Student Voice: The Instrument of Change

[00:01] SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.

[00:06] Announcer:

Here's your host, director of the Principal Center and champion of high performance instructional leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and my guest today is Dr. Russell Qualia. He is founder and director of the Qualia Institute for Student Aspirations and is one of the world's foremost authorities on the development and achievement of student voice and aspirations. And since at the Principal Center, we are all about developing leadership capacity. I'm particularly thrilled to have Dr. Qualia on the show to talk about students' role in leadership and the role of student voice in school decision-making.

[00:42] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:45] SPEAKER_01:

Dr. Qualia, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:48] SPEAKER_00:

Thanks, Justin. It's great to be here.

[00:49] SPEAKER_01:

So your book is Student Voice, the Instrument of Change, written with your co-author, Michael Corso. And this is really your life's work, isn't it, around developing student voice?

[00:59] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, it really is, between student voice and aspirations. In some ways, the book was a great milestone to have, and then in other ways, I look at it and I'm like, wow, my entire life has just been put in 200 pages. So yes, I think it is certainly a compile of all my work with the hope that there's a lot more work to come.

[01:17] SPEAKER_01:

Right, and there's a lot in there. So I wonder if maybe you could just give us kind of an overview of those two main topics, student aspirations and student voice, and then we'll dive in a little bit more from there.

[01:29] SPEAKER_02:

Sure. I think the basic premise of the book is really this two driving forces that drove both Mickey and I to write the book. And the first one is that all students have something to teach us. And that's not an accepted belief yet, but that certainly drives the work that we do at the Institute and certainly what is kind of the impetus behind the book. And the second component that really drove us is that students have the potential. They're not the problem.

[01:54]

I was so tired hearing 30-plus years ago about how we're always trying to fix students because it's a problem and da-da-da. And I don't know. I fell into that trap too, I guess, for a while. And then I just realized after talking to students, like, you know what? They're not the problem. They're our potential.

[02:10]

And the more work I do with schools and literally travel the world talking to people about the importance of student voice and aspirations, I've come to the realization that students, they not only have something to teach us, but they're our greatest resource. I tell kids all the time, there are way more of you than us. If something's not working in school, take some responsibility for it. And so the whole book is driven by the fact that students are our greatest resource. And I think We ended up with a title, The Instrument of Change, because I believe their voice is one sure way to get change happening in schools, as long as teachers, administrators, and for that matter, even the community are willing to listen.

[02:49] SPEAKER_01:

And what are some of the things that students tend to say? I know you have a lot of statistics in the book, and those statistics are not meant to substitute for listening to your own students. But when we take the time to listen, what do you find are some of the patterns in what students have to say to teachers about their experience and to administrators about their their experience in school and what they need.

[03:10] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I think there's really three things that emerge. And you're right, there's lots of data in there. But thematically, two things emerge. I mean, a few things emerge. One is that students want us to know, as teachers and administrators, that they matter. So it's like I matter.

[03:28]

I want to be myself. I want to feel like I belong, which means I can feel like I'm part of the community, but I can also be myself. So I'm not stripping someone of their individuality. They're telling us they want to have heroes in their lives, someone that they can look up to, someone that they can turn to when things are going not so well. But they also, interestingly enough, want somebody there when things are going great so they can share that with somebody. They're telling us about their sense of accomplishment needs to move beyond A's, like recognize me for citizenship.

[04:02]

We talk about it, but I'm not being recognized for that, or perseverance and effort. We make a big pedoodle around how important those things are, yet we really don't assess them. And I don't mean assess them with a number, but value them, I guess, is a better word. They tell us that they're bored. They tell us that they don't think teachers care about them. And, you know, when I say they, I'm talking half the student population.

