Centering Student Voice and Building Equity: Five Insights from Street Data
In the continually evolving landscape of education, the importance of centering student voice and fostering equity cannot be overstated. The book, Street Data by Shane Safir and Jamila Dugan, provides a transformative framework for educators and districts to prioritize fostering student voice, advocacy, efficacy, belongingness, equity, connection, and relationships. By shifting our focus from standardized metrics to the lived experience, voices, and perspectives of students at the margins and ALL students within our care, we can begin to co-create more inclusive and equitable educational climates.
1. Embracing Student Voice and Advocacy
Street Data emphasizes the power of listening to students' stories, insights, and perspectives. By valuing their voices, we can better understand their needs, challenges, and strengths; fostering a more responsive, informed, and supportive collective efficacy in our classrooms and schools.
Actionable Steps
Conduct Listening Sessions: Regularly hold listening sessions with students to hear their experiences and concerns. Co-create safe agreements and open spaces where all participating feel comfortable sharing and the actions and experiences of deep and focused listening are studied and practiced.
Student-Led Forums: Encourage students to lead discussions and present and share on topics that matter to them. This promotes ownership, advocacy, and ever growing efficacy. Embracing student knowledge shares can often function as a primary source in the process of growing school and classroom culture and moving from TEACHER efficacy (where students depend on their teachers’ belief in them) to developing their very own SELF efficacy.
Incorporate Student Feedback: Consistently INVITE student feedback to inform instructional practices, curriculum design, school and classroom culture, practices, and policies. Be responsive to student shares, insights, requests, and ideas; follow through with communication and co-create change when possible and profitable. Assure students that their voices can drive meaningful change.
2. Fostering Efficacy and Belonging
Creating a sense of efficacy and belonging is crucial for student engagement, collaboration, and success. When students feel valued and capable, they are more likely to take risks, participate actively, and persevere through challenges.
Actionable Steps
Highlight Strengths and Talents within a Growth Mindset: Acknowledge and celebrate unique strengths that are apparent now and provide frequent opportunities for productive struggle. Ask students often, as a positive question, “What are you struggling with” (as opposed to whether anything is challenging them) and open discussions with them to share how they struggle and how they themselves persevere. This can help to normalize struggle, even celebrate struggle, and grow self-efficacy for doing hard things.
Collaborative Learning: Promote group work and collaborative projects that encourage peer support and shared learning. This helps students experience connection and being a part of a learning community that celebrates teamwork and healthy group growth and dynamics.
Mentorship Programs: Co-create mentorship programs that connect students with older peers, teachers, or community members. Provide frequent opportunities for skill sharing by thoughtfully grouping students for the purpose of growth and relationship development. These experiences can provide guidance, support, a sense of belonging and ownership within school and classroom culture, and a tremendous amount of learning that inevitably occurs in both the mentor and the student throughout the duration of the program.
3. Advancing Equity and Connection
Street Data challenges educators and districts to confront systemic inequities and work towards a more just and inclusive educational system. This involves critically examining each of our practices, policies, and mindsets.
Actionable Steps
Equity Audits: Conduct regular equity audits (within schools, grade level teams, and even classrooms), to identify and address disparities in access, resources, and opportunities. Use intermittent action data collected by teams to inform targeted interventions.
Culturally Responsive Pedagogy: Incorporate culturally responsive teaching practices that honor and reflect the diverse backgrounds of students. Co-create (with teacher teams and students) some of the instructional content to include more diverse texts, perspectives, visiting experts, and materials in the curriculum.
Family and Community Engagement: Proactively foster strong partnerships and relationships through greenhousing families and the community. Engage them in the educational process, invite them to share their cultural knowledge and experiences, and honor them by centering their story and voice within classrooms and during school meetings or assemblies.
4. Building Relationships and Connection
Strong, positive relationships are at the heart of a thriving educational milieu. Street Data underscores the importance of relational trust and connection between students, educators, families, and the community.
Actionable Steps
Regular Check-Ins: Foster trust by implementing regular check-ins with students to build rapport, demonstrate fully attentive listening, and seek to genuinely understand their emotional, academic, and social needs. This can be done through one-on-one meetings, surveys, and informal conversations.
Advisory Programs: Create advisory periods where students can connect with a consistent group of peers and a trusted adult. This provides a safe space for relationship-building and personal growth.
Social-Emotional Learning (SEL): Integrate SEL practices into daily content to help students develop skills in co- and self-regulation, self-efficacy, empathy, and relationship-building within the school and within the school community.
5. Transforming Schools Through Student-Centered Practices
To truly center student voice and promote equity, schools must embrace a student-centered approach in all aspects of their operations. This requires a commitment, first, of adults in ongoing reflection, learning, and purposefully focusing on growing adaptive expertise as educators and staff. We must be the lead learners who become “students” of our students.
Actionable Steps for Schools
Professional Development: Offer continuous professional development focused on elevating culturally responsive teaching, equity, and student-centered practices. Consistent attention to self-reflection (and peer feedback) can be prioritized; purposeful and frequent opportunities for educators to rehearse practices that force us to decenter ourselves as the primary “source of knowledge” within the classroom or the school have the capacity to empower us in the transformational follow-through required to begin to truly center student voice.
Inclusive Decision-Making: Involve students in decision-making processes (co-creation) at the classroom and school levels. Create student councils or advisory boards that are empowered to have a voice in shaping school policies and initiatives.
Strategic Vision, Mission, and Plan Alignment: Ensure that the school's vision, mission, and strategic plan align with the values of equity, inclusion, and centering student voice and experience. Regularly revisit guiding principles and regularly assess progress throughout schools within the district.
The Path Forward
Centering student voice and prioritizing equity is not a one-time effort, but an ongoing, and often, uphill journey. By intentionally, empathically, and compassionately listening to our own staff, our students and their families; by valuing their experiences, and sharing our commitment to increase listening and better understand our path and required steps toward equity, we can co-create spaces that are not only places of learning, but also spaces of belonging, profound connection, and transformational growth for all stakeholders. .
Our collective efforts in fostering student voice, advocacy, efficacy, and equity can lead to more inclusive and empowering environments within our schools and school cultures. As we embrace the principles outlined in Street Data, we can move forward toward fostering vibrant schools where our students will both feel and know that they are heard, valued, and are actively being empowered toward exponential growth, personally and collectively, within the school and the school community.
