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In this episode, we sit down to talk with Dr. Dana Mitra, a leadership coach and author of The Empowered Professor. She discusses the transformative power of student voice in education, emphasizing the framework of agency, belonging, and competence.
Using timely research, Dr. Mitra highlights practical strategies for educators to counteract tactics that suppress student voices so they can foster a collaborative environment that truly empowers students. The Big Dream Dr. Mitra envisions an educational landscape where student voices are central to decision-making processes. She wants educators to embody an equity mindset, making sure that the most disadvantaged folks facing the greatest struggles are at the center of change efforts. Mindset Shifts Required One important mindset shift for educators to embrace is that all social issues—and any kind of change we want—start with education. You can’t disengage from political issues or what’s going on in culture, and it’s important to be in touch with those things because they all start in the classroom. Dr. Mitra also highlights the mindset shift of viewing students as partners, not merely participants, in the educational process. Students and educators bring unique skills and assets to the partnership. Action Steps Here are some action steps educators can take to build capacity in their school environment to prioritize and support student voice: Step 1: Commit to establishing youth-adult partnerships. Both educators and students need training and education in this so they can collaboratively work together. Step 2: Get resources and support by partnering with others. Educators don’t have to do this alone, but can seek support from nonprofits or organizations that can help sustain student voice initiatives and provide necessary training for both students and educators. Step 3: Educate students on practical matters like how schools work, policy processes, and how they can use language that speaks to adult audiences. Step 4: Implement practical strategies to create inclusive spaces and challenge traditional authority dynamics. This includes things as simple as reconsidering seating arrangements (i.e., students sitting in prominent positions, showing their perspectives are valued at a meeting), or going deeper and holding intentional conversations with students about their challenges. Step 5: Focus on building trust. Students, especially those who have been traumatized and negatively impacted by educational systems, may initially “test” educators by acting out. But as educators respond with compassion, kindness, and care, trust is established. True educator-student partnerships can only operate on a basis of trust. Challenges? One challenge is the impact of external factors on the classroom or school space. So, even caring educational spaces may be impacted by things like immigration policies and other current events. This causes friction, so educators are challenged to create more layers that reinforce a supporting, caring space; they operate as buffers and protectors of the space. One Step to Get Started Educators seeking to prioritize and support student voices can start by asking big questions and involving students who are directly affected by the issues at hand. Dr. Mitra encourages us to engage students as fellow travelers in the problem-solving process, ensuring initiatives are meaningful and impactful for all involved. Another simple action step is to connect with other educators who naturally collaborate with students and dream together with them. Stay Connected You can connect with Dr. Mitra on her website or by email. To help you implement today’s takeaways, our guest is sharing The Student Voice Toolkit with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 213 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
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TRANSCRIPT
00:02 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Dr Dena Meacham. Welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited for this conversation. Listeners know I've cited you many times in my written work and my verbal stuff on the podcast, but I think, aside from your kind of professional bio, is there anything you want people to know about or keep in mind as we jump into our conversation, whether it's like you as a whole human or something you've been working on recently. What should we know? 00:30 - Dr. Dana Mitra (Guest) I think one of the things I've really tried to do in recent years is to think about ways that this work can apply in clinical and related settings. 00:39 So about 12, 15 years ago I became a certified coach and in some ways it feels like it's a very different thing, but for me, the philosophy coaching is helping people find their voice, find what their purpose is in the agency. 00:57 They have to be able to navigate their world better, so it's really thinking of a very similar framework their world better, so it's really thinking of a very similar framework. And I recently wrote a book called the Empowered Professor, which finds that agency and belonging and competence actually is a developmental framework that works for any age and anyone of really trying to think through how they want to feel more authentic, how they want to feel more connected, what skills they need to move forward, whatever stuck place that they're in. And you know working with a lot of mid-career people with it as well as grad students who are stuck on their dissertations, and so, as much as I've done most of this work in K-12 settings, it's been really fun to see the way that the framework can be used in broader ways, especially when thinking about career development things like that. 01:50 