Student Voices

 

Release Form Post

Students as Co-inquirers: Thoughts from a Former Student

Choosing Your Teams:

Pick your team for a mix of skills. As we have said elsewhere, we think it is beyond crucial that at least one member of your student team have tech skills—esp. video editing—as well as general tech savvy.

The kinds of work skills you will want to look for in your student workers are the same you might seek in any job that involves working in teams. You will expect your student workers to: take responsibility, take initiative, show some maturity, keep drama to a minimum, etc.

What you might look for in student workers in terms of what they will bring to the Inquiry: we all have had the experience of having a student in our class that we think would make a great teacher, and we may have even told her so. That kind of student is what you are looking for here. They have “court vision”—to use a basketball metaphor–about the goings-on in a classroom—in other words, they have an awareness that is broader than simply their own place and actions in the class. They often offer insights about fellow students in the class. They are often the main person keeping a group activity moving in the right direction. They have insights about education and may see the big picture culturally and socially in regards to where education fits. They seem empathetic. Don’t despair about finding this kind of student; they aren’t that rare. After all, you yourself were just such a student!

Build For Success:

Getting a student team rolling is a bit like getting a class rolling. You will want to build in early activities that lead to early success. You may want to keep these early activities small, and build in reachable goals.

You should consider facilitating activities that lead to group bonding among the student workers: take them to lunch; have them come up with a group name; create activities that take you out of the center, and that instead have their interaction with each other be at the center of the experience. Their team chemistry is vital, but just as in a classroom, you are ultimately in charge. That is to say, you reserve the right to put out any fires that may arise around student worker tensions, gossip, etc.

Training:

There are a number of different ways your student workers can be brought up to speed about the Inquiry:

  1. Hands on—where they are working on some issue side by side with you. The “theory” or big picture might not be totally clear to them as they work with you, but the idea here is that through immersion they will begin to understand more deeply.
  2. Stand-alone training—where they get introduced to some important aspect of their work in a more formal training setting. For example, this approach would be appropriate for offering tech training.
  3. Background research—where they are given access to materials, often supplied by you, that offer them some grounding in the issues at hand. We have had success in having students engage with essays, web sites, books, movies that delve into the topics they will be investigating as the Inquiry moves forward.
  4. “Practice” activities—where they engage in the kind of activity and thinking that the Inquiry will require of them, but they do so under conditions where the stakes aren’t so high, and where the task at hand can be done under a short time frame.
  5. They can train each other—let’s say one of your students has a skill that the others will need; that student can be put in charge of getting the others up to speed. They will often do this quite naturally, but it never hurts for you to facilitate this.

It Is A Bit Like Running A Business:

Although you are in an academic setting, you may feel that working with a student team is a bit like running a small business. You will be scheduling them, dealing with their time cards, facilitating training, helping them prioritize projects, etc.

Personnel issues may arise: tardiness, unprofessionalism, lack of initiative, etc. And you may feel like you are a manager in dealing with such issues. How you handle all this will be a function of your interpersonal style, your school’s culture, and the guidelines you establish for the student workers.

Don’t Be Afraid To Turn Them Loose:

On the one hand you may feel a real need to keep close reins on their work, but on the other hand, part of the real power of using student workers is that if you give them some freedom, they may surprise you with their creativity and initiative. (Again it’s a lot like a classroom in which the teacher tries to strike a balance between keeping control and offering freedom.)

Sometimes they will suggest something that on the face of it seems silly or off-target or not workable etc…resist the urge to squash it too soon… they sometimes come up with something great. Sometimes, their idea ends up half-baked or they can’t deliver at the execution level. This is where you may pick up the pieces and finish it for them. This is not a bad thing, for they have got the ball rolling in a direction you might never have considered and now—with your greater experience and vision of the bigger picture of the Inquiry—you can finish the job.

Of course sometimes they won’t have an answer or any insight, and they just sit there seemingly stupefied, like can happen in the classroom. If this happens, you may decide to simply move on to something else, realizing they aren’t yet able to help with this particular moment. (Don’t be surprised if a week later they offer a cool insight; they have had time to think about it, and also, we have seen that they begin to develop a pride in what they bring to the proceedings and they don’t want to let you down.)

