Student Voice and School Performance

The performance of our students is inherently tied to their capacity to align their values, intentions and actions to the voices that express what they believe to be authentic to themselves. Those who know how to express what they want and how they want to go about turning their purpose into practice through their connection to people, place and planet are those who will be most capable of realising their aspirations.

Performance is key to the success of a school; students, families, teachers and other community members all thrive when learners and programs achieve expected and pleasing results. Great schools understand how to weave in the development of the voices of students to augment their sense of what these results should be. They support their students through:

• Openness, Improvement & Mastery: students need to consciously develop a spirit of open-mindedness and curiosity about the world around and beyond them. 
• Progress, Achievement & Success: students need to recognise the pathways that are right for them and make strong choices to build their level of achievement.

As they learn to create direction for themselves and their own performance through their problem-solving, their natural and normal development on The Pathway to Excellence will see them go on a journey “from me to you to us” that will enable them to do the same for the family and friends, their school, and their community more broadly in a sustainable fashion. 

Great schools help their students dedicate their voices to a reciprocal story of individual achievement within collective performance:

We become motivated to transform the lives of others through the habit of kindness, the instinct to serve, and the will to give. It is our tangible actions that show how “us” transcends “me”.

Ref: www.aschoolfortomorrow.com/the-pathway-to-excellence/lead/service-and-volunteering

So much of the work of developing the performance of our students flows from our own understanding of the centrality of character in the realisation of performance; in order to perform individually and collectively in school, we must lead for this character. One school leader involved in our CIRCLE Global Educational Research Program explains it as follows:

“A leader for character is someone who leads by example. To add, this is someone who exemplifies character traits that include, dignity, integrity, perseverance, and courage. My vision as a leader is to inspire everyone around me to be great and make purposeful and ethically sound decisions. In addition to academics, being able to navigate through life’s adversities in a dignified way demonstrates one’s ability to control his or her destiny.”

source: www.aschoolfortomorrow.com/the-way/lead/character-leadership-in-theory

Expert teachers recognise this intersection between performance and character in their work. They support their students to become solution architects who use creativity to adapt to changing situations and problems, guided by a sense of the right direction for shared progress, achievement and success for their communities. Their practice reveals discernment and focuses on:

• Openness, Improvement & Mastery: teachers enjoy looking at problems or issues with their students from different angles so that they can try to come up with new solutions or answers.
• Progress, Achievement & Success: teachers provide timely, thoughtful and helpful feedback to all students that takes into account their personalities, approaches to learning and progress.

Often referred to as ‘human’ or ‘soft’ skills, the global educational research program of a School for tomorrow has identified six core Employability Skills. Educating for Student Voice is enabled by a deep sense of how character and narrative both influence the results of the problem-solving from which performance is derived both individually and collectively:

I think that there’s so much about one having your own self-awareness about your own story, and who you are, and how you show up in the world. 

Aiko Bethea | Game Changers insight*

In leading for performance** in our schools, we need to balance the needs of yesterday, today and tomorrow as we chart a direction for our school community to take together. While we seek to balance these often competing interests and the voices that represent them, we need to recognise that we cannot stand still; a resolution to preserve the status quo belies the reality that all organisations need to incorporate cycles of renewal into their performance. As Adriano and I argue in our recent book***, we must model the voice of renewal and the role of the solution architect for our students and communities:

Families demand the best possible education for their children. They want this to unlock a lifetime of possibilities and to create pathways to success for them … What is common to all schools … is their capacity to improve.

Ref: Game Changers: Leading Today's Learning for Tomorrow's World (Hawker Brownlow Education 2022) p.115

Let’s go!

Phil

* You can listen to Aiko Bethea’s Game Changers Episode here: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/game-changers/id1503430745?i=1000522984662

** You can learn more about the performance of a school that celebrates student voice here: https://www.aschoolfortomorrow.com/game-changers/work

*** Game Changers: Leading Today’s Learning For Tomorrow’s World is available for purchase here: https://www.hbe.com.au/hb1338.html