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) That is a fascinating evolution. That's such a good point that those components are so necessary for all humans, regardless of age. So that's super cool, I think, with regard to either the K-12 space or, just like larger life spaces, coaching spaces, you know, I think about Dr Bettina Love's words around freedom dreaming, and so she talks about her dreams grounded in the critique of injustice. And so, considering that, considering, like just all of the pieces of the world that are unjust, what is kind of that dream you hold? Again, either for the education space, what's a freedom dream you have there? Or in your work now more broadly, oh, gosh. 02:30 - Dr. Dana Mitra (Guest) I mean recording this just at the beginning of the Trump administration, when there's so much uncertainty about so many things that it I feel so ungrounded right now about what reality is and what's possible. So, you know, a few months ago it would have been really thinking about ways that voice and could really have strong ties to an equity mindset of making sure that the most disadvantaged and the folks who are facing the greatest struggles are at the center of change efforts, and that I still believe that. But while the context surrounding that of what is possible are really changing right now and I don't think any of us really know how to make sense of it. 03:20 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Yeah, it's such an important like contextualization for our conversation, given that that, like the world, often right, in K-12 education particularly, I think often there is this pull towards like this mythical neutrality or like staying out of politics, or at least in my experience in teaching high school was so central to just making those connections and inviting students to, you know, have that agency to share, to think about action steps, to think about collective action, at a school level even, or a classroom level, you know whatever feels possible and doable. 04:05 A classroom, you know whatever feels possible and doable. I also know that there's a lot of teachers who, whenever we talk about a pedagogy or an invitation for more student voice, have a hesitation, right, and there's just kind of this oh, that's not how I was taught, or that's like a you know a thing that feels wildly different and almost impossible to like hand over control to students. Like this is in my coaching a lot of times, what comes up as like a hesitancy and I'm curious, what's kind of the either advice you give to teachers who might be in that space, or kind of a mindset shift that you've seen be really effective for teachers to kind of unlock that student voice pedagogy. 04:41 - Dr. Dana Mitra (Guest) Yeah, I teach teachers or pre-service teachers at Penn State. Yeah, I teach teachers or pre-service teachers at Penn State, and even before that, they're required to take a course in politics and policy with me, and less so than even 10 years ago and certainly since the pandemic. But you know, I would get questions of like why do I need to learn this? I want to be in my classroom, I don't want to work in politics and just trying to show them the ways that any political question or any social change that we want to have, we often start first at schools, including ice raids and removing students right now, so showing them that any social issue is going to show up in terms of things they're expected to do or engaged in. But things are so immediate in the past few years I have to make that argument less around, whether it be masking or and now with immigration. I think one of the most important things that I tried in the second level is to help understand that teacher voice and student voice build upon one another. It's very rare for there to be ability for students to have agency and belonging if teachers don't feel that first and 95% of the time, the concerns that students have if you get under the hood. Under the questions are shared concerns that can be worked on together because both groups have the same interests and well-being at heart of equity and resources and power. 06:25 It's not a zero-sum game of teachers ever handing over power. 06:28 It's finding the unique contributions and the perspectives that students can give to a situation to allow a more ready conversation and ways alliances can be formed. 06:43 It's in the world of human development and agriculture, actually studying like nonprofit organizations for age, things like that. They use the term youth adult partnership and I think that's really a helpful concept to think about that there is a partnership and both, and it does involve power sharing, but it's all about the unique skills and assets that each group can bring and thinking about those unique funds of knowledge resources that are there and how they can be a synergy to move towards excellence. Even at like, the state level of Oregon and Kentucky are some wonderful examples of ways that legislators have partnered with students, because students are just so much more articulate and the media appreciate them more that issues that students are really excited about if they can help students to be a part of hearings, a part of press conferences in a way that students are not co-opted but very much partners. It can be a really powerful way to move change in places where change is really not happening right now. 07:54 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Thank you for those concrete examples and I am interested in that. The students are not co-opted, but they're true partners concept. I think that's a very common misstep sometimes when we're like, oh, student voice, and then it becomes this very different, like not actual partnership, not actually grounded in students ideas and leadership. So I'm curious, do you mind talking a little bit about that or giving us maybe an example of like what, what, how do we know where we are in that kind of continuum? How do we know where we are in that kind of continuum? 