Student Voice Shapes School Culture
When thinking about who shapes a school, administrators and teachers often come to mind. However, at Crescent, student perspectives and feedback are encouraged and valued.
Crescent has four student research groups: The Student Participatory Action Research Collaborative (SPARC), Student Strategic Solutions, Challenge Success, and the newly formed Middle School Research Team. These groups gather student feedback about school life, analyze the data, and formulate recommendations, which are shared with the senior administration.
The inaugural Middle School Research Team featured one Grade 7 and five Grade 8 students. The group falls under the purview of the Crescent Centre for Boys’ Education and is overseen by Trish Cislak, Research Consultant, and Dr. Sandra Boyes, Executive Director of Professional Learning and Research. In their first project, they examined whether switching from a traditional paper agenda to a digital format would create a more streamlined schoolwork management process and contribute to better executive functioning skills, such as organization.
The team analyzed the digital platforms used by the school, assessing how they work, how to manipulate the settings to trigger emails and notifications when new assignments were given, and how to ensure they could feed into each student’s Google calendar. “They figured it out,” says Cislak. Then, they built an instructional guide that was given to 15 Middle School student volunteers for testing. The guide explained how students could use Google Calendar to display deadlines and notifications, essentially functioning like a digital agenda. “They've done the work, they have the data to back it up,” says Cislak. “And they've got the kid perspective that the adults in the room want to hear.”
During a focus group at the conclusion of their agenda project, the boys on the team revealed that the research process was empowering and helped them develop their leadership skills. Their findings will be shared with the Middle School administration later this year and could lead to a more robust pilot before determining whether digital agendas will be fully adopted in lieu of the paper version.
