Abstract
Student involvement in leadership activities is now common in English schools. It is generally assumed to have beneficial learning outcomes and there is some research which suggests that this is the case. However, there is still work to do to detail these learning outcomes − and to assess them. I present one case in which primary school students researched what they learned from leadership activities. I then illustrate how these learnings could be amenable to student-led monitoring and tracking and thus formative assessment. I argue that adult school leaders need to find time to work with students on assessing student leadership and that such work might provide experience useful for other pedagogical changes.
Introduction
Most English schools now involve young people – or least some young people – in processes which produce institutional change. Such activities range from being consulted about aspects of learning, school policy or strategic priorities for improvement through to being members of committees with ongoing involvement in school governance. A limited set of structures has also emerged over the last decade or so, endorsed and supported by a range of policy and practice initiatives, 1 to support student-led activities, mostly variants on student councils which may, or may not, report back to whole class or year level meetings. A staff member is generally given responsibility for supporting these student fora.
Schools have a range of reasons for wanting to involve students in leadership activities; these include meeting official expectations since ‘student voice’ activities are endorsed in national policy and positively regarded by inspectors and visitors. It is, however, generally agreed that such student involvement is a ‘Good Thing’ − for the school, which has access to and the benefits of a broader information base to inform decision making − as well as for the students themselves.
Researchers and practitioners alike have noted a number of challenges which arise from the ways in which student participation is sometimes promoted and enacted in schools. These include inter alia: the tendency for particular kinds of students to be chosen and/or elected for representative activities; corralling of the areas about which students can speak; patchy take-up of proposals made by students; and very importantly, a marked tendency for schools to confine student discussion to extra, rather than main-stream curricular activities (Holdsworth, 2000; Fielding, 2006; Mitra, 2008; Bragg, 2007; Lodge, 2005; Rudduck, 2007; Alderson, 1999). In particular, there has been significant underdevelopment of classroom pedagogies which encourage everyday dialogue between students and teachers, and even regular evaluative discussions with teachers are comparatively rare (Arnot and Reay, 2007).
And while the benefits for students of involvement in leadership activities are regarded as positive and important, most schools have been glacially slow in developing ways to make these explicit. The vast majority have also been singularly tardy in thinking of ways in which these learnings might be acknowledged via any form of credentialing other than the obligatory certificate and positive newsletter article (e.g. see Bragg et al., 2009; Thomson et al., 2009b).
This paper addresses a preliminary aspect of this lacuna, namely, scoping the kinds of learnings that are afforded by, and occur through, student leadership activities. I report on a small study in which primary school (Years 3−6) students involved in a leadership committee researched what they thought they had learned from the experience. Secondary students (Years 7−12) who had been involved in such activities when they were at primary school were also asked to reflect on their experience. I suggest that the students’ research offers a frame for beginning to think about assessment and/or evaluation. I then consider what might be required in order to take this kind of development further. I frame these as challenges for adult school leaders, particularly those who are charged with leading pedagogic change.
The benefits assumed for students engaged in leadership activities
Students learn (or not) from the kinds of tasks, information, relationships, interactions, talk, tools and texts that are available. The choices that we make about these and the ways in which they are made material in classrooms is dependent on what we are hoping to achieve. In other words, what teachers do cannot be separated from why they think they are doing it. And the why and what are intimately connected with what students actually learn. Outcomes, processes and purposes are tied together in classrooms – and in student leadership activities too. It is therefore important in any discussion of learning to consider purposes, practices and outcomes at the same time.
The rationale for student involvement in leadership might start and stop with the notion that it is for the school’s benefit, or that it is the school fulfilling its obligations under the UN Convention (1989), or that it’s just good practice. Most schools, however, think that it is also good for the students, because through their participation they learn to be confident, articulate and responsible.
Advocates for student participation elaborate the purposes. The list below is one example. It is taken from one of my own presentations which attempts to encourage school staffs to not only think about the possible outcomes for students engaged in leadership activities but also to debate the kinds of emphases they would place on student leadership practices. I present the following as possible foci: civics – students learn how to be an elected representative, what it means to work in a democratic structure where one is accountable; vocational skills – students learn how to work in a team, present ideas to a range of different people, be accountable, plan a project and meet deadlines and commitments; citizenship – students learn how to be an active participant in a democratic social setting, investigate problems, debate solutions, generate projects and plans and make decisions together; twenty-first century dispositions and competencies – students learn how to exercise initiative, be creative, synthesise and use information, generate possibilities, critically analyse situations, solve problems, and work in a team.
