LISTENING TO STUDENTS TALK ABOUT THEIR SCHOOLS

It’s the Path Toward Genuine School Improvement

Schools across the country are vastly different—they’re large and small, public and private, in cities and towns, and serve children of different ages and backgrounds. Yet when I ask students to tell me about their schools—as I’ve done in my travels around the country speaking about my new book,¹ they tend to talk about the same things.

Students’ take on these issues differs widely, but these three seem to matter most.

Issue 1: Students tell me how others in their school make them feel.

Their words bring Maya Angelou’s wisdom to life:

I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

These students aren’t waiting for years to remember how the people in their schools make them feel. They know how others make them feel. They know now.

In education, we tend to debate issues of pedagogy like curriculum, sometimes masking the fact that learning begins and ends with people!

It’s not just the teachers—it’s everyone in the school.

“We ARE a community,” a high school student in one of the schools said “It’s the kids, it’s the teachers, the coaches, the people in the cafeteria, everyone I pass by during my day. There are real bonds between us.”

I could see that when I was given a tour of the school by an administrator. She connected with everyone we passed, with a smile, a hello, a “How was that test you were worried about?”

Another student from the same school said that he likes being around the people at school and sometimes he even forgets it’s school. He can’t wait to see them every day.

Really! He said that.

Descriptions call out how welcoming or excluding the school culture is.

Students talk “belonging” first off, almost as soon as I ask them to tell me about their schools. They talk about teachers-student relationships and friendship groups; they talk about how open and closed these relationships are—whether there’s acceptance, favoritism, or rejection.

In education, we tend to talk about belonging as the province of those who are excluded, but that’s not the way the students feel it. Belonging affects everyone, even those who are seen as belonging the most.

A high school senior who was selected to talk with me because he’s a school leader described the groups in his school as closed bubbles. He told me he doesn’t feel safe leaving his bubble. When he looks inside he sees kids just like him (high achievers); when he looks outside, he sees people he’ll never get to know but would like to. He can’t wait to go to college so he can hang out with people who are different.

In contrast, a high school senior in another school says she has best friends, but she feels welcome in lots of different groups.

A culture of belonging is reflected in how school-wide decisions are made. In fact, handling phones in schools seems like a litmus test to kids. In two of the schools I visited, phones were barred from classrooms and the student in both schools agreed with that decision.

In one school, however, the school administrators had made the decision with no student input and the students felt demeaned. “They see us as shallow and detached,” one student told me. “We have more experience than they have with phones,” she continued. “It’s not that I disagree with the policy, but it would work a lot better if we’d been asked.”

In another school, students were surveyed and helped create the policy. They ended up with the same policy—no phones in classrooms, but here the policy felt completely different. The students felt respected and were going to ensure the policy worked rather than try to undermine it.

Relationships come first because they are the foundation on which learning is built. Not surprisingly, the next topic students talk about is learning.

Message 2: Students tell me how learning is seen.

In speaking about learning (not teaching), I hear about whether school is boring or interesting, but there’s something more. The stories I hear center on how mistakes are viewed—are they to be hidden or openly encouraged and embraced?

In education, we have slogans about mistakes (“mistakes show you are trying,” etc.), but the students I talk with look beyond these sayings to see how others react in real-time when mistakes happen.

One student told me that he’d learned to become comfortable with being uncomfortable. That’s because his teachers push everyone beyond their comfort zone. In his school, students aren’t viewed as smart or dumb, as they are in so many schools. This student said that when everyone is pushed, everyone makes mistakes. He’d realized, “I don’t need to be perfect because,” he stated, “who is?”

He went on to say that without this pressure, “I don’t think I would have learned how to adapt.”

At another school, students said that making mistakes shows whether teachers trust students to learn. At her school, she doesn’t feel trusted.

Message 3: Students tell me whether they feel the learning prepares them for life beyond school.

Young people, especially the older they get, know they’re eventually going to move farther away from home, family, community and they want to be ready. But students define readiness differently than educators, who are likely to see “ready” as having mastered the right knowledge to move on.

Students seem to see ready as having the right skills to master life when the going gets rough.

After I spoke with a group of students at one school, a small group lingered and asked if they could speak with me privately. They said that they were supposed to be leaders in their school but they didn’t know how.

One described an incident when they (the elected officers of their class) had an idea and raised it with their advisor in the hall as she was going from one class to another. From the advisor’s point of view, it probably felt like an ill-conceived, last-minute idea and she told them so.

They were less upset that their idea was rejected than they were with not knowing how to come up with ideas that might work and how to present these ideas in ways that could be heard by adults. That’s what they want to learn.

“We’re called leaders,” one of the students said, “but we’re not really leaders. We’re not learning how to be leaders.”

At a different school, students told me they felt prepared for the future because their class officers from higher grades shared how they contributed to solving school-wide problems in assemblies. There’s was an open-book in decision-making. “Since I was a freshman,” this student said, “I’ve heard these students talk about how they manage tough issues and I feel prepared.”

Kids need real skills for real life!

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In the research I’ve done with the business community, I’ve seen repeatedly that the most effective efforts to improve workplace environments begin by listening to employees and respecting what they have to say. It doesn’t mean all ideas are implemented; it does mean that a lot of creative thinking comes to the fore and as a result, employees have more buy-in. The same is true in education.

Listening to students talk about their schools is a step toward school improvement.

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I'm so grateful you're reading Research to Thrive By on Substack! My book, The Breakthrough Years is available for purchase here.

1. When I’m invited to speak at schools, I ask to speak with students first. Some schools convene whole assemblies, while others select leaders for a conversation. Sometimes I ask students to respond on index cards first before a discussion, sometimes we jump right into a discussion. The question I ask is: ”If I were visiting your school from another place—another country—what should I know about your school?” Open-ended questions, get the most thoughtful responses. After I speak with students, I share insights with parents and teachers.