Student Voice | Scott Cairney | TEDxYouth@OSC
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-8xdt-IfRE Video ID: y-8xdt-IfRE ============================================================ I don't know if I can live up to that intro but I'll do my best oh that went one side too far there we go that's the correct one Pokemon Expert probably not the topic you were thinking I was going to talk about but when I was young I was really into Pokemon I love playing the game boy game the card game watching the show and uh annoying my family with my talk of Pokemon which they humored Me by uh pretending they cared after a while I'd like to think of myself as a Pokemon Expert I used to go to tournaments to play the card game and everything um basically knew everything there was to know about it but eventually as things happen life got in the way I grew up I started playing Yu-Gi-Oh instead um and then eventually went off to University and then had children of my own fast forward to now and I have kids that love Pokemon I promise you I didn't influence them much um and we got our first Pokemon game it's a brand new one so much fun playing and we first started off I started talking to my kids about okay it's not enough to just to collect cute little Pokemon you have to think about what kind of Pokemon you know you want how to do team composition battles how to explore use items all these things myself as a Pokemon Expert I became the teacher to my own children as I played through my own profile though something else happened as I would go around this new generation of Pokemon some of them I recognized most I did not were my children next to me shouting out oh that's this Pokemon oh it's this type oh that's the evolution of this one and I had no idea whatsoever my student my children were allowed to speak and not only that but I learned so much from them about something that I was an expert of which brings me to my topic student voice and what that looks like and what that means so for student voice it comes from the concept of Divergent thinking Divergent thinking is when when you want to generate a lot of very good ideas you generate a lot of ideas the best way to do that is to have a lot of different perspectives you can have 10 people in a room and have each one generate 10 ideas you would think to yourself okay then we have a hundred ideas but the problem is if those 10 people all think really similar and come from similar backgrounds and similar experiences those ideas are very likely to be similar but if they come from vastly different backgrounds and they come from multiple experiences then those you might actually get a hundred ideas from 10 people giving you 10 ideas so what does that look like in the context of a school we are on its surface a company that provides a service which is education to students we like to recruit teachers that come from different points of view different walks of life different experiences because we do in fact value Divergent thinking but one of the problems with this is that we don't actually talk that much with one of our largest stakeholders which is our students we come up with things such as student government or ASAS and we say see voice done but what do we do with that and how much do they actually have our ears or are they just therefore the sake of reasoning so what could that look like in a school setting students having voice in curriculum planning this might seem like a crazy concept but it's really not I'm fortunate enough to be an 11th grade advisor so I see 11th graders every morning and I have lessons with them but I also get to teach those same 11th graders some classes recently I was stuck I wasn't sure how to approach the topic of Ethics typically a very easy topic to teach and so I posed it to my 11th graders how would you like to learn ethics how do you feel best as far as learning something like this and after a back and forth conversation that took about 20 or 30 minutes we finished the class and I had a lesson about ethics from talking to my students about it now I understand that this is not practical for every single lesson but one of the big key takeaways from this was that my lesson got better and I know it's definitely a better lesson what I had in mind by simply asking the students how do you want to do this so the topic didn't change just the approach to it another one is about student decisions making we have a student government most schools do we say you are the leaders of the school as most schools do but then when we have a leadership meeting where is the student government when all the heads of grades and all of the heads of departments and the heads of the school meet where is the school student government are they the leaders making them part of decisions making them part of those meetings that decisions get made is part of student voice allowing them to have say in policies in a few times we have is the reason why we have slightly later times in which we start this is the reason why we have a new bell schedule coming up but in actuality it really should be something to where you treat them as if they are in fact what you tell them they are leaders another one is in the hiring practice as mentioned before we do try to hire teachers that come from different backgrounds but again we're not using the most important voice in the process these students are who those teachers are going to teach they should have a say in that not only should they have a say in that but the most important aspect of teaching the one single thing every teacher can agree on that leads to positive educational outcomes is relationships imagine the relationships the students would have with that teacher knowing that they had a say in that teacher being there imagine the relationship the teacher will have with the students from day one by being like wow you wanted me to be here these voices can be hugely powerful in order to transform schools by simply asking the people that are in it Hewlett-Packard once said if only we knew what we know we would be great and the same goes for schools but you'll never know what you know until you ask and so another way of asking is through student surveys and most schools will do this but then what do you do with the surveys most of the time we look at them and we go well that's good to know we might make one or two surface adjustments okay we'll definitely serve more kinds of pizza in the Cantina now but how often do we actually look at that and then respond in kind how often do we go back to the students and say you know what you all said this to us we listened and so now we need a second round of this which is we want to make that change you're talking about how do we do it what are your thoughts about how we approach that we use these conversations to push things forward but this is not an easy concept if it was everyone would do it there's a lot of difficulties Divergent thinking has always come with tension always come with tension because people don't think like you therefore instantly you will have arguments perspectives on how things should get done another thing is as a person who's trying to promote this you have to be open to hearing the voices it is not enough to put a student in a meeting how much are you listening to what they're saying how much are you internalizing that that is a huge part of student voice as well it's not enough to just have a platform it's whether or not you are truly listening to what they have to say much like when I play Pokemon I have never asked my kids to stop talking I have always listened to what they had to say even now that they're getting much better at it I talk to them about how I compose my team what Pokemon I like and sometimes my irrational decisions of just having one in my team simply because I really like it so what does this mean as far as the decision-making process in a school now I'm not saying that you bring in the student council I'm not saying you bring in students and then they say okay we really like this and then you go well okay student voice then that's what we'll do now at the end of the day the decision making is still for the person who is most responsible for the outcomes of the decision if it is policy changes it still will come from the principles if it's classroom changes it'll still come from the teachers because they're the ones who ultimately have to live with the outcomes of that but what I'm referring to is simply changing your knowledge growing your knowledge allowing yourself to be open to the fact that although you are an expert no expert knows everything and no person knows nothing and sometimes the parts that you miss are the parts that they know much like my profile is still my profile but sometimes I miss things so what does this look like overall well we talked about not only is this a growth for the schools it allows us to grow in a very positive way by thinking of the students exactly who they are stakeholders in a company a company that they want to get better they want it to progress and so it helps the students grow by giving a whole new perspective to the school moving forward in all kinds of things that directly affect the students but also it helps the students grow by letting them know that we hear them by letting them know that their ideas matter and that they are valid and so moving forward I challenge everyone and I not just schools I challenge parents I challenge administrators and other companies take the time to listen they're not always going to provide the transformative information that will make your Pokemon team complete but often they can provide information that you never thought about and those little changes over time that can create big changes thank you [Applause]