Interestingly, every time I have presented these as options to school staffs they initially refuse to differentiate between them, saying that they are all equally important. It is not until we move to programmatise them − that is, until we discuss what each might mean in terms of what is to be done − that the differences between having a vocational or a citizenship emphasis become apparent. A vocational focus necessitates partnerships with business while a citizenship focus requires engagement with community organisations and local government. Unless business is defined as social enterprise, then the kinds of affordances available to students via leadership projects are situated in quite different contexts; as a result, overlapping but also different learnings are made possible within each option.
The list offered above is just one example of how purposes might be considered. The point here is that elucidating purpose provides the lens through which the criteria for evaluation of the activity and for assessment and evaluation of students’ learning can be conducted.
Empirical research also offers some insights into the learning derived from students’ participation in leadership activities. Researchers generally see student voice learning as having both an epistemological and ontological basis (Batchelor, 2006) – that is, learning is not only about what students know but also who they are learning to be and become. Fielding and Bragg (2003), for example, say that students as researchers learn a positive sense of themselves and their capacity to exercise some agency, creativity and initiative in the school setting, as well as enhanced skills and social competences effected through the new kinds of relationships that they make; and they have increased opportunity to be reflective and critical of their school experiences. Mitra (2004) argues that student involvement in decision-making builds agency, belonging and competence. There is also evidence that participation in leadership activities provides affordances for positive identity (re)formation (Thomson et al., 2005) and for reconstructing relationships with local communities (Thomson, 2006); this can be particularly important for young people who are on the margins of schooling.
Ideally, schools ought to consider why they want students to engage in leadership activities at the same time as they think about what they want them to do and how they will know, and make judgements about, what happens as a result. However, schools can also gain insights from investigating what students are learning from their involvement: this is one way to interrogate hitherto unexamined purposes and processes.
I offer one case study to illustrate the potential of engaging students in a conversation about their leadership learning.
Student leadership learning at Woodlea Primary
Firstly I provide some context about the school and the student research project, followed by the research report which was jointly written with the children.
The school and its philosophy
Woodlea (a pseudonym) consists of a nursery (4−5 year olds), a former junior primary (5−7 year olds) and primary school (8–11 year olds) now amalgamated on one site. A larger than average school (some 550 children) its pupils are largely white British and come from a wide range of economic home settings. It is situated on the outskirts of a Midlands city. Ofsted 2 describe Woodlea as average in nearly all respects except in its performance, which is good with many outstanding features. These include a broad and enriched curriculum with foreign languages, extensive use of information and communication technologies, a noteworthy forest and outdoor education programme across all year levels, a whole-school focus on creativity, and strong and evidenced practice of student leadership.
In late 2008 Woodlea become a National School of Creativity (NSC) through the now defunct Creative Partnerships programme (CP) (see www.creative-partnerships.com). The designation of NSC was in part on the basis of the ongoing activities of the Creative Partnerships student leadership team. This functioned as a standing committee of the Student Representative Council and was made up of four children from each of Years 3−6, 16 in all. Children served up to a two-year term, and at any one time there were always two new and two experienced year-level members. Students applied in writing to become part of the leadership team, the headteacher sifted the applications and experienced student members interviewed and selected the next generation of representatives. The Creative Partnerships Team (CPT) was charged with the responsibility of developing and carrying out proposals for two projects each year. This involved them in: consulting with their year-level peers; developing plans and budgets in conjunction with an external CP adviser; presenting the plans and budgets to the SRC and then the senior leadership team; advertising for and interviewing artists; and then assisting in the project management and its evaluation.
As part of the NSC programme each was served by an education consultant who acted as a critical friend (Swaffield and Macbeath, 2005). I was appointed to Woodlea. During the first year I focused on helping the school clarify its values and philosophies. After several conversations I wrote a text (Figure 1) which seemed to me to sum up what the school leadership most strongly believed.
My interpretation of the Woodlea philosophy
The headteacher agreed with the content of this text but as far as I know did not share it beyond the senior leadership team. I assume this is because she did not see the relevance or importance of having such a statement available.
