The Journey to Student Voice and Agency: Talking with Hayley Dureau
By Hayley Dureau
Hayley Dureau is Assistant Principal at a Government secondary school in Melbourne. ReConnectEd talked with her about her journey in creating the conditions for young people to realise student voice and agency.
We started by asking her how she started on this journey.
I was working at a large government secondary school in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, and I had the role of Year Level Coordinator in Middle School (Years 9 and 10). I loved working with students and their families and teachers, but I found myself spending 90% of my time with a very small portion of the student cohort.
The Attitudes to School Survey data at the time showed there was a real lack of ‘connectedness’ among the students. We were also losing quite a few students to select-entry schools in the area. I saw an opportunity to engage students in the process of attempting to improve school pride and student connectedness to school. To me, it was a no-brainer: nobody knows what’s going on in a school better than the students in it!
In 2014, I worked with a group of Year 10 students to establish the Year 10 Leadership Team. They weren’t elected leaders; they were self-nominated leaders who wanted to further develop their leadership capacity and work collaboratively with students and staff to serve the school community. This group of 20 students transformed what we understood as student voice and leadership at the school. By the time they completed Year 12, we had seen a huge change in our student voice, leadership, and agency program across the college.
How did you move from a small group of already enthusiastic and vocal students, to a larger structure that enables a more inclusive 'voice', particularly of students who traditionally felt ignored and excluded?
This took time! In fact, it took several years until we were satisfied that all felt they had a voice. One of the key enablers for this was our Mount Matters initiative.
Essentially, Mount Matters involves student-led focus groups. Any student can be a Mount Matters representative, including students who may have attendance or behavourial issues … everyone. We were very intentional about this. We explained to staff and students that we wanted the group of Mount Matters representatives (two per class) to represent the diverse student body.
In these focus groups, students had a ‘voice’ that wasn’t always verbal. For example, some students are reluctant to speak up in large groups. The student leaders who led the sessions were amazing: they put a lot of effort into ensuring there were various ways students could provide feedback.
In addition to giving feedback, the Mount Matters representatives were part of solutions. This included putting forward proposals to key staff or inviting key staff or school leaders to join the conversation and work together to improve the school experience for all members of the school community.
As a result of that journey, what has student voice and agency come to mean to you?
Genuine student voice is not just about listening to students; it is about working together with them and involving them in authentic, rather than tokenistic, ways. Asking students what they want or think is one thing, but truly listening to a diverse range of perspectives and then working together with the students to formulate solutions to problems and involve them meaningfully in the change process, takes a lot of work. To me, that is student voice.
Sometimes students have perspectives or views that we as teachers or leaders don’t agree with, and that’s perfectly OK: that’s life! Being transparent with students about the parameters and limitations is important. For example, there’s no point asking students to redesign the curriculum if you know at the end of the day it can’t change. Look for opportunities where students can have input and involve them. When I say ‘them’, I don’t mean just the School Captains; I mean look for ways where all students can contribute if they want to and in ways they want to.
How can teachers work with students in their individual classes to improve student voice and agency?
Ask the students! Involve students meaningfully in discussions about learning and teaching. Ask them: ‘do you feel like you have a voice in this class? If so, how? How could we improve this?’. Honestly, when students are asked these questions and when they trust that they are going to be listened to and not ridiculed, they are so insightful. To me, student voice is about adapting our pedagogy (how we teach, not necessarily what we teach); when we incorporate student voice into our teaching, then we are likely to gain a deeper insight into what students already know about a topic, or gaps in their knowledge from prior learning. Student voice isn’t something over and above teaching the curriculum; it is a vehicle for improving the way we teach and the way that students learn. Providing opportunities for students to share what they know, and explain their thinking and reasoning is just good teaching. Gathering feedback from students about a lesson or how they might like to approach the next stage in their learning is a way to authentically incorporate student voice into our teaching.
For example, you may have tried to incorporate more group-work or class discussion into a unit of work, or, you may have trialled a new technology as a teaching tool; ask the students for feedback, and listen to what they have to say. It is important that you close that feedback loop and communicate back to the students what you have heard them say, and what you might do in response to their feedback, or what you might need from them in order to improve their learning experience.
