Amplifying Student Voices: Strategies for Empowerment in Education

·40 min·3 clips

This real world is not a good world, so how do you prepare kids for it while also giving them the agency to shake it up?

1. Teachers Talkin' hosts Dustin Tetreault and Ghazali Abdul-Wahhab interview guest Cecilia Sessi-Alcaraz about building student voice and agency in schools. 2. Cecilia has been in education for 20 years and is currently Dean of Students for the School of Education at Noble Schools in Chicago, previously a guidance counselor at an alternative school. 3. The episode's central question is how educators can empower students and involve them in real decision-making, not just symbolic feedback-gathering. 4. Cecilia defines student voice as feedback about what students want their school community to look like, and student agency as taking ownership and action on that feedback. 5. She describes practical tools for gathering voice: exit tickets, Google Forms, a student council she is renaming 'House of Representatives,' and the CPS-wide Cultivate survey given at the start, middle, and end of the year. 6. She credits a former principal, Jennifer Reed, with the phrase 'we're a schoolhouse first and foremost' as a touchstone for balancing content mastery with student voice. 7. Her students' council-equivalent group currently shapes school culture decisions but not policy, and this year reviews the parent-student handbook to build feedback skills. 8. She uses a red-light-camera analogy to explain being honest with students