By Dr. Zoe Plotnick, School Improvement Representative
School leadership practices that center student voice support learning environments that are equitable, inclusive and responsive. For schools serving students from traditionally underserved populations, however, collecting and acting on student experience data must become an imperative. Students with disabilities, multilingual learners, at-promise youth, and students from other marginalized groups often navigate school systems that have not been designed with their experiences in mind. When we embrace student voice as a driver for improvement, everybody wins: students gain agency, while the adults gain insight (Dugan & Safir, 2021; Hammond, 2025; Mitra, 2018).
Measures focusing on how students experience school can offer a form of “street-level data” that sheds light on many of the realities that are often invisible to traditional metrics (Bryk et al., 2015; Dugan & Safir, 2021). While attendance and achievement scores can certainly help us identify patterns and spot important trends, the snapshots they provide are incomplete without an understanding of the opportunities, barriers, root causes and challenges that may only be perceptible to those willing to view them from the student perspective on the ground. For example, shadowing a newcomer English learner for a day will often reveal the barriers to comprehension, missed opportunities for interaction, and inaccessible routines that satellite-level data fail to capture.
The dividends of centering student experience data do not end with informed planning processes for leadership, however. This approach to understanding school systems aligns with culturally responsive and sustaining frameworks (Gay, 2018; Hammond, 2015; Paris & Alim, 2017) that prioritize identity, belonging, and affirmation. When students’ cultural and experiential assets shape school decisions, engagement rises and achievement follows. Below are some strategies that school leaders and administrators can implement immediately to start collecting street-level data and approaching school improvement using the lens of student experience.
Full-Day Student Shadowing
Shadowing provides leaders with firsthand understanding of a student’s access, challenges, and opportunities. Select a student who is among those in your school who are least likely to be heard – newcomer ELs, students with disabilities, or students with chronic absenteeism – and spend a day following them to observe their school day, from arrival to dismissal. You might decide to create an informal tally, checklist or other protocol or system for taking notes during your observations. If you aren’t sure what to look for, here are some things worth noting:
- How often is the student invited to speak?
- Where do they encounter barriers (e.g., instructional language, lesson pacing, transitions)?
- How often do they seem confused, and do they try to hide it?
- How many opportunities exist for authentic engagement? Meaningful interaction? Belonging?
Action Research Mini-Cycles & Design Sprints
Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) empowers students to become co-researchers of their own school experiences (Cammarota & Fine, 2008; Kirshner, 2015). In these cycles, students identify a problem, then collect data using tools like surveys, interviews, photography or mapping in a small-scale investigation. Students then go on to analyze their findings, brainstorm solutions, and present their proposals to authentic audiences that may include school administrators, community partners, parents, or local leaders.
This type of interdisciplinary project-based learning offers powerful opportunities for students to apply what they learn across different content classes, but it can also be scaled down to a smaller scale: you might try inviting students to participate in a design sprint. Over a 60-90 minute period, students co-design potential solutions to thorny problems that affect them at school – for instance, How can we streamline our lunchroom procedures to maximize time spent eating and hanging out with friends? – then present a prototype to school admin. If you would like to learn more about how teachers and students might apply design thinking in a K-12 class setting, you might want to start with the free info and resources offered by organizations like IDEO and Stanford d.school.
Reimagine Student Advisory Councils
The makeup of traditional student councils tends to skew heavily toward academically successful, socially confident students. Making student partnerships and advisory groups truly meaningful, though, requires school leaders to be intentional about ensuring that students who tend to be marginalized have a seat at the table. Some councils reserve seats for immigrant newcomers, students with disabilities, LGBTQ+ youth, teens who are pregnant or parenting, or other historically excluded groups (Cook-Sather et al., 2014). Another approach is to regularly recruit panels of students who represent “unlikely voices:” students who are experiencing homelessness, have migrant status, are recent transfers, speak a minority language at home, are chronically absent, or are simply the ones staff describe using words like quiet, shy, and introverted. Because students representing these categories often have unpredictable schedules, it likely makes sense to rotate participation.
Scaffolds that support participation from these students can include providing discussion questions or prompts ahead of time, offering sentence frames or “talk stems,” using small-group pre-discussions beforehand, and providing multiple options for responses (e.g., verbal or written). You also might consider offering some form of compensation – whether that looks like “points” or “bucks” within your school’s incentive currency, service-learning hours, or even a literal stipend, it’s worth acknowledging that voice counts as labor.
Embark on an Experience Walk
Rather than focusing on compliance or instruction during your next round of walkthroughs, try walking a route through the building with an eye for student experience instead. As you move through arrival or dismissal routines, hallways during class transitions, the cafeteria and playground, restrooms, etc., with an eye for who is (and isn’t) assumed to be the “default user.” If your data suggests that at least one student subgroup is less consistently connected and engaged, what aspects of the school feel designed for those students? What aspects feel like they were designed without them in mind? Do you notice any indicators that reveal subtle features of your school’s emotional climate (e.g., warm greetings and staff availability)?