It’s also important for students to hear from other students in order for them to understand why the teacher makes the decisions they do in the classroom. For example, if a student keeps giving the feedback that they hate groupwork, but their teacher still does a lot of groupwork, they may feel like they are not being heard. If the student sees that 80% of the students in the class prefer groupwork, they might understand why the teacher is incorporating groupwork into their lessons, even though they have listened to that student’s feedback.
Why do teachers and schools often find it difficult to meaningfully create the conditions where all young people have voice and agency?
Implementing student voice initiatives meaningfully is hard work, particularly if the culture of the school is not there yet. It also takes hard work to maintain and sustain as new students come through the school.
I love being a teacher and I think it is the most rewarding job in the whole world. Teaching is a deeply personal profession – we share so much of ourselves with our students, and it can be very confronting getting feedback from students that we don’t agree with.
Teachers who show students that they themselves want to improve and continue to learn, and who are responsive to students and will adapt their teaching to accommodate student needs will find that students are much more engaged in the learning. Teachers who are open to feedback and make it clear to their students why and how they are changing their practice based on the feedback will find that students are much more willing to share and use their voice.
Teachers are also under the pump! They have many things they need to do – they need to get through the curriculum, they need to assess students’ learning, they need to write reports. They lie awake at night thinking of their to-do list and there’s never enough time to get everything done. Creating a culture of student/staff collaboration needs to be something that is going to benefit students and staff, rather than seen as just another thing that teachers need to do on top of everything else! So it’s about looking for opportunities where enhancing student voice and agency will improve student learning.
How can teachers effectively create this culture of student/staff collaboration to enhance student voice and agency?
A key ingredient to creating a culture where you can meaningfully implement student voice is ‘trust’.
For example, if teachers or school leaders just randomly ask students to give feedback on something, there will be a range of responses, including silence. Students come to us having had a whole range of experiences and if they have experienced giving feedback and it not being received well, or giving feedback and it not being listened to, they are likely to be reluctant to do it again. This ‘scepticism’ can be overcome, but it takes work. Students need to see that their voice is being heard and they also need to be part of the feedback loop. Teachers and school leaders need to be transparent about what is happening with the information that is gathered and the decisions that are made based on it. In the busy day-to-day life of schools, sometimes despite the best intentions, we forget to feed this information back to the students, which can perpetuate the cycle of scepticism. Another danger is ‘tokenism’. If we invite students to host assemblies or put the flags up and down each day and label that as ‘student voice’ there is a problem. Student voice is not about a student leadership position or a public speaking competition; it’s about every single student in that school knowing that how they feel about something is important, and that they can contribute to the improvement journey of the school.
Not all students come to us with the skills and attributes that would make it easy for them to articulate their ideas and experiences in a way that we might like them to be communicated. It is up to us to help students build those skills, and we need to be open-minded about the ways we invite students to contribute meaningfully by using their voice.
How can teachers work together to improve student voice and agency in school?
Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) involve staff working together to enhance student outcomes. Teachers use data to identify an area for improvement and to measure the success of their improvement efforts.
A lot of what teachers already do in PLCs can be enhanced by incorporating student voice approaches. If teaching teams are analysing student work samples or student achievement data, or planning the next unit of work, they should be incorporating and encouraging student voice. What better data is there than student input?
Students can be invited to attend PLC meetings and offer their insights, or provide feedback on their perceptions of a particular strategy that has been implemented. The important thing is that this is done in a meaningful way - not a tokenistic one. Students shouldn’t be wheeled in as decoration or to tick a box. If they are invited to attend a PLC meeting, they should be treated as a member of the group and have the opportunity to contribute as one.
Now that you're at a new school, how have you carried such approaches across into a new environment, where perhaps there isn't that 'tradition'?
Context is so important. I have been at my new school for almost one year. This year was about getting to know the staff, and students and putting effort into understanding the unique school culture. The worst thing I could have done was to barge in and try to implement what has worked at another school. I love my new school: they are doing great work in this space already. I can see opportunities to enhance student voice and agency here too, on which I very much look forward to working with staff and students in the future.