“I like when the teacher asks me what I think,” one kindergartner from the Early Learning Village in Jessamine County said.
“I like when we get to pick our learning stations,” another kindergartner from the Early Learning Village stated.
“Younger students must experience a myriad of voice opportunities and develop skills that support their emerging voices in order to be eager learners and prepared to engage in a meaningful partnership with students,” Kristin Fox, a vice principal in Ohio and member of the National Association of Elementary School Principals, said.
Younger students not only want and like having a voice in their school, they need it. Even though this is so important, it is not happening in most kindergartens around Kentucky. But why?
Some adults think that younger students simply don’t care about or don’t have opinions about school. Other teachers don’t believe that student opinions should impact what happens in the classroom or school. And some teachers do want to elevate student voices in their classroom, but they just don’t know how.
I have heard so many times that kindergartners don’t have opinions, or that they don’t care, or even that they just don’t know what is best for themselves. I do not believe this is true. When I was first introduced to the idea of student voice, I only heard of it in terms of middle schools and high schools, and I wondered why student voice couldn’t be just as present in elementary schools and kindergartens. So I contacted the Early Learning Village, a school in Jessamine County with only preschoolers and kindergartners, about my idea for a student voice interview project. They thought it was a great idea, so I did research about student voice and came up with a set of questions. Starting out, I thought that this project would only last about a year, but it ended up lasting three, and I am still going strong.
When a student has the chance to share their voice and opinion, they begin to develop ownership of their learning.
For the past three years, I have interviewed around 300 kindergartners at the Jessamine Early Learning Village. I would pull students out of their classroom individually to ask them seven different questions about what they thought about their school and teachers. Almost all 300 students had an answer to every question. The answers ranged from the obvious — wanting more recess or wanting to paint all the walls in the school pink — to the less intuitive — kids saying that they wish they had more time for learning centers, or they didn’t like breakfast because they weren’t able to go through the line like all their friends were since they had brought their own breakfast. At the end of each year, I would make a presentation of all the data I had collected and present it at a staff meeting at the Jessamine Early Learning Village. Then the teachers and I would work together to come up with solutions to solve the problems that the students had told me. All of these things may seem like simple changes, but to a kindergarten student, knowing that their opinions were taken into consideration could mean the world. My interviews clearly showed that younger students do have opinions about their school and want to share them.
When a student has the chance to share their voice and opinion, they begin to develop ownership of their learning. This helps the student become engaged in class because they want to learn more, which in turn helps create a strong foundation for their education, learning, student voice, and leadership skills. It is important to start encouraging student voice at a young age so that students can build on this foundation as they get older.
One of my favorite quotes is “A person’s a person, no matter how small.” Despite kindergartners being four-foot-tall five-year-olds, they should still be able to have a voice in their education. No matter what age, a student should always be able to express their opinion. Kindergartners are the ones in the classroom, the ones who are coming to school everyday to learn: they might know a little something about what or even how they like to learn.
Since student voice in younger students is clearly very important, how can teachers promote student voice in their classroom? There are so many different ways. A teacher could simply ask students what they like and don’t like about coming to school. Some of the answers may be predictable, but others might help a teacher — and even if all the answers are predictable, the students are still able to experience the benefits of sharing their voices. Another option could be learning centers, where teachers set up different stations around the classroom and the student gets to pick which one they go to. For example, if a classroom is working on certain sight words, one station could be a student reading the sight words, another could be writing the sight words, another could be spelling them with magnets, and even another could be writing sentences with the sight words in them. This creates a choice for the students. Finally, teachers could include students in decisions about what topics they want to learn about. For example, if there was a unit about storytelling, the students could pick a topic like castles, the ocean, or sports. The teacher would then make an effort to pick stories or activities that go along with that topic. I have seen these examples work, and you can tell that the students are much more engaged when they have a voice in their learning.
Student voice is something that is critical for a student to experience. Starting young gives the students a foundation, and as they grow, they can build onto it.