08:25 - Dr. Dana Mitra (Guest) Indeed, and I think again, the leadership from Kentucky has done some really wonderful thinking about both what are ways that change can be impacted, but also in thinking about what are ways that adults and people in power try to suppress student voice. And so Andrew Brennan and Zachariah Sippy worked with Jerusha Connor recently in a publication that talks about five tactics to suppress student voice that they've experienced from the Kentucky legislature from trivialization, which is minimizing concerns. Dismissal, which is not recognizing. Tokenization, which is allowing students in but not really, and then there's derailment and exclusion. 09:24 So I really appreciate the work collectively that Kentucky Student Voice has done over the years and has been able to have the churn of students, which is natural because students grow up with but still very student-centered and wise perspective. They've been able to make real great gains. But because they're increasingly powerful or like known that they can do these things, they're also viewed as a threat by folks who would not want to see that happen. So at the same time that they're learning and becoming more sophisticated as to ways to build partnerships with legislature, there are legislators who are not wanting students' voices to be heard, who view them as a threat to traditional ways of thinking. So they've gotten more on both sides of that successes but also real blowback. 10:22 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Thank you for sharing that. I didn't know of that recent research, so that's really exciting about naming the five tactics, not exciting in practice of what is happening. I do see that sometimes, even in the microcosm of the school, the just administrators fearing change or, you know, kind of suppressing student voice in that way, even when we're trying to make a change at how we we organize classes or you know something that's affecting student learning directly in the school community. And so I think this is valuable for policy level and class level, for teachers who are listening and leaders who are listening I'm curious about. So one of the places that my research went was like what are the mechanisms to help support student voice? 11:02 And thinking about your student voice pyramid, like really how to support kind of the top tiers your student voice pyramid, like really how to, how to support kind of the top tiers of of student voice, so we're not just like listening to students but we're truly partnering with and inviting students to lead. And so I know you talked about youth adult partnerships. You've written about like youth participatory action research. There's like a bunch of different, I think, things that might feel Similar, yeah, yeah, similar and big, and I'm curious to know for, maybe like a newer teacher or a teacher who's new to this work what would be your recommendation of like where do you kind of get started or what are some actions you can take to think about how you might kind of build that capacity in your school environment? 11:43 - Dr. Dana Mitra (Guest) Yeah, I think I can also have you link to the podcast and infographic that I've created on ways to support student voice. That might be useful to teachers. I think first and foremost, what we've learned is the importance of not doing it trying to go alone, but finding a nonprofit, an organization that can help support them. I did some work on some student voice initiatives in different schools once and went back a few years later to see which ones sustained and they were all organizations. They had some partnership outside of the school, because so much happens in a school and there's so many different pressures that are not student forward that having a non-profit or or some sort of organization on rarely and sometimes it's a district or or an intermediary unit that really believes in this, but usually it's in the United States. It's a non, a nonprofit who has this as their mission so they can keep steadfast while teachers are struggling with that and there's a lot of wonderful organizations out there to work with. So I think having that partner and not having to figure it all out themselves and get resources and support, resources and support and relatedly it's teachers and all adults and all students need some sort of support and training. Teachers need to learn how to be more of that guide from the side, how to enable and really scaffold but have students go forward. A lot of it's around valuing process over product, because how it's happening is as important as any campaign that's occurring. On the student side, they need a lot of learning about how schools work, how policy processes work and getting training on how to use certain words when speaking in front of adults that adults prefer to hear code switching, those kind of things. So there's training needed on both sides. 