Pakuranga College (TLIF 2-056) - Student response systems as a tool for engaging student voice Publications
Publication Details
Project Reference: Pakuranga College (TLIF 2-056): This project emerged from both research and practice. The former suggests that meaningfully engaging with the voices of students is desirable, worthwhile and effective. Students often know things that adults do not know. However, we often don’t hear students’ voices, and in particular, we don’t hear those of marginalised students, including Māori and Pacific students. Consequently, we don’t have a full picture of what is happening in our classrooms and schools.
Author(s): (Inquiry Team) Martyn Davison and Alison Taylor
Date Published: February 2019
Overview
Professional learning at Pakuranga College is largely driven by teacher inquiry. The school’s senior leadership team was seeking to stretch that professional learning by introducing teachers to effective modes of engaging with student voice that cast students as informants and co-inquirers.
I felt that doing it digitally, I could voice my opinion openly and that face-to-face, I would be scared to say my true opinions, in case they were shocked by what I had to say. So, I felt that I could voice my opinions and not feel victimised if they [the teacher] had done something wrong.
Rose, senior student
We did some learning before we did an internal [assessment] and she [Rohan’s English teacher] did a [Gosoapbox] poll on that, based on how helpful that learning was and whether we needed to do that again. Doing that, we did some more learning on that internal, as we didn’t really understand it. We did that again and we did much better the second time.
Rohan, senior student
Bringing these strands together, this project was based on the belief that student voice has the potential to test teacher assumptions and offer insights that help to modify teacher practice. The project team was particularly interested in how student voice might be used to challenge the tendency to assume students are a homogenous group. By revealing the heterogeneity of the school community, the team hoped to help teachers identify and respond to the individual voices of Māori and Pacific young people.
The project demonstrates that engaging with student voices has the potential to improve teacher practice, strengthen learning relationships and engender student agency. This potential is realised when teachers integrate student voice with practice, use different methods to elicit feedback, and signal to students that they have heard their feedback.
The inquiry story
The project involved eleven teachers who teach across a range of disciplines and who carry some responsibility for the school’s professional learning programme. Each teacher invited the students in one of their classes to participate. Consequently, approximately 300 students took part, ranging across all year levels. The ethnicity of the students was: European: 52%, Māori: 3%, Asian: 24%, Pacific peoples: 4%, Middle Eastern/Latin American/African (MELAA): 5% and Other: 12%.
What was the focus?
This project explored how teachers could use student voice to inform their understanding of and decisions about teaching and learning. In particular, it focused on using a digital student response system called Gosoapbox to provide a safe channel for genuine feedback, in real-time, between the teacher and those students who may feel marginalised because their voice is not being heard. The project’s central question for inquiry was, “What is the impact of student response systems, principally Gosoapbox, as a tool for engaging student voice?”
The project team hoped to achieve four outcomes:
- Teachers, in responding to student voices, will adapt and improve their practice.
- Students will have an improved experience of teaching and learning and a greater sense of agency.
- Students will feel that they have improved relationships with teachers and other students.
- Engaging with student voices will help to explore the school community’s heterogeneity and to hear the voices of Māori and Pacific students.
What did the teachers try?
The teachers used a digital student response system to gather feedback from students in the eleven participating classes about the teaching and learning that was taking place over three terms. These digital systems were either Gosoapbox or Google classroom, forms, or docs. The school has a ‘bring your own’ device policy so most students used their own device to access the digital student response system. Where students did not have a device, one was made available for them to use.
The experiences of the participating teachers and students was monitored through analysis of written logs maintained by the teachers, student surveys, and interviews and focus groups with teachers and students. Analysis of the logs and survey data was conducted using Qualtric survey software.
Despite the project’s focus on digital student response systems, many teachers also used paper-based and verbal tools to engage with student voices in line with their aims and the context. They experimented with different ways of asking questions to get the information they needed, discovering, for example, that sometimes an open question can be too demanding for students and they need the scaffold of a multiple-choice question. When using Gosoapbox, teachers selected the following means of eliciting student feedback:
- written comment in response to a question (40 percent)
- multiple choice (18 percent)
- rating scales (9 percent)
- a response to a scenario (7 percent)
- a dichotomous Yes/No response (7 percent)
- forced choice, where you pick one option from a list (5 percent)
- confusion barometer (3 percent)
- other kinds of ratings (11 percent).
What happened as a result of this innovation?
Intended Outcome 1. Teachers, in responding to student voices, will adapt and improve their practice
Eighty percent of teachers reported that the student voice they examined did have an impact on them, and 76 percent said that they would consider changing their practice in the future. However:
- only 60 percent of teachers said that student voice had led to them making an actual change in their practice;
- only 49 percent said that their assumptions about teaching and learning had been challenged by the voices of students; and
- only just over half of the teachers said that student voice had alerted them to a diversity of viewpoints within the class or revealed something surprising.