Woodlea students research their leadership learning
One of the questions I continued to ask the head through my first year as critical friend was about what students in the CPT were learning. I wanted the school to think about what were the benefits to the students, as opposed to the clear benefits to the school, and what this might tell them about other student leadership activities that they undertook. In 2010 we decided to ask the CPT to research their own learning. We also decided to ask some former CPT members, now in secondary school, what they remembered about the CPT experience, what they thought that they had learnt from it and what use this learning was at secondary school. We also agreed that both the school and I would be able to use the project and its findings.
We began with a morning brainstorming session where five boys and five girls from Years 4−6 thought of all of the things they had and were learning from CPT work. I used the metaphor of being a detective looking for clues about learning to stimulate children’s narratives and ideas. We then used a consensus decision-making process to decide on an agreed list of learning outcomes. This did involve some voting, a practice the children initiated. Our second morning involved 10 secondary students, seven girls and three boys from Year 8 and 9 in two neighboring schools. They were taken on a tour of the school and each was interviewed separately by one CPT member, using questions we had designed in the previous session, about their memories of CPT and the learning that accrued. These interviews were recorded and later transcribed; because the quality was highly variable, the transcripts were of less use than we had hoped. On a third and final morning, the CPT students, the CP adviser and I examined the transcripts, my field notes, the original list we had made and we shared our memories of the second ‘data’ session. We then agreed on the basic ‘findings’ points to be made in a report to the school. I wrote the report which was then given to the CPT and the school for amending.
The report is shown in full below.
Woodlea CPT research report
We formed a research team because we were asked to find out what children learned from being involved in CP team. We brainstormed a list of the things that we knew that we had learned. Students from two local secondary schools visited us to see what had happened in the school since they had left. They had all been involved in CP team. We used our brainstorm list to design some questions for the secondary school students. We later looked at the transcripts of our interviews in order to write this report.
CP teams
What are they?
CP teams consist of four children from each year level in the school. Anybody can apply to join. The positions are advertised each year in assembly. Children have to write an application and then there is an interview for those who are selected by Mrs XXX (the headteacher). The interviews are conducted by children who are already CP team members. People who are chosen have to be serious about wanting to do the work involved in CP team, and be ready to work with other people. While being on the CP team is fun, the children involved do miss lessons and so they have to be prepared to make up the work.
What do they do?
The CP team plan projects that will help to improve the school. Team members think about the future of Woodlea, they consult with other children and come up with ideas for creative projects. The CP team sometimes advertises and interviews artists who will work in the school. Two years ago the CP team in Years 3 and 4 decided to have a Tricky Maths project, and put an ad on Artsjobs 3 and selected the three artists.
Sometimes the CP team get a budget for their projects and they have to keep track of what is spent.
As well, the team sometimes help community organisations – for example, the 2009 Christmas production for our local church where the team were responsible for planning and setting up.
What do children learn from being involved?
We have all learnt to be part of a team and work cooperatively. We have all gained in confidence. Most people in CP teams learn to focus and reflect on what they’ve learnt. We appreciate other people’s opinions.
Current team members
CP team members learn to get their opinions across and to explain things. CP team members have to have ideas. The first time that we have to stand up in public and represent the school, we are nervous, but it is something that we have got used to. We have become more independent. Some CP team members suggest that they are more responsible outside of school as well and their parents have noticed that they have changed.
Previous team members
The ten high school students who were interviewed remembered being involved in the CP team very well. They said that it had helped them to learn new personal skills.
One said, ‘I’ve learned how to speak to other people and not be shy and I also know how to listen now and absorb information that is coming towards us and accept other people’s ideas because that could be the idea that could change people.’
Another one said, ‘When I first joined Creative Partnerships in Year 4 I was really shy when it came to talking to large crowds of adults because they were a lot taller than me and they were all looking at me and I felt really scared but over the years I’ve managed to develop it and now in Year 7 I can join in class discussions because I’m not shy about talking to anybody.
The former CP team members agreed that the most important thing they had learned was how to work with other people. ‘The main skill I probably learnt was team work and not sitting in the background not doing anything’.
‘Learning to get on with a wide range of people was also very important – and useful.’ ‘I’ve learnt how to mix with other people a lot more because the skills that we used in CP really come in … you use them a lot in everyday life.’