13:56 There's also a lot of interesting attention that can be paid to, especially in the very beginning. Just the physical setup of like where are you as an adult sitting? Where are students sitting? Is the space in a circle? I even went to a hearing in India where the students were standing and the politicians were sitting on the ground, which is more common in India. I don't think that would happen in the United States, but I could see like a lecture platform with people in chairs, very intentional to try to disrupt some of the assumptions as to who has the authority in a space and just not just that students are being listened to, but who are you talking to? So if you're really concerned about failing ninth graders, then that's who you're working with. So if you're really concerned about failing ninth graders, then that's who you're working with. Oftentimes the leaders in the school, the student council, kids, whoever and I was one of them. But school worked for me. I thought more like an adult. I'm not then as helpful in understanding what students are thinking about, who are struggling. So that's the workspace and the faith that those students also and especially have a contribution to make in thinking through change efforts. 15:13 And you know, an example is a fishbowl done by a high school trying to figure out what was going on with the increased absenteeism in this ninth grade dropout situation. So they brought in the ninth graders on verge of dropping out and the student teacher sat outside in like a second circle and they asked the students to share their experiences. And what they were finding is the students would not be able to come to school for various reasons, including having to take care of younger children if they were sick, or having to work a night shift and not being able to wake up in the morning. But then, when they would come to school, feeling shame and a lot of anger expressed towards them for not coming and not really a curiosity as to what was going on, which reinforced their reluctance to come further. So it became a spiral. So instead of looking at like what are the broader structures that are making it difficult for this student to get there, and wow, like the research post-pandemic is that these issues of absenteeism have really increased and stayed at a higher level and not declined, that becomes even a bigger issue. So root causes getting underneath and assuming the best intentions of both sides and coming to some sort of understanding and that really gets to the point. 16:49 And some recent research that I've done, particularly looking at students who have been traumatized by school in some way before, or their parents have been or something. Really they had a teacher or an experience that was really awful, a teacher or an experience that was really awful. Once that happens and usually that has happened to students from students by the time they get to middle or high school then there's this trust has to happen first, like the rebuilding has to be at the first point of any effort. And research around trust rebuilding says that there's kind of this dance that people do, including students, including students, traumatized students of can I trust you? 17:37 And there's often been a testing of a small, acting out, or something to see like how are they going to behave if something happens? 17:49 Are they going to be curious? Are they going to be compassionate? Are they going to treat me like I'm not a human being? So that testing is is like part of like a ritual and a culture of trying to figure out what that's going to look like, and only once that is moved through is partnership actually possible. So that building of trust needs to be very forefront in minds of both a caring also a willingness of adults to be vulnerable, to share themselves as more than just a particular role, themselves as more than just a particular role, and see students as more than just the student role that they have, all these other responsibilities and roles that they play. So that holistic viewing is really at the center of how trust is built and without that, that student voice is very hard, either in classrooms or schools and it's going to take longer in places where students have experienced greater alienation and their families have experienced greater alienation from previous school experiences. 18:58 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Wow, I'm so glad that you took us there because I think that is what a lot of people I mean a lot of people have experienced. And also I think about your naming, like you know, marginalized populations and thinking about students with interrupted formal education or students with, like, bad school experiences, students who are multilingual, who have just immigrated, who are in the larger context of, you know, the United States right now. Even if your teacher is lovely, you know like there's so many factors that are like we need to make sure and, of course, individuals need to make sure that they're like testing the space and making sure it's like, psychologically safe. I think that makes total sense to be able to like focus there. I'm curious, you just kind of named a bunch of challenges that like people kind of have to overcome. Are there any other challenges that you have seen in the student voice space that you want to kind of name and like make sure people know about and maybe know how to like address that if it comes up? 19:55 - Dr. Dana Mitra (Guest) Well, just that. Even when schools create beautiful containers of caring, when we have policies like immigration, that agents able to come in, that is impact. So it's like there's, you know, the layers of there's the classroom and the school, the district and then these outside community forces, and the more that these layers reinforce a supporting caring space, the better, and the more that there's friction between them. You need adults who are big buffers and protectors of space. So, and again, even in caring spaces, the ways in which administration can protect and allow for some grace to, for the messiness that may need to occur as things are being built or experiments are happening, and without that safety of knowing that an administrator has your back, it's a lot harder to take risks, and this work takes risks. So the administrative protection is also really important. 