[04:25]

We're missing half the kids. Interestingly enough, half the kids that say they're proud of the school are the same half students that say, my teacher cares about me. They're the same students that say, my teacher knows my hopes and dreams. So there is a real pattern in there that we're connecting on about 50% of the kids, and we're not connecting with the other half. What I find fascinating, Justin, about the data is when I share it with people, they're not at all amazed by it. When I tell them that 52% of the kids in this country are bored in school, they're like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[05:00]

And I'm saying to myself, how can that possibly be acceptable to anybody? When I tell people that the longer students are in school, the less they know why they're there. And the response is, oh, yeah, of course. And I'm like, seriously, that shouldn't be, oh, yes, of course. That should be, holy crap, that's horrible. How are we going to change it?

[05:18]

And so we see sixth graders being much more satisfied with their education than 12th graders. We see two data points that really cut me to the core. One is half the students in our country don't think we care if they show up. So, for example, the question we ask is, does your teacher care if you're absent from school? Half the kids say no. Now, I am the biggest teacher advocate on the planet out there, so this isn't a testimonial about the problem of teaching.

[05:49]

This is a fact that we need to take time and let these kids know that they matter to us. But when half the students say they don't even care if I'm there, I don't know why we get in our pants in a bunch worried about AYP and everything else out there when half the kids don't think we care if they even show up. Another two data points that are striking to me, particularly in the work I do around student voice, is that 52% of the kids say teachers are not willing to learn from students. So it's kind of hard when we go into the field telling students, you need to have a voice, you need to express your voice in a meaningful and respectful way, when half of them don't think, why? It doesn't matter. And then 47% of the kids say they have a voice.

[06:30]

And again, that's not surprising. That 47% is the same percentage that say my teacher cares about me. It's the same percentage of kids that are bored in school. So there are some huge connections between the importance of voice and student achievement.

[06:45] SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. And it sounds like that's both on the structural side, you know, the conditions that we're putting in place for students that, you know, that we need to hear them on what they need and, you know, also huge on the motivation side.

[06:57] SPEAKER_02:

Right, and here's the interesting thing too about voice, I think, Justin, that you raised just by that comment. And I totally agree with you. But one of the interesting things when we talk about the importance of student voice to schools, their understanding of that is, I know, well, we give a survey. Or if you're really advanced, you'll have a focus group. And I let people know, no, student voice is way more than a survey. It's way more than a student's opinion.

[07:22]

To me, student voice is being actively engaged in the process of doing something after I voice my opinion. So I could take our student voice survey, and that's fine. There's like a million surveys out there. But, you know, ours is pretty solid. And it's not about just giving that survey. It's what am I going to do with that data?

[07:40]

Am I willing to listen? Am I willing to learn from it? Am I willing to have conversations with students about it? And then once I understand what that data is, then I want to hear student voice about what am I going to do about it? And when I say I'm going to do about it, I'm not talking about the administration. I'm not talking about the teachers.

[07:58]

But I want students to take responsibility for what they're saying. And for that to happen, we need a cultural shift in schools. I believe, and I might be way outspoken on this and maybe somewhat misguided, except I really feel strongly about this. I think our system is built on testing and accountability. I think we need to move toward trust and responsibility. We need to trust that students have something to teach us.

[08:27]

We need to hold them responsible for what they're saying and believe that they can make a difference. Instead, we're constantly testing, we're constantly holding people accountable for things that might not even make sense to them.

[08:38] SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. Very well said. Well, and I think we don't give students enough credit for their ability to figure out what it is that they need to accomplish the purposes that they're there for. And as you said, if they're not even sure why they're there, if they're not even sure what some of those purposes are, we're fighting a completely unnecessary uphill battle to try to get students to show up and do things that they're not invested in in ways that you know, that they're giving us feedback on that, but that we're not listening to. Let's talk a little bit more about the aspiration side, because obviously if we as adults in society have decided that there are things that we want students to do and students are not necessarily all that interested in doing those things, I think maybe that's part of the reason for our kind of cynicism about the lack of engagement that a lot of students have and the level of boredom and the

[09:28]

the lack of commitment. So talk to us a little bit more about aspirations and how can we find out what students' aspirations are and how can we make them more of a focal point in what happens in schools?

