence of the seven cultural elements in classrooms and in life outside of the classroom in this residential school. The seven cultural elements – giving students and teachers choices, collaboration, problem solving, open-mindedness, reflection and self-assessment, challenging academics, and a family-like atmosphere – described the conditions for students’ successful learning in the school. Beyond documenting the school culture, the discussion at the end of the day focused on new ideas for strengthening these elements and even moving beyond them.
Over the past six years a core group of people have worked to become a learning community, a restructuring collaborative with a focus on students and learning. In the process, individuals from several schools and districts have been involved. We have learned how to bring students, school staff, and laboratory staff together in research efforts. We have learned how to work together with everyone contributing and everyone benefiting. We have developed trust, knowing that people will use the work of the collaborative to enhance their own work, but not claim personal or organizational credit for collaborative work. We have moved beyond competition. We are learning how to learn together.
The remainder of this book presents the fruits of our work. The book is a resource for reform-minded practitioners and others who are interested in bringing students into school restructuring efforts. It presents both the results of our research and many ideas and techniques for schools or collaboratives to use in answering the question, What do our students think? We hope this book helps you include students in your restructuring work and in forging collaboration among educators, parents, researches, and others.
Chapters two through eight present case studies of the individual research efforts conducted by laboratory collaborative members. These chapters portray a wide variety of research methods to elicit the student voice. Many student quotes are included (and occasional teacher quotes) so that the results reflect the words and thoughts of students. Each of these chapters tells a story in itself with sections on:
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Chapters two through five tell the stories of research efforts at individual schools. At Dickinson Elementary School in Chapter 2, students from kindergarten through sixth grade reveal what they think about learning in this re-cultured school. The students provide confirmation to the faculty that sought-after cultural changes to create a caring, learning-centered school are indeed taking place. Royal High School (Chapter 3) tells the story of students taking charge of the research effort as they interview their peers and provide a critique of the school’s current approach to teaching and learning. The most interesting finding here is that virtually every student interviewed felt that they learn better outside of school than inside. Similar findings come from another high school in the Southwest (Chapter 4), but this time with the research conducted in a single day by the Restructuring Collaborative working with a school research team. This case demonstrates the importance of caring and positive relationships as a pre-condition for learning. Chapter 5 demonstrates various approaches to eliciting student views and how these methods evolved in an Eastern middle school. The case presents some surprising findings about how students learn best, and how they think quite differently about success in school and success in life.
Chapters six through eight present case studies of larger entities than single schools. Research across a diverse network of reforming K-12 schools in California is presented in Chapter 6. Interestingly, there are a number of common themes that cut across these various schools. The chapter also discusses research issues related to bilingual students. Chapter 7 presents the work of another type of network -- a group of reform-minded teachers who collaborate with laboratory researchers to include the student voice in school restructuring. The chapter demonstrates how to involve teachers so that eliciting student views becomes a natural part of classroom assessment. A statewide perspective is presented in Chapter 8 in which students answer questions about Kentucky state reforms and how these reforms affect them as learners. Here, students show they have mixed feelings towards popular reforms such as portfolios and performance assessments.
The seven case studies are the core of the book. In the interest of synthesizing these diverse efforts, Chapter 9 provides a discussion of common themes and learnings across the case studies. We divide what we have learned into some broad conclusions about the student data, and observations and lessons about conducting this kind of research on students from kindergarten through high school.
We end in Chapter 10 with a “how to” for school staffs who would like to conduct this kind of research on their own, but who face limited resources and time. The chapter presents different variations on a technique that the collaborative has used in three high schools across the country. The technique takes between a day and a day-and-a-half and can be designed as a professional development activity to begin the process of including the student voice.
A list of author names and contact information is presented in Appendix D.