21:02 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Thank you for naming that. I was just recently at a professional development and leading with history curriculum in Massachusetts and it was so cool to see the Massachusetts representatives of the Department of Education get up in front of all these teachers and be like we have your back, we want you to teach this, we are committed to justice. It means talking about all these things X, y, z. You could just see the energy in the room. Just be like okay, like I know I'm protected. I just heard this from a state representative Like we're good, it is wildly unsettling everything that's happening, and so to be able, now more than ever maybe, to just have that person be that buffer, I think is huge. Thanks for naming that. 21:46 I think this is such a big like there's so many challenges and yet it's so important, right, I think about student leadership and student voice in these ways like super important. Most people can agree that it is super important and there's some kind of gap sometimes between the yes, we think it's important and like the implementation of getting started. So I love that you've kind of named all of the things to consider I'm wondering about like a first step for someone who's just like ending the episode, wants to try out something today, wants to kind of move in that direction. What is something that a listener could do today when they end the episode and kind of get moving in that direction? 22:23 - Dr. Dana Mitra (Guest) Well, we've done a lot of work lately, thinking with Jerisha Connor and Sammy Holquist, thinking about classroom level student voice as well as school level student voice. And if we're thinking of teachers, usually they have more agency. Thinking about classroom and we're trying to distinguish between what voices and what choice are, as well as other really great pedagogical ideas like cultural awareness, building trust, but trying to show how voice is distinctly different. And so voice in a classroom setting is more about either students giving feedback after teachers are teaching or giving insight into the design of things going forward. But it, you know, it's not just like you can do a PowerPoint presentation or a book report. It's more of like how was that experience for you? How could we do it different? What are you wanting more of? What are you wanting less? Helping students develop metacognitively around how they work as a learner and how they can best articulate that to their teachers. So, from a classroom perspective, I would say you know thinking of, and we have a student voice toolkit that's available online through the Search Institute, that's available to all teachers and administrators, with a bunch of different data collection and tools that could be used to try to elicit feedback and collaboration processes. And at the school level. It's getting brave to ask some of the big questions and bring students in who are struggling with them as fellow travelers, and starting small is fine, I think, as long as you're picking the kids who are really engaged in the issue and that takes a strong leader who's willing to put that as part of it. I think it's very compatible with a lot of restorative justice, disciplinary policies that a lot of schools are really looking into around that, building that peace and that understanding. So thinking of ways that voice could help to amplify and improve even further efforts around shifts in discipline policies is something at the at the school level that might be really helpful. 24:47 Um, and, and that's kind of like really getting into the meat of things, I think a lot of times folks try to start by like asking students what they want and not having a guide to be able to ever have shown them they can do something meaningful. 25:02 They'll say like we want extra pizza at lunch, which fair, fine, but like, but really like, if. Even if you're going to start one thing, have it. Have it be something that's meaningful to everyone and useful of your time and and that way adults will be more willing to invest. It also may require a little bit more of whoever is running a space to scaffold some rules around, like you have a student at your table anding new assessment ideas or whatever, and training students, as you're going to go in here and you're going to see what this is what you're going to see and this is the role but that person running that is really then like creating guardrails and helping for that to occur. So try it out, but make it real. Start with a few students, but if you know, and really also as a leader, like there are, there are teachers who naturally do this. 26:08 I call them wizards, as did my former advisor Millbrae McLaughlin, but like, so you know, as if you're trying to initiate something like who the teachers are, who just kind of naturally behave this way, like start with them. Who the teachers are, who just kind of naturally behave this way, Like start with them. You know, don't start with the hard parts and ask them like what have they been dreaming and wanting to do? And I bet they have a few ideas in their mind that are pretty fantastic. So really building on the skill sets of natural born collaborators, with young people as a starting place. 26:42 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) I love all those ideas. Thank you for sharing those. I think you kind of went in the direction I was going to go, just to kind of start closing us out. You've shared a lot of things that you have been learning about lately and like new research that you're working on that has come out, anything you want to add to what you've already shared in terms of things you're learning about. It also could be totally separate from education. It could be like I'm learning how to play the piano or something. 