Student voice is your engagement flywheel

Student voice is a hot topic within education right now.

When we speak to schools, we’re increasingly hearing about their initiatives to enhance student voice and put students at the centre of their learning. It feels like we’re finally realising that students aren’t passive receptacles that we should fill with knowledge.

Instead, they’re independently-minded learners who, like all of us, gravitate towards different things. It seems that we’ve figured out that giving them a voice in their learning and school experience leads to greater engagement and ownership. We think this will be one of the most important shifts education can make over the next decade.

But what is student voice? And how do you promote it?

Cura works with schools to help them answer both these questions. In this article, we’ll share what we know about creating classrooms with greater student voice at their core.

What is student voice?

Student voice is an umbrella term which comprises three different elements - student voice (confusingly an element of itself!), student agency, and student ownership. If you’ve got all three, then you’ve got real and compelling student voice.

Student voice isn’t just about having class discussions or inviting students to contribute ideas and opinions. It is about students being able to influence the content and manner of learning within the classroom. It represents a gradual shift away from the industrial, top-down approach to education and instead suggests a more collaborative approach where teachers and students work together to decide how learning should best occur.

Student agency. If student voice is about giving students a say in how they learn, student agency relates to the autonomy and the freedom they have as they learn. Can students drive their learning? Can they make their own choices over how they learn? Or over how their learning is applied? Agency is about giving students more responsibility to own their learning process, but most importantly it is about recognising that there are different ways that their learning can be manifested. Greater student agency gives them the ability to show what they’ve learned in the manner that they choose.

Finally, student ownership is about giving students the power to manage and direct their own learning. It means they hold themselves and each other accountable. They own their self-improvement and map out the steps needed to reach greater heights. When we talk about creating lifelong learners, cultivating this sense of ownership in every student is crucial.

Why is student voice important?

We think student voice is the secret to unlocking true engagement in classrooms. We’ve discussed the work of Phillip Schlechty previous when we’ve spoken about engagement. Using his model for engagement, student voice is one of the ways we can create high-commitment students. And when you have students who are both attentive and committed, you have authentic engagement.

Numerous studies have shown that the single best way to get students committed to their learning is to give them a greater say in it. Students show more commitment to a task when they had input into the task’s nature or parameters and when they have the agency to decide how that task should be completed. They’ll be more committed to producing a better result when they are the ones who own their learning and have set their own learning goals. And if they’re responsible for helping set assessment criteria or evaluating their own work, they’ll have more of a vested interest in producing a high-quality output.

But there’s another reason why student voice is so important. It’s because it drives an engagement flywheel.

Engagement flywheel

The flywheel concept comes from the book Good to Great by Jim Collins. It’s a business classic but this one concept is very applicable to your classrooms.

First, picture a massive flywheel – kind of like a huge mechanical hamster wheel. Now imagine that your task is to get the flywheel turning as fast and long as possible. Pushing with great effort, you get the flywheel to inch forward, moving almost imperceptibly at first. You keep pushing and, after two or three hours of persistent effort, you get the flywheel to complete one entire turn. You keep pushing, and the flywheel begins to move a bit faster, and with continued great effort, you move it around a second rotation.

You keep pushing in a consistent direction. Three turns ... four ... five ... six ... the flywheel builds up speed ... seven ... eight ... you keep pushing ... nine ... ten ... it builds momentum ... and then you hit the big breakthrough! The flywheel’s own momentum kicks in, its own heavy weight working for you instead of against you. You’re pushing no harder than during the first rotation, but the flywheel goes faster and faster. Each turn of the flywheel builds upon work done earlier, compounding your investment of effort. It’s now got almost unstoppable momentum.

Hopefully you’ve followed along with that example. What we’re saying is that the flywheel takes a lot of work to get started at first but then, once you cross a tipping point, the flywheel’s own momentum does all the work for you. Now it can’t be stopped!

So, let me ask you a question. What’s your flywheel for creating a truly engaged classroom? What’s the aspect of teaching and learning that you need to put a lot of work into in the beginning but, if and when you get it right, the effect compounds and grows until you can’t not have an engaged classroom? What is the most important factor to create your own virtuous cycle – or flywheel – of student engagement?

If you guessed student voice, you’re picking up what I’m putting down. In our experience, it is the strategy par excellence to create your engagement flywheel. Let’s explore why.

• We know by now that greater student voice leads to higher commitment. Students are more invested in their learning if they have voice, agency, and ownership over it

• Higher commitment leads to greater interest. If a student is more committed to something, they’ve got a greatest interest in that topic or task. Makes sense

• Greater interest leads to greater focus. If I’m more interested in something, I’m going to work at it for longer. That also means persisting for longer when faced with a challenge

• If a student has greater focus, they’ll get more done and achieve at a higher level. Again, this is common sense

• If students achieve at a higher level, they’ll be more prepared to set more challenging goals and take on greater challenges. This is where we want to get every student to

• And if students are setting themselves greater challenges and working at a higher level, they’ll want to set their own goals and decide how they’ll achieve them. And when you have this, we’re back at student voice again

So, you can see how student voice is one big virtuous flywheel. It might take a bit of work to get it right and successfully embed it in your classrooms, but once you do get it right the flywheel takes holds. It spins on its own without much effort from you, and its effect on your classroom is palpable. More engaged students, greater academic performance, and a culture of lifelong learning. There’s a lot to like.

How do we increase student voice?

We’ve said before that enhancing student voice doesn’t require radical or revolutionary changes to your teaching and learning approach. You don’t need to forget everything you know and start again from scratch. But what you do need to do is very intentionally take steps to address each pillar of student voice – voice, agency, and ownership.

It won’t surprise you to learn that you can’t just stick these changes on top of a classroom approach which values textbook learning and a didactic approach to knowledge transfer. That isn’t going to work.

So, what’s the best way to organically embed greater student voice, agency, and ownership into your classrooms? Giving student hands-on, real-world, and self-directed units to work on. This approach implicitly encourages students to have a greater voice in how they learn. It gives them greater agency in choosing how to work through the unit and solve the problem the unit is built around. They have the agency to decide how to apply what they have learned. And it emphasises student ownership as students direct their learning with the teacher as a facilitator. It organically incorporates each student voice pillar.

And that’s even before you consider the other, non-student voice benefits of approaching learning this way. The hands-on component brings learning to life and engages students; the real-world aspect makes learning relevant and meaningful as student can connect theory with their own lives; and the applied, problem-based aspect gives primacy to the skills and competencies that students need to develop. All these aspects hit both sides of Schlechty’s engagement equation – both attention and commitment.

Of course, this is easier said than done. But hopefully you’re experimenting with this approach. And you’ll find plenty in the Curations archives to help you; whether that’s to structure a real-world unit around a core of explicit teaching, or to teach the thinking and interpersonal skills that students need to thrive in an environment of greater voice, agency, and ownership.

Good luck – and may your flywheel keep spinning!

Do you know an educator who wants to increase student voice in the classroom? If so, please share this article with them!

If you are passionate about maximising student voice want to learn more, get in touch with us at hello@curaeducation.com.