California Department of Education
Taking Center Stage – Act II

Meaningful participation

According to the Healthy Kids Resilience and Youth Development Module1 (a summary of resilience research), meaningful participation involves students in relevant, engaging, and interesting activities with opportunities for responsibility and contribution, and is a natural outcome of high expectations. Among other things, resilience research shows that:

  • Participation, like caring and support, allows students to have some control and ownership over their own life and learning.
  • Positive developmental outcomes—including reductions in health-risk behaviors and increases in academic factors—are associated with youths who hold valued responsibilities, planning and decision-making opportunities, and chances to contribute to and help others in their home, school, and community environments.
  • In schools with low levels of delinquency and school failure, students participated actively in school events. When treated as responsible people, they reacted accordingly.
  • Surveys of adults who had avoided poverty, teen pregnancy, and drug abuse and had graduated from high school showed a high correlation between their success as adults and their reported empowerment as participants in directing their learning when they were students.
  • Meaningful participation means that the classroom and school must become a democratic community.
  • Meeting students’ needs to have some control and a sense of participation, or belonging, usually prevents students from disconnecting from the school. Alienation is a behavior that the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health has found plays a significant role in students’ involvement in problem behaviors.
  • Give students more opportunities to respond to questions.
  • Ask students for their opinions on issues and classroom problems.
  • Create study circles in which students engage in a democratic process for sharing their thoughts and concerns on a particular issue.
  • Give students a choice of assignments and books to read.
  • Have students create the classroom rules and procedures.
  • Ask questions that encourage self-reflection, critical thinking, and dialogue—especially around salient social and personal issues.
  • Make learning more hands-on.
  • Involve students in curriculum planning.
  • Use participatory evaluation strategies.

The module contains the following list of suggested school-based strategies for engaging students in meaningful participation:

  • Create many opportunities for creative expression through art, music, drama, writing, and storytelling.
  • Use cooperative learning.
  • Establish peer helping/tutoring and cross-age mentoring/tutoring programs.
  • Provide community service-learning.
  • Infuse adventure learning into curriculum and after-school programs, groups, and clubs.
  • Use restorative justice circles in place of punitive discipline. (Restorative justice is a payback concept that requires offenders to compensate those whom they have hurt. For example, if students ruin someone’s belongings, they must replace them. Restorative justice encourages dialogue and responsibility for past behavior while focusing on future problem solving and offender accountability.)
  • Engage students—especially those on the margin—in a school climate improvement task force.
  • Use project-based learning.
  • Use experiential learning.

In the Spotlight

McKinleyville Middle School, McKinleyville Union Elementary School District, a 2006 Schools to Watch™-Taking Center Stage Model School
Twice a year, students at McKinleyville participate in a student-led parent conference, an article on the EducationWorld Web site, using the model developed by Stiggins.2 Students make presentations to their family members about their progress toward achieving the California standards in oral and written language. Students present their accomplishments and future goals, supported by work samples, and together with their parents or guardians, they evaluate performance according to a rubric based on standards for each of their courses.

 

The California Healthy Kids Survey gives seventh-grade students an opportunity to participate in shaping the school community as they express their concerns and indicate sources of support and caring from their school communities.

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Footnotes
1 Resilience & Youth Development Module: Aggregated California Data: Fall 1999 –Spring 2002. Sacramento: California Safe and Healthy Kids Office and WestEd, 2003.
2 R. J. Stiggins, Student-Centered Classroom Assessment. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1994.

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