The Value Of Student Worker Teams:

There are a lot of good reasons to invite student workers into your Inquiry work; some are pretty obvious, but they all bear repeating.

  1. They know things you may not know—or not remember!—about being a student, about the complex worlds they navigate, about how education is perceived by their peers.
  2. They offer a fresh perspective about these age-old issues around education, and because they are not jaded, they can make the process more fun.
  3. They can be enlisted to do things that might take you forever to get done, that are crucial to the Inquiry, but which you might put off for a long time.
  4. Politically—if that is the right word–they can be a very important face of the Inquiry on campus. As they become more comfortable with themselves and with the Inquiry, they may share the stage with you as you move your work out into larger arenas—on campus, at conferences, etc.
  5. Finally, the greatest value of having student worker teams may be in what if offers to the students themselves. They get to spend two years working closely with faculty in a relationship that if not reaching full collegiality, feels a lot like the relationship of graduate student and professor. They get a behind-the-scenes look at the work teachers do. For those among your student workers who are considering becoming teachers, doing this work can offer an invaluable first introduction. Working on Faculty Inquiry project is a great resume builder, and it also offers the student worker a chance to grow in many different ways.

There are many ways to capture Student Voices. We hope the list below offers some starting points for you and your team. We will add to this list as we begin to hear other ideas from FIN teams.

  1. Faculty interviews student .
  2. Student interviews student.
  3. Student interviews herself—self-reflection.
  4. Roundtable—group of students discuss issues put before them.
  5. Think-alouds. Student is filmed as she works through a problem taken from her class, all the while talking about why she is making the choices she is making. With this strategy, the student’s meta-cognitive state is revealed.
  6. Collaborative problem solving. Similar to Think-alouds, but with more than one student engaged in the task.
  7. Students of course can be filmed in the class setting, working in groups, responding to the instructor, etc. With this strategy you may run into issues around getting good sound. One tip is to, whenever possible, get the camera in close to whomever is speaking.
  8. Of course, any time you ask students in a class setting to generate content that you can later analyze as part of your Inquiry, you are uncovering Student Voices. For example, having students do in-take self-assessments, or written self-reflections, or classroom assessments, etc.–all of these tools reveal Student Voices.

Student Voices — as objects of Inquiry

Types of interviews:

  1. One-on-one.
  2. Duo interviews, in which 2 students are on camera.
  3. Group interviews.
  4. “Man in the Street” –actually should be called “Student in the Street” interviews. Students are esp. good at conducting these. These kinds of “quick hitting” interviews can actually serve as good starting points for Inquiry. They of course can tend to be anecdotal in nature, and may not deliver hard data, but they do sometimes uncover areas of interest that Inquirers may not have considered.

Student Voices—as Co-Inquirers

For many faculty, engaging student voices as objects of Inquiry may seem rather obvious. After all, if we want to know what our students are thinking about their education, it would make sense to ask them. What may seem less obvious, however, is the idea that students have a role to play as Co-Inquirers.

There are many ways to integrate students as Co-Inquirers in your team’s Inquiry. We hope the list below offers some starting points for you and your team. We will add to this list as we begin to hear other ideas from FIN teams. The ideas below pre-suppose that you have a student team with whom you are working, but keep in mind that for some of these strategies you can engage students in a more ad hoc way. For example, “e” below works very well with students in any class you may be teaching.

  1. Student interviews Student.
  2. Student interviews Faculty, Counselors, Administrative personnel, etc.
  3. Students administer assessments; collect data; conduct research; read relevant literature about your Inquiry.
  4. Students take part in your team’s meetings, where their contributions to the evolving Inquiry can be made.
  5. Students help you problem solve, for example, a data dilemma your Inquiry has uncovered.
  6. Students act as admin-assistants. This kind of work is unavoidable as Inquiries evolve, and students take to it well. This will lighten your workload and thus your stress levels!
  7. Students help out—or take the lead—in all phases of Making Visible;

February 25, 2009