This material was developed by Education Scotland and East Lothian Council and was originally developed for the Student Voice: Bridge to Learning conference in Scotland, in May 2018. It provides a learning conference plan for practitioners and includes a PPT for the cooperative learning activity.
Conference plan is below. Please also see Appendix 2: Activating Learner Voice PPT.
09.30 - Registration
10.00 - Welcome – Ross High School Pupil Leadership Team
Nick Morgan, Education Scotland
10.45 - Local Authority participation initiatives - Caroline Davis, ELC
11.25 - Learner participation in the classroom - Musselburgh Grammar Lead Learner Team
Workshop Plan – Activating student voice in learning & teaching
- Learning intentions – Caroline, Zoe + pupils – brief introduction of learning intentions and success criteria for the task. (Slide attached!) - 5 mins
- Organise participants into groups - 10 mins
- Start by asking for examples of hello from the different partner countries (Holland, Hungary, Ireland, Slovenia, Scotland) – pupils could ask everyone to repeat this as a whole group.
- Ask participants to move into mixed country groups by walking round, saying hello in the different languages and forming multilingual/international groups. Each group should have around 4 to 5 languages.
- There are 37 delegates altogether + pupils so if they could create 8 groups of 4 or 5 that would be great.
- Once seated in groups, please ask delegates to introduce themselves to each other including their names, school background, country and interest in the project.
- Group Activity - 15 minutes
- The activity will be to look at how do you activate student voice in the classroom in 4 different areas:
Planning -Learning and teaching -Assessment-Evaluation / Feedback
- Each group will be assigned one expert area (Planning, L&T, Assessment and Evaluation & Feedback)
- Their task is to:
- Define the importance of student voice in your area: e.g. describe the impact of student voice in planning
- Brainstorm as many ideas as they can in their area and display your ideas on a poster i.e. Come up with as many ideas as you can for activating student voice in lesson planning.
- Pupils can participate in the groups and play an active role in the task.
- I’ll bring task sheets, pens and A3 paper for the group task.
- Gallery Walkround - 10 mins
- Ask delegates to display their posters either on their tables or on the walls (I’ll bring blue tack for this)
- Move back into country group.
- Move round each poster (2 mins per poster) – whoever participated in its development, will then present that poster to their country group.
- Plenary – 5 mins
- Move back into country groups
- Debrief and discuss – what will you take back? Pick one thing per area.
- Sharing and feedback – ask for feedback on what different delegates will take away from the task.
- We will collect in the brainstorms and will type them up to be shared with all partner countries as an Intellectual Output.
- Thank you to everyone for their contribution!
12.15 - Lunch – Hotel restaurant
13.00 - 13.45 - Workshop 1 - Ross High School
13.50 - 14.35 - Workshop 2 - Musselburgh Grammar
14.40 - 15.25 - Workshop 3 - North Berwick High School
15.30 Plenary – North Berwick High School Lead Learners
16.00 Close
Presentation files - Please click image to go to full PP
This planning framework is designed to support a conference for education practitioners, led by pupils and designed to share practice and develop thinking around student voice.
This material could be used in classroom practice or to replicate a conference in your own context.