When teachers did adapt and improve their practice, it was often linked to a greater awareness of individual student needs. One of these teachers had experienced some quite challenging feedback which had raised awareness of the diversity of student needs and prompted a more deliberate stance towards knowing their impact. This teacher could talk about what the students had said and had lots of ideas about ‘what to do next’ as a result, such as checking the clarity of her instructions. Her inquiry stance seemed to make this teacher particularly open to being adaptive.
Intended Outcome 2. Students will have an improved experience of teaching and learning and a greater sense of agency
The survey results suggest that teaching and learning is an overwhelmingly positive experience at Pakuranga College and that teachers regularly ask students for their perceptions of teaching and learning. Some students could identify that their teacher had been responsive to students’ voices and changed their practice. These changes were invariably seen as an improvement. However, other students were less certain about what the teacher had changed and whether their experience of teaching and learning had improved. The difference was related to whether the teacher had explicitly signalled what they had heard from students and explained their response.
Teachers and students were interested in different things. Teachers highlighted that they regularly asked about: student understanding; the focus of the learning; learning activities; what students enjoyed; levels of confidence; student successes; and what could be done differently to help students. Students agreed, but between a quarter and one-third felt that they were not regularly asked about other areas that were important to them, such as what they enjoyed, preferred topics and contexts for learning, their goals, and their sense of confidence. This is significant because these areas are closely aligned to student agency and to the affective domain. The latter contrasts with the teachers’ greater focus on the cognitive domain.
Outcome 3. Students will feel that they have improved relationships with teachers and other students
Students and teachers said the student response systems enhanced communication and relationship-building. Students talked about: their sense of safety when giving feedback using these systems; the systems’ ease of use and timeliness; and how they generated learning conversations with both the teacher and other students. However, about a quarter of the students disagreed with the statement, “Teachers at this school really listen to students.” This suggests that the practice of listening to all students is something that could be further improved.
Outcome 4. Engaging with student voices will help to explore the school community’s heterogeneity and to hear the voices of Māori and Pacific students
Māori students were more likely than others to see teachers as caring and having high expectations, but they also perceived teachers as not being easy to talk to. They observed that while they were regularly asked about the cognitive dimensions of learning such as ‘their understanding’ or ‘what they were finding difficult’ they were not regularly asked about its affective dimensions, including their feelings or goals.
Pacific student responses were very similar to ‘all’ students, except for a strong perception that their teachers were always ready to help and a desire for their teachers to ask them more regularly about the usefulness of classroom resources.
Challenges
There were times when teachers and students felt that things were not going particularly well. This was typically when: very few students in a class were providing feedback; teachers felt under time-pressure to share their learning; students could not see any change in teaching and/or were not asked about what was important to them; and, teachers felt anxious about what students were saying.
What did they learn?
Overall, the project team learned that engaging with student voices is meaningful when teachers are responsive to student feedback and deliberately signal this to students, use different modes to collect information, and perceive student voices as integral to practice and not separate from it; and when students talk with teachers about what is being done and feel heard. They learned the following specific lessons:
- Teacher and student perceptions about what is important in teaching and learning can differ, and student response systems can help us understand this.
- There would be value in teachers and students interacting more around the affective dimension of learning, such as what’s enjoyable, what might make you less or more confident, and how you feel about the learning.
- The adoption of digital response systems does not mean that teachers abandon non-digital tools and systems. Paper-based and verbal tools continue to have a place.
- Teachers at Pakuranga College could be more mindful of engaging Māori students in those affective elements and reflect on how they might become easier to talk to. They could offer more opportunities for Pacific students to share their views regarding resources.
- When barriers and challenges are understood, they can be addressed. For example, the team found that few teachers had shared their learning with colleagues in any depth. This reminded them of the importance of providing teachers with safe contexts for such interaction. The project leaders surmise that sharing the findings offers a way to continue the school’s bigger conversation about the use of student voice to inform teacher practice.
Inquiry team
This project had two project leaders: Martyn Davison and Alison Taylor. The rest of the team consisted of Dave Corner, Natalie de Roo, Maree Hoeberigs, Kylie Kilmartin, Lisa Merchant, Ellysa Mulcahy, Philippa Mulqueen, Vicki Squibbs, Dayna Stirling and Mike Williamson.
Claire Sinnema (University of Auckland) provided external support.
For further information
If you would like to learn more about this project, please contact Martyn Davison at dav@pakuranga.school.nz You can also find videos and links to related articles on the Educational Leaders website.
Reference list
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