How Listening to Students Can Help Schools to Improve

Below are my annotations from the article How Listening to Students Can Help Schools to Improve- by Pedro A. Noguera (can be read here)

Questions:

My first question came reading page 3 (or 207 of the article), when the author is comparing percentages between students at “large” schools and students at “small” schools are these percentages proportional? 20% of students in a school of 1000 is a large number of students than 92% of students in a school of 100.

Reactions:

The points made by the students regarding the need for their teachers to be passionate about what they teach makes a strong point. If we simply teach out of a book or to the test and do not add anything to the class the students will check out.

The amount comparative percentages the article gave began to trouble me and started to show a possible bias towards the “benefits” of a small school.

Connections:

Under the High Stakes Testing section I share a concern with those who opposed the use of a “high stakes” test to judge if a student is allowed to graduate or not. My first criticism is from my personal experience in high school where as sophomores we took our high stakes test (AIMS). How can a test taken your second year of high school determine if you are allowed to graduate two years later? At the end of each course there should be a “capstone” unit that requires the student to use what they learned throughout the year. What should not be used is a static test that pushes teachers and administrators to gear the curriculum to passing a test and not towards what the students truly need to learn. Test are used to reinforce and determine what you learned, teaching to a test teaches nothing.

Restatements:

The idea of asking the students for their opinion on topics such as their school or possibly a class sounds great, however that may be due to us still being students now and feeling that many of our classes should be restructured. What I can assume is a hurdle that current administration may face in asking for student input it the typical response of no homework, or pizza every day. It is impossible not to get these types of responses but they need to be filtered out so that the genuine responses from students that want to see a change can be seen.

Applications:

As a teacher, and especially a history teacher, we need to continue to be energetic and passionate of the content we chose to teach. And we need to remember that we chose to teach it, our students have to be in our class and we need to make it an enjoyable learning environment.

The idea of a student panel could be a way to better use the Student Government class, instead of being a glorified “pep” class they can become involved in school policies.