Learner Voice Event

Our students recently took part in the ‘Learner Voice’ Danes Education Trust event. Nikki Railton, DET Leader of Purpose and English teacher at St Clement Danes, described the importance of learner voice:

“It’s no longer enough to simply give learners a voice – we need to make sure that we actually listen to what they have to say. That’s why we established the Danes Educational Trust Learner Voice Council, to provide a forum for meaningful discussion and active research into the teaching and learning that helps our students the most”

You can read the full article here

Here are our students’ experiences of the event:

" The learner voice council induction day was a wonderful experience for all the schools involved in the Danes trust, it helped introduce some of the most important and fundamental skills for teaching and leading. Here is a summary of the things that we have been working on since induction day.

Our school’s council has been working on increasing moral and motivational drive within lessons. Some of the ways we have thought to do this was by changing the way a starter was done in class or changing the way lessons are presented. In the end we ended up deciding that we should look more at rewards and the way that they motivate students.

Our rewards system will motivate students to input effort and focus in hopes of spinning a rewards wheel. The wheel will have multiple motivating rewards, for example, choosing where you get to sit in your next lesson. We will be trialing this in our creative arts lessons at school.

Since then, we have been taking surveys from students and staff to get a baseline set of analytics before implementing the project in our regular lessons. We can’t wait to see what changes, and hope that this will aid teachers’ and students’ motivation within lessons! "

Amelia T

“The Learner voice induction day was a fun and interesting experience, as participants enjoyed a range of activities that gave insight into how the brain is stimulated and how to communicate and understand with each other better. During the day we were split into groups where we got to talk and work with students from all the other different schools - we even enjoyed free croissants and drinks! In our groups we went to different adults who taught us different things; a psychologist who taught us how to stimulate and engage the brain, there were team building exercises with a PE teacher and oracy lesson on how to come to agreement with people. After these activities we then gathered as a school group and created ideas on how to create better learning environments for ourselves and our peers and shared them to the rest of the school. All in all, it was a fun experience and helped us understand how to create a fun setting while still getting work done”.

Hayden K