A government survey tool is giving students a powerful voice in how their schools are run, says a local principal.
Larry Dick, principal of Paul Kane High School, spoke to St. Albert Protestant School Board trustees Wednesday about the Tell Them From Me project. The three-year project, run by Alberta Education and The Learning Bar, has students answer online surveys to give administrators a wealth of information about what they think about school.
Alberta Education spokesperson Karin Campbell said the project came out of the province’s high-school completion framework, which launched a number of research programs to figure out how to get more Albertans to finish high school.
About 48,000 students in 263 schools are involved in the pilot, including Paul Kane, Elmer S. Gish, Lorne Akins, Sir George Simpson, W.D. Cuts, and nine schools from the Sturgeon School Division.
Students who feel engaged in school learn more and are more likely to stay in it, said Dick, who is heading up the project for St. Albert Protestant. “We have to get kids to feel like they have an advocate in school.”
Tell Them From Me gets students to fill out half-hour questionnaires about student engagement twice a year and sends the results to school staff, Dick said. The questions measure 49 different indicators of engagement, including grades, effort, physical activity, bullying and alcohol use, which can be used to create snapshots of student attitudes.
“They provide unbelievable data,” he said. “It’s almost too much.”
Unlike traditional satisfaction surveys, said Simpson principal Pierre Rousseau, Tell Them From Me lets teachers really drill into the results. While a normal survey might reveal what percentage of students feel safe, for example, this one lets administrators figure out the age, gender, grades and programs of the ones who don’t. “This can give us a target.”
For example, Dick said, recent survey results suggested that most smokers in Paul Kane were Grade 11 and 12 boys, and that they smoked more than the provincial average. “A principal shaping a smoking campaign [now] definitely knows his target group.”
Rousseau said the survey helped his staff discover that about half of their Grade 8 and 9 boys weren’t doing homework. That prompted staff to reduce the amount of homework they assigned and to increase the amount of class time they gave for assignments.
Other results prompted Paul Kane to add 70 stalls to its parking lot, Dick said. “This invites a thousand kids to write a comment,” he said, and most do — the survey has an 85-per-cent response rate.
This is a powerful tool for school staff, Dick said, but is also one that could easily be abused.
“It’s kind of like discovering we can split the atom.” Parents might use the surveys for simplistic comparisons of schools, for example, while teachers might overemphasize its results. “I’m concerned [the surveys] might become what education is about.”
It also gives students a chance to get more engaged with school, Rousseau said. When he showed survey results to his Grade 9 classes and asked them to explain them, the students came back with some great suggestions.
“The fact that they realize that whatever they’ve done in the survey comes back to them … gives some meaning to this.”
The project wraps up next year.