27:07 - Dr. Dana Mitra (Guest) In that toolkit. 27:08 We really worked hard to create a quantitative measure that is available to be used, but also, if schools wanted assistance, they can look at the search Institute to see if that's helpful to them. 27:24 But we really initially engaged in this project and learned a whole bunch of other things, but realizing that there isn't a good way to measure what is the range of what student voice looks like at the classroom and school level and how is it linked to outcomes, and so there's a bunch of things being published right now that again I can link to your show notes and things around ways that we've been able to find that at both the classroom and school level that increased voice is connected to improved academic outcomes, higher GPA, lower absenteeism, greater student engagement, and it's one of the first US studies that's really been able to show that, not just at the qualitative level, but to have enough data and have enough financial support thanks to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to look at this at a scale in which we can measure and, have you know, look at this at a scale in which we can measure and, have you know, we were able to get down to the granular student level of access to their records as well as their surveys, to be able to pair performance with outcomes, and so we're really excited that our hypotheses were true that Student Voice does link to academic improved academic outcomes and behavioral outcomes. 28:45 It's been a lot easier to show the social and emotional side of things because that's easier to show qualitatively. So excited to have that data as evidence that practitioners can use to show the value of potential impact, and also happy to have some tools that other people can use and further develop and hone if they want to collect information in their school districts or for their researchers, who are looking for a validated survey instrument to use for their studies as well. 29:18 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Wow, okay, I am really excited and nerding out right now because that my dissertation was looking at like what is? I did kind of a mixed methods, developing a survey around student voice, cause I was like, yeah, there's such a like there's such a need for this here, and so that's so cool that you guys were doing such a massive scale study, cause you know it's hard to it's hard to do that work, so, so hard. 29:39 - Dr. Dana Mitra (Guest) I was trying to do it for 20 years and I had given up, because foundations and and government have their own visions for what they're looking for when they're funding, and student voice is always kind of to them like this quirky, interesting thing, but never at the center of any call for submissions. 29:57 So it often get to like the final round and then lose out to someone who had more traditional types of ways of data collecting and going about their work. And then, luckily, during the pandemic just was one of those situations where I was just looking for people who I could talk to online to my classes when we were fully remote and was like, oh, I have a. I know somebody who I think she works in charter schools and turned out that she was working at the Gates Foundation, learned about what we were doing, and then there was a group of colleagues that were, you know, ramping up some funding on that. So it was very synergistic and all of a sudden we had the you know almost a million dollars to do this work, and that's how much it takes to do something like this, unfortunately, whereas you know we had kind of thought like it was never going to happen. So don't ever give up and just keep saying what you're wanting to do and you never know who you talk to. Might know somebody who really wants to support you. 31:04 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) That's incredible. Oh, what a story. I love that. 31:08 - Dr. Dana Mitra (Guest) Yeah, it's a wild story. 31:10 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Yeah, oh, wow. I love when all the things connections are so important, because something always comes back together. That's right, that's right, and I think just people will probably want to continue learning. I certainly am going to continue following what you're doing. Where can people kind of connect with you and and kind of follow your work? 31:29 - Dr. Dana Mitra (Guest) sure, um you can find my research as well as my coaching work at danamitranet and there's a link to uh under the research tab. There's a link to all of my research there as well, as well as the student voice toolkit. If you Google that with Search Institute, our resources are there as well, and there's a link to all of our current papers through the Search Institute from this study, so that's a way to find that as well. 31:56 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Incredible Dr Mejia. Thank you so much for your time today. This was a real pleasure. 32:01 - Dr. Dana Mitra (Guest) Thank you Thanks for having me.
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AuthorLindsay Lyons is an educational justice coach who helps schools and districts co-create feminist, antiracist civics-based curricula, discussion opportunities, and equitable policies that challenge, affirm, and inspire all students. A former NYC public school teacher, she holds a PhD in Leadership and Change, and is the founder of the blog and podcast, Time for Teachership. Lindsay believes all students deserve literacy, criticality, and leadership skills. Archives
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