Invite Students to Document Their Lives at School
If you like the idea of YPAR but aren’t sure you have the time and resources to devote to such an initiative, you might instead start small by asking a few students to log their blocks or boosts. With support from staff, students can spend one week documenting tasks, events and interactions like the following:
Blocks
- something that slowed me down
- a moment when I felt confused
- a time when I didn’t know what to do or how to start on the work
- a reason I didn’t ask for help, even though I really could have used it
Boosts
- things that helped me learn
- something that helped me understand better
- a moment when I felt like I belonged
- when something “clicked” for me
- a time I took a risk and raised my hand
Another way leaders can visually zero in on areas where supports might be added is to invite students to mark a floor map of the school building (Ralls & Pottinger, 2021), an approach that is especially useful for schools that are welcoming newcomer English learners. Students can make markings and notations on a printed or digital floorplan of the school as they respond to questions about their daily experiences:
- Where does the student feel safe (or unsafe) in the building?
- Where does learning feel easier (or harder)?
- Where is it easy to get help from an adult?
- In which places is it more difficult to find someone who can help?
- Where do communication or participation barriers most frequently arise?
- In what places does the student feel their home culture is affirmed?
Let Students Inform Staff Development
Students can get involved in teachers’ professional development by sharing how they learn best, what challenges they face, and which practices help them access grade-level material. They might be invited to demonstrate how they annotate texts, create and deliver a mini-lesson on “What helps me succeed,” explain what helps them persist and feel connected, or show how they use digital tools to access and communicate knowledge. This experience aligns with culturally responsive teaching principles that emphasize learner agency and cognitive engagement (Hammond, 2015) and is transformational for teachers and students alike.
Implement Quick Feedback Loops
Leaders may be surprised by the depth of insights that can be obtained with this approach, which only requires a few minutes per day. As you walk through the building and encounter students in hallways and common areas, you can conduct a “micro-interview” by posing one or two questions to a few students. Alternatively, you might conduct one-question surveys using QR codes that allow students to anonymously respond to a prompt like If you could change one thing about our hallway procedures, what would it be? or What made learning easier or harder today? Track patterns regularly, and don’t forget to share your findings (and how you will act on them!) with students.
Conclusion
To sustain these practices, leaders will need to intentionally create formal structures that ensure that student voice and collaborative problem-solving are practices that remain embedded in their schools’ culture rather than a one-off initiative. By consistently adopting participatory and human-centered approaches, we can create systems that reflect the lived experiences, aspirations, and needs of students. Most importantly, though, we must remember that authentic student voice requires more than simply collecting input – we actually need to shift some meaningful decision-making power toward students, too. By taking care to nurture a sense of belonging and improve instructional access, we will create schools where all students can thrive.
Works Cited
Bryk, A. S., Gomez, L. M., Grunow, A., & LeMahieu, P. G. (2015). Learning to improve. Harvard Education Press.
Cammarota, J., & Fine, M. (2008). Revolutionizing education: Youth Participatory Action Research in motion. Routledge.
Cook-Sather, Alison, Cathy Bovill, and Peter Felten. 2014. Engaging students as partners in learning and teaching: a guide for faculty. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Dugan, J., & Safir, S. (2021). Street data: A next-generation model for equity, pedagogy, and school transformation. Corwin.
Gay, G. (2018). Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research, and practice. Teachers College Press.
Hammond, Z. (2015). Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain. Corwin.
Hammond, Z. (2025). Rebuilding students’ learning power: Teaching for instructional equity and cognitive justice. Corwin.
Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (2025). K12 futures library. Stanford University. https://dlibrary.stanford.edu/k12-futures
IDEO (2012). Design thinking for educators toolkit. https://page.ideo.com/design-thinking-edu-toolkit
Kirshner, B. (2015). Youth Activism in an Era of Education Inequality. NYU Press.
Mitra, D. (2018). Student voice in school reform: Building youth–adult partnerships that strengthen schools and empower youth. SUNY Press.
Paris, D., & Alim, H. S. (2017). Culturally sustaining pedagogies. Teachers College Press.
Ralls, D. and Pottinger, L. (2021). Participatory mapping. In Barron, A., Browne, A.L., Ehgartner, U., Hall, S.M., Pottinger, L. and Ritson, J. (Eds.), Methods for change: Impactful social science methodologies for 21st century problems. University of Manchester Press. Accessed online: https://aspect.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Deborah-Ralls-A4-Guide-2.pdf