Fostering Students’ Leadership is What They Most Need Now: Some International Experiences
Originally published in the Delhi Commission for Protection of Children’s Rights’ “Children First Journal on Children’s Lives”
Estefany Ruiz Ortega teaches six classes each day to students from 7th through 11th grades in the outskirts of Cali, Colombia, in a neighbourhood where families, many of whom are Afro-Colombian or indigenous, have a very low income that comes mostly from the informal economy and where there is no green space or recreational infrastructure. Ms. Ruiz shared that because last year’s classes were virtual, she and the other teachers could see some of the challenging situations happening in students’ homes, so when they came back to school in person this year, she knew she would need to actively listen to them to understand what is going on in their lives and develop ways of meeting their needs. She began by asking them questions: What motivates them to come to school? What happened during the pandemic? Is there something they’d like to share?
Understanding that her students were managing a range of issues — from living with violence to fear of bullying to depression — Ms. Ruiz realised how important it was for her students to be in a safe space, to feel trust and connection. She also resolved to build their socio-emotional skills through co-regulation, fostering their self-awareness, and building their conflict resolution skills.
As a result, early this school year she took some of her students to the mountains, and they saw firsthand the impact of environmental degradation when the mountain they were climbing no longer had its usual snowy peak. She saw the inherent motivation her students had to do something about the situation and recognised their potential for leadership. When the students returned to school, Ms. Ruiz supported them to design and implement a campaign in the school to collect plastics for recycling.
In classes with as many as 40 students, Ms. Ruiz saw beneath some of the classroom management issues she was having and realised that her students were trying to get her attention. Understanding their potential for leadership and desire to be useful, she constructed a project through which her older students in the Grades 10th and 11th taught the younger ones. Through this, she saw that when she entrusted them with responsibility and gave them a chance to exert their leadership, they were more interested and motivated.
“When people say this is a lost generation, it hurts me” Ms. Ruiz says. She’s seen firsthand that when we listen to students and put them in charge, they can contribute and learn so much. Ms. Ruiz found that the path to tackling the range of challenges her students were facing, as they returned to school, was listening to her students and enabling their leadership. Her example is one of many across international network of teachers, education leaders and advocates in more than 60 countries. When we set out over these last months to understand from these teachers and educators what students need now, we heard a resounding theme that seems to be relatively missing in the public discussion — we heard that students need the power to drive their learning and to ensure that what they learn is relevant to them.
“We need to unlearn the idea that power lies only in the hands of teachers’’, shared the teachers Mălina Luciana Flocea and Ionela Munteanu from Romania, reinforcing their perspective about the need to “pay attention to the complexity of the learning process where the two main roles, student and teacher, must be interchangeable.” Similarly, a teacher from Thailand, Noppamart Kamsaen wrote: “Students’ voices need to be heard and their actions need to be seen. We need to listen to what they want to learn, what they want to be, and respect their decisions.”
As we engaged with educators across our network, we heard that the key to motivating and engaging students is fostering their agency and voice. At the same time, we know that this is the only path to preparing students who can navigate the uncertainty that is ever-more apparent during this pandemic. These are skills that will be crucial in preparing students to create meaningful careers in a changing economy and solve the complex challenges facing communities, countries, and our global society. The challenges of this era are opportunities to accelerate progress in this direction. Chan Soon Seng, CEO of Teach For Malaysia, put it this way: “As a result of COVID-19, many more students are dropping out of school, and the idea of memorising more content for exams is not convincing them to come back. Instead, we see students energised by being able to do something to make a difference for themselves and their communities — now. The great opportunity we have in front of us is to reshape education from a process of depositing knowledge into children, into a process that develops leaders who will lead themselves, and us all, towards a sustainable and equitable future.”
Teach For All’s Global Learning Lab has spent the last several years learning from classrooms where students are growing in their ability to lead and shape a better future. We wanted to understand what differentiates teachers who are fostering students’ sense of agency, their awareness of the world and of themselves, their problem-solving and critical thinking skills, their empathy and ability to work across lines of difference, and their sense of wellbeing.