All of the high school students thought that it would be good if they could continue with CP work when they moved school. ‘I think we should have a CP team at our school. If we were able to have a CP team we would have much more influence and be able to enjoy school more’.
They were sure that being involved in CP team gave them something special. ‘I would join a CP team if I was in secondary school because I’d like to have as much opportunity as I had in primary school.’
Comparing then and now
The high school students also mentioned being realistic about what could be achieved, planning, expanding and changing ideas and the importance of taking responsibility. They talked about the ways in which they now saw many of these as being important to getting and keeping a job in the future.
The findings in the students’ research report, as shown above, were very affirming for the school and the headteacher was particularly pleased with confirmation of her advocacy of children’s engagement in leadership activities, something she initially had to argue strongly for with governors and some staff. I saw an opportunity to offer a challenge – if this group of children were learning these things which were clearly of value, how could such experiences be extended further? How could these kinds of learnings be made available to all Woodlea children? This then became a topic for further discussion.
As a researcher I also noted two other things within the data: the importance to the young people of agency and its effects, and the ‘fit’ with the school philosophy as I understood it.
Agency, identity and horizons of possibility
During the discussion there were many interesting statements made but the one that stood out most to me was a comment from one of the boys. He said that he didn’t know that he had anything to say until he was involved in CPT. Furthermore, he didn’t know that he had anything to say that anyone would be interested in hearing. The CPT experience had, he thought, made him think differently about who he was and what he might do in the future. There was general agreement from all of the secondary students with the latter part of his commentary – that is, that being in CPT had helped them to see themselves and their future possibilities differently. The boy’s comments went directly to the issue of being and becoming. CPT had changed the young people’s horizons; they felt that through students leadership activities offered by CPT they had learnt new ways to be, as well as new ways to do things together (cf. Delors, 1996).
All of the secondary students had stories to tell about the ways in which secondary school differed from primary. They were sentimental about their primary experience, describing it as a time when they were listened to and when they were able to have ideas and put them into action. They continually referred to the lack of opportunity that they had for any involvement in leadership activities, and while some sought to find rational explanations for why this was the case, others just wanted to find ways to change the ways in which they, and their peers, experienced the somewhat alienating and de-powering environment to which they had transferred.
Two of the girls had been so concerned about the lack of involvement in secondary school that when they were in year 7, they had made an appointment to see their headteacher to ask why there was no student leadership programme available to them. The head had listened and then told them that he wasn’t interested in students having a say in anything. The girls were very disappointed and were keen to find ways to address this now that they had a new head appointed.
Two secondary teachers had accompanied the students to Woodlea to supervise. Together with the CP Advisor, they decided that they would attempt to get ‘student voice’ happening through Creative Partnerships. And this did actually happen. That it was initiated via an activity at their old primary school did however reinforce the students’ notion that primary schooling was different/better. However, they also saw that things could change when the right adults were involved because, it seemed, students alone could not make a difference to the kinds of power–relations that exist within schools (cf. Rudduck and Fielding, 2006).
Philosophy in action and possibilities for evaluation
Further analysis of the students’ brainstorm shows that there is a correlation between the qualities listed by the students and my version of the school’s philosophy. The various aspects of CPT learning that students reported do have strong connections with citizenship and the outcomes of the creative and experiential pedagogies that the school espoused. The students’ list of learnings does thus demonstrate the kinds of outcomes that the school hoped to achieve through the provision of experiential, creative and connective pedagogies. The head had good reasons to feel vindicated about the CPT through the student research as a form of programme evaluation.
But, importantly for my argument here, as well as for the message I was trying to give to the school, all of these learnings are also amenable to practices which might assess the students’ learning. In Figure 2 I suggest that there are relatively simple ways in which focused running records kept largely by students themselves could be used to construct a formative assessment narrative about what leadership learning happened, when and how.
Potential for records of leadership learning
It is not too hard to see that the students themselves would be able to use records such as journals, diaries and meeting notes to reflect on their own learning. On this basis they could also for example prepare a portfolio which showed their cumulative learning over a period of time. They could use their reflection on their leadership learning to engage in conversation with their peers, teacher and parents about what they now knew how to do and to be, and what they might want to learn to do and be next.
I now conclude by thinking about what might be preventing progressive schools such as Woodlea from moving in these directions and what this might imply more generally for adult school leaders.
