| What can we learn from our classes as a group - why and how does pupil consultation work? |
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Research taster
Pupil voice research explores pupils’ perspectives on teaching and learning, how teachers responded to their pupils’ suggestions and the effects of pupils participating in research. Rather as formative assessment gives you a window into the learning of an individual, pupil voice work offers insights into the learning processes of a whole class. 
Your evidence
Pupil voice revolves around gauging the reaction of a class to something, be it an organisational issue or teaching practice. Gathering these from the entire class can show the range of opinion and any consensus on more or less any topic. At its most straightforward, discerning the responses of a class to any situation, just involves asking them to write down what they observe. One way of organising this is to design a simple questionnaire, asking pupils about various aspects of a lesson and getting them to rank each aspect from one to five. You might focus initially on easily observable issues like the types of activities, the pace of work or the phasing of class and homework. Teachers are usually surprised at the seriousness and depth of perceptions their pupils bring to such questionnaires. What surprises do your pupils’ responses contain for you – and how can you use these to enhance your own and your pupils’ experiences of the teaching and learning process? What will help your pupils to see how much you respect their efforts and insights, especially when it isn’t possible for you to act on them? Taken from Reflective Activity 6-2e Moving forward Your own and your pupils’ motivations for using pupil voice as a tool to inform and shape teaching and learning experiences may well be different from those of the initial researchers. For example you will probably want to concentrate on issues that you can affect directly. Having taken your first steps and considered how to use them, can you see other areas where a shared exploration of pupils’ perceptions would help you to tackle more intransigent problems? What do you need to do to turn this potential into a reality? Find out more:  The project website: http://www.consultingpupils.co.uk/ A TLRP Research Brief on pupil voice at: http://www.tlrp.org/pub/documents/no5_ruddock.pdf A GTC Research of the Month summary on pupil voice at: http://www.gtce.org.uk/policyandresearch/research/ROMtopics/pupilvoice/ |
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