What we learned is that perhaps the most important differentiator of these teachers is their very orientation, which undergirds all their actions — they begin from a belief that their ultimate destination is developing students as leaders who can shape better lives for themselves and others. In seeking to understand how these teachers developed, we found that they had experiences that led them to “un-learn” mindsets inculcated by our education systems and to develop new perspectives in their place. These teachers came to see their students as whole people and as leaders with the potential to reshape the world. They came to see themselves as learners and to resist allowing the nature of their commitment to the growth of their students to prevent them from growing alongside their students. They came to see the assets present in their students’ communities, which are so often overlooked. They came to see challenges as systemic and to reflect on the root causes of the things that happen in classrooms, schools, and communities, rather than seeing them as problems within students and the people in communities.
We see so much of this in Ms. Ruiz’s example — she came to understand the roots of the challenges she saw playing out in her classroom, she saw her students’ desire to lead and make a difference, and she saw herself as learning from her students and evolving her approach accordingly. With education systems around the world having suffered their biggest shock in generations, educators and parents are rightly worried about the impact that the pandemic has had on children’s education, and the desire to take action to compensate for this disruption is to be welcomed. However, rather than rolling out a rash of interventions to make up for learning loss, we should set out to foster students’ agency and leadership in addressing the situation. Before investing in mass efforts to build the skills teachers need to catch students up, we should start by investing in professional development designed to support them to embrace new mindsets and let these perspectives guide the skills they need to build.
Moreover, even as we invest in building teachers’ commitment to elevate the students’ voices and leadership, school and system leaders must recognise the implications for their own approach. Rather than meeting in adult-only rooms and developing plans for addressing students’ learning loss and their mental health and well-being, we should bring students into the conversation and seek their thoughts and engagement in developing the path forward. Teach For All’s Student Leadership Advisory Council, comprised of eight students from as many countries, shared recently their prevailing experience that adults decided everything during the pandemic and didn’t listen even when they raised their voices. One student, Lucha Papikyan from the village of Aragatsavan in Armenia, shared that her experience was different. Her school’s Student Council which unlike most such groups has a mandate to partner with administrators to strengthen the school, rather than to plan social events was quick to step up during the pandemic. They organised training for the teachers to help them learn how to utilise technology and conduct online lessons.
As an example of the kinds of change which place the student’s voice at an institutional level, Teach For Italy has designed its monitoring, evaluation, and learning system to serve as a tool for student engagement and empowerment. The system enables teachers to monitor their students’ personal and academic growth, their emotional and mental wellbeing, and also their opinions and feedback for the teachers about their classes, their overall experience in school and their own personal learning styles. Last year, Teach For Italy gave back all the data to its fellows, aggregated per class clusters, to allow them to discuss and interpret the results with their students. This approach strengthened these student communities around shared interpretations of their well-being and academic progress and kept them closer together during the months of lockdown. It fostered their selfreflection skills and their ability to influence their school environments. Going forward, the organisation aims to use this system to foster student leadership and active citizenship through ‘data ownership’. The organisation is developing a digital platform to simplify the participation of students in the surveys, enabling teachers to plan regular discussions of the results with their students, and teaching them how to autonomously visualise and understand the data they have generated.
Similarly, Suchita Mohan, a school leader with iTeach schools in Pune, India, who has charged his Student Council with a mandate to improve the school, shared with the group data from weekly tests of 9th graders. When the Student Council members saw how far behind the students were despite all the online learning that took place when schools were shut, they were concerned and took the initiative to create a plan. They met with each teacher to prioritise the content taught and provided extra support for students who needed it during and after the school day. With the help of these interventions, the school was able to achieve more than 90% of the students passing the high-stakes test and moving on to Grade 10.
Even before the pandemic, classrooms and schools were failing to prepare young people sufficiently to thrive in this uncertain world and to put communities, countries and our global society on a trajectory to meet our aspirations for peace, justice, sustainability, and shared prosperity. Today, at this juncture when students face unprecedented challenges to their learning and well-being, we have an incredible opportunity to change this, but only if we resist the temptation to jump to stop-gap interventions that don’t address the root causes of this failure. Meeting students’ well-documented needs and seizing this opportunity to create education systems that are fit for the challenges we face around the world will require elevating students’ agency and ownership and giving them the power. Our students are ready and waiting — they just need us to partner with them and do what is necessary to equip them for the future.