Conclusion
There are dominant curriculum and assessment patterns in England which frame the ways in which leaders and teachers think about what they can and must do.
The pattern is this. Learning is largely equated to that which happens in the formal curriculum; prior learning is equated to that which appears in formal curriculum texts (Thomson and Hall, 2008). Other learnings, such as those the students are afforded through extracurricular activities or through their out-of-school lives, are acknowledged, but there is little account taken of what teachers might learn from these for doing things differently in formal lessons (Hall et al., 2007). Assessment of learning is made by teachers about students. Summative assessment of learning is largely confined to essays, multiple-choice questions and projects (cf. Wiggins and McTighe, 2005). While there has been a move to greater levels of cross-curriculum work, particularly in primary schools, this has not extended to assessment which is still largely confined to single subjects with outcomes measured in the customary way (Thomson et al., in press). Formative assessment is generally confined to teaching to explicit targeted learning ‘levels’ which teachers whiteboard daily and which students are expected to know as well as meet (Thomson et al., 2010). While there is a lot of discussion and activity around assessment reform to encompass more feedback and formative approaches, inspection and performance management pressures often work to make this a narrow and instrumental approach with a focus on externally predetermined, rather than negotiated, outcomes. Some early childhood and primary educators are moving towards post-profiling approaches, including backwards mapping learning onto profiles, rather than forward planning from targets (Thomson and Lorna Rose, 2011).
This pattern holds even in schools which, like Woodlea, are actively engaged in creative and alternative approaches to learning and teaching.
The existence of this pattern is attributed primarily to the combination of marketisation and audit and testing regimes which value the performance of this pattern above all others (Ball, 2006; Gleeson and Husbands, 2001), and a systematic steerage of teacher education towards teaching to the syllabus and to this dominant pattern. Researchers suggest that the result has been a deskilling of teachers, meaning not only that their repertoires of practice have narrowed and become instrumentalised, but also that the intellectual resources on which they might draw to redesign pedagogies have been denigrated, demonised and diminished (Mahony and Hextall, 2000; Gerwitz et al., 2009). There has also been a shift in the obligations of adult school leaders in formal positions towards managerial and market activities, with many expressing regret and frustration that they have too little time to focus on the educational leadership that they know is important (Gunter, 2001, 2005; Thomson, 2009; Barker, 2010).
However, the presence of new time, financial and ideas resources in schools which support efforts to change does encourage a view that there is currently some cause for cautious optimism that this pattern might be challenged (Jeffrey and Woods, 2009). And there is certainly, as stated at the beginning of this article, and to which this journal of Management in Education attests, considerable energy being devoted to finding ways to give students a greater say in their schooling (Czerniawski and Kidd, 2011). But, given the framing of all progressive reform activities by the dominant curriculum and assessment pattern (Jones and Thomson, 2008), it is probably unsurprising that there is as yet little work undertaken on how to assess the learning that students gain from participation in student leadership activities – and to involve students themselves in this process.
This area remains a challenge for adult school leaders.
I want to suggest that meeting this challenge requires more than simply finding time in busy days. It also requires a change in focus. My seven-year engagement in ‘creative’ schools suggests that what most principals mean by educational leadership is a focus on how children learn, rather than also on the what and why (Thomson et al., 2009a). I guess that this is why the senior leaders at Woodlea did not readily respond to my version of their philosophy and other conversations about curriculum, because they understood their jobs as being directed to the improvement of outcomes by focusing primarily on teaching methods – not on changing them. Even though they had introduced new curriculum by way of languages and outdoor education, Woodlea adult leaders had largely put questions of knowledge and assessment aside.
The real challenge for adult school leaders is to focus on the totality of what Bernstein (1990, 2000) noted as the three major message systems of schooling – curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. A focus on the processes of learning alone is insufficient.
I can think of no better place to start trialling new ways of bringing together purpose, process and assessment than through an examination of student leadership. It is after all, as I suggested at the outset, already seen as A Good Thing. Working for innovative ways to evaluate what students get from these Good Thing experiences would be relatively uncontentious. And, the experiences of different formative approaches to assessment which involve students as active partners in generating and analysing ‘evidence’ of learning, as well as the experience of reciprocal conversations about that learning, could provide a valuable resource for further school change.