[09:40] SPEAKER_02:

Well, there you go. And there would be the book. But let me give you the snapshot of where we are around aspirations. Typically, when we use that word, people think about dreaming. They're asking kids what do they want to be in the future when they grow up and those kinds of questions. To me, that's half of it.

[10:00]

The way we define aspirations, it's having the ability to think and set goals for the future, but it's also being inspired in the present to reach those goals. When Mickey and I were putting the book together, we realized an educational phenomenon is that you cannot be an educational thought leader until you have a quadrant. Yeah. You laugh.

[10:22] SPEAKER_01:

I've got a triangle, so I'm halfway there.

[10:25] SPEAKER_02:

No, you've got to get a quadrant. I've done my research on that. So we decided to develop one. In our quadrant, the axes are doing and dreaming. So if you can think of that, and the audience can think of that in their head, we have doing and dreaming. And if you're low-dreaming...

[10:44]

and you're low doing, you're in this hibernation state. You're not causing trouble, you're just there. We see kids all the time in schools that, again, they show up, they're not bad, they're survivors, but they're in this hibernation state. You could have them in the back of the room with a bag over their head, it just wouldn't matter. Then if you think, if I'm high in dreaming, but I'm low in doing, which I would say a majority of our kids are, they're in the imagination state. For example, these kids are telling us everything we want to hear.

[11:15]

They're telling us about being doctors and lawyers and teachers and carpenters and all those things. And then you start having a conversation about what they're doing. Well, I want to be a teacher, but I don't like to read. I want to be a doctor, but I don't like science class. I want to be a professional athlete, but I don't like to sweat. I mean, I could go on and on and on of countless examples of students that tell us what we want to hear.

[11:37]

And then you ask them, what are they doing to get there? And the answer is nothing. How many kids are telling you they're going to Harvard and Yale, Columbia, yet haven't even pulled out the application yet? So that's the imagination state. Now flip it on the other side. So if I'm high doing and low dream, that means I'm working really hard but don't have any kind of future kind of perspective out there.

[11:56]

We call that the perspiration state. These kids get to school early. They stay late. They work their hearts out. But they're going nowhere. They don't know what they're doing next week, never mind two, three, four years down the road.

[12:10]

And then if you go to the upper quadrant, obviously, where there is a balance between I'm a good dreamer, I want to think about the future and need to set goals, but I know I need help. to do something. Hence, I'm high doing, high dreaming, and that would be the aspirations quadrant. And in that quadrant, we've got kids that have a decent balance between dreaming and doing. Now, I think it's also important when you think of that quadrant that we're not stereotyping anybody that you're typecasting this quadrant for life. I could be in a class and I might be in the imagination state.

[12:43]

I could go into another class and be in hibernation and so on. The point that we want to raise with these quadrants is to let people know that every single day in your classroom, you've got kids in different quadrants, and we need to recognize that.

[12:55] SPEAKER_01:

Well, it's a great model because I think we can all think of times for ourselves as learners when we've been in each of those where maybe we're not clear on what we're doing now or what the purpose is and where it's going and definitely felt that sense of hibernation. or maybe we feel like we're working hard. I think probably a lot of us have felt that way in math, that we're working really hard. Maybe I'm even getting good grades on this, but I don't know where it's leading to. Or maybe I have these aspirations, but I'm kind of in that imagination quadrant. And if we look back on the big successes they come from, from being in that aspiration quadrant.

[13:34]

So do students tell us, do you have in your research, do students tell us what puts them in that aspiration

[13:41] SPEAKER_02:

quadrant yeah we do and so we it's three guiding principles and we call them guiding principles one is this notion of self-worth what puts them in the that quadrant gets them out of imagination and perspiration and hibernation is feeling good about themselves and this isn't about you know sitting in the hallway singing kumbaya this is about an inner belief that i can make a difference so this notion of self-worth i believe i can be successful if i put my mind to it But I need people to believe in me as well. Hence, as I mentioned earlier, the need to belong, the need to have a hero, the need to have any kind of sense of accomplishment. The second guiding principle for us is engagement. Engagement is one of the most overused words in education, I think, right now. Yeah, it's pretty common sense that we want people to be engaged. And when they're engaged, they're going to learn more.

[14:33]

Well, the kids are telling us the exact same thing. They want to know why they're learning what they're learning. They want to see a connection between period one and period two. Those are pretty natural things that we would want as a human being. Kids with inquisitive minds want to know that kind of stuff. So hence, when we look at getting kids engaged, we look at things like making sure that they're curious, they're allowed to be creative, they have a spirit of adventure, they're not afraid to try something and fail.

[15:00]

And Justin, the other piece around spirit of adventure, we don't want them to be afraid to try something and succeed. It's amazing how many kids are afraid of success. We have not made it cool to be successful yet. And the other kind of condition for us in engagement is fun and excitement. We want these kids to have fun and excitement in the classroom. It's not a novel concept to think that when you're having fun and you're excited about something, you're going to want to learn it.

[15:28]

And then the third and final guiding principle for us is having a sense of purpose. And a sense of purpose is moving beyond me but thinking beyond myself. It's not telling you what I want to be when I grow up. It's telling you who I want to become as a person. We find that incredibly important. And interestingly enough, when students have a sense of purpose, when they have a clear direction of where they want to go, when we, and I'm talking teachers, administrators, and even other students, take the time to learn students' hopes and dreams, they're 18 happy.

[16:05]

18 times more likely to be academically motivated to learn. Now, there's a lot of good stuff out there in the field that we can do in education. But if we look at student voice, if we look at concentrating on their aspirations, that's kind of the Holy Grail to me. Yes, it's a different pathway to academic achievement. But when I have a kid that feels that they have a voice, they're seven times more likely to be academically motivated. And when they have a sense of purpose, in other words, understanding who they are and where they're going, they're 18 times more likely to be academically motivated.

[16:37]

So it's not about enhancing the curriculum. It's not about more tests. It's not bringing in high-powered consultants. It's about asking kids what they think and feel. It's paying attention to it and then giving them the responsibility to do something about it.

[16:50] SPEAKER_01:

Well, how do we how do we get started? How do we start to listen and kind of unlearn some of the habits we've developed around, you know, honestly, just just ignoring that, you know, that source of information for ourselves as leaders. So speaking to an audience of school leaders, how do we start to listen more effectively to the students that are in front of us every day?

[17:11] SPEAKER_02:

Well, to your point, it needs to be a way of being. It can't be an event. And right now, Student Voice is an event where the superintendent says, well, you know, I meet with the student council once a year. I'm like, yeah, that's great. I have my teeth cleaned twice a year. What the heck does that mean?

[17:28]

I'm like, no, seriously. I'm like, does that make me a dentist? I'm like, no, this is going to be a natural way of being. But here's the interesting thing. And again, it's to your point. The very first thing I tell schools all the time is the problem that we're having is that common sense has been trumped by common practice.

[17:50]

Because we've never had student voice in schools, it's like, well, we don't. Rather than saying, no, it only makes sense that they're, one, our greatest resource. Two, they have something to teach us. Three, we've been spinning our wheels for umpteen years. Why don't we start listening to what the students value and have to say? So that's number one.

[18:08]

The other thing is, I mean, real specifically, we need to value student voice and their aspirations as much as we do standardized test scores. I don't see that happen in Washington anytime soon, but I can certainly see it happening in local school areas where, boy, student voice and aspirations, yeah, that's really important. Oh, the test scores, they'll go up, but we're going to concentrate on voice and aspirations. How do you do that? I think we need to commit resources, quite frankly, to develop student voice through leadership, training, and preparation. And I'm not talking about teacher professional development at the moment.

[18:42]

I'm talking about student development. I'm not sure students know how to give their voice yet. I'm not convinced they know how to do it in the right way that's respectful and meaningful. So I think kids need to be trained in that. And these aren't high school kids. I'm talking from the little peanuts.

[18:59]

I'm shooting for age three to grade three, kind of working with those kids and kind of taking them right through the system. Then I think we do need professional development for adults. I think there's a great assumption out there that because we work with students, we know exactly how to communicate with them. I think we're really good at telling students things. I don't think we're really good about listening to what students are telling us. And then literally, and I mean literally, have a plan to listen to student voice and incorporate their voice in the decision-making process.

[19:30]

Not to have some kind of like hokey, oh, student voice is important to us. We want lifelong learners. We want them to take responsibility. No, that's cute. I want a plan. I want to know how you're going to integrate student voice into your school.

[19:43]

I want to see kids on your hiring committee. I want to see kids at your curriculum meetings. I want to see kids making rules for other kids when it comes to discipline issues. I want them to be active members of that community. And I believe until that happens, We're going to have this conversation for the next 30 years.

[19:59] SPEAKER_01:

Wow, very well said. And I can think of individual schools that are doing some of those things, but maybe very few that are doing all of them. And I really appreciate your point about the gap between common practice and common sense. So the book is Student Voice, the Instrument of Change by Russell Qualia and Michael Corso. Russ, thank you so much for joining me for Principal Center Radio.

[20:21] SPEAKER_02:

Well, Justin, thank you. And thank you for the opportunity to rant on the radio. I apologize. if I ranted a tad too much, but, but thank you for the opportunity. I tell people all the time, this, this is the kind of thing that can really make a difference. Um, not just for the kids, but for the teachers as well.

[20:37]

And in the whole community. So thank you for the opportunity.

[20:39] SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. Well, and I, I appreciate the rant because anytime we have such a huge gap between, uh, you know, the reality and, and where we need to be, I think we, you know, we need voices like yours pointing us in the, uh, the, the directions that should be obvious, but aren't. So thank you.

[20:55] SPEAKER_00:

And now, Justin Bader on high-performance instructional leadership.

[20:59] SPEAKER_01:

So high performance instructional leaders, what did you take away from my conversation with Dr. Qualia? What really stands out to me is that students are not only partners in the educational process, but they're one of the richest sources of information available to us as instructional leaders. And at the Principal Center, we believe that instructional leadership has a great deal to do with information and decision making. And in the High Performance Instructional Leadership Network, we've been focused on decision making and getting the information that we need from walkthroughs and classroom observations and those sorts of things for a long time. But we're broadening our emphasis on instructional leadership to include students and teachers as instructional leaders.

[21:46]

And two specific ways that I think reflect Dr. Qualia's emphasis on student voice are in decision making and goal setting and strategic planning. So look for more from us in the High Performance Instructional Leadership Network on both of those topics. But I was very intrigued by the quadrant that Dr. Qualia shared in our interview, and we'll post a link to that on the website and he has a short paper on the aspirations profile that quadrant of what we're doing in the present versus what we're doing in the future and those four quadrants being hibernation imagination perspiration and aspiration and of course we want students to be in the aspirational category where they're working toward long-term goals in the present they're they're doing things now that are going to help them achieve their their goals and their aspirations in the future So do check out the book Student Voice, The Instrument of Change.

[22:37]

It is a fantastic resource and a fantastic read full of research and statistics on what our students are longing to tell us. But I would encourage you, don't just look at those statistics. Don't just look at the big picture that's reported in the research. Listen to your own students and look for ways to involve students in decision-making, in goal-setting, and in being instructional leaders in your school. And if you're looking for more resources along those lines, take a look at the High Performance Instructional Leadership Network where we have resources on student goal setting that are aligned with staff goal setting and school level and system level goal setting and strategic planning. And we also have the Deciding In Dialogue Kit that will help you develop a decision-making matrix for your school that includes student voice, not as kind of a one-time event as Dr. Qualia was talking about, but as a way of being, as a practice that's essential and at the core of how we run our schools.

[23:38]

So for more information on the High Performance Instructional Leadership Network, check out principalscenter.com slash leadership.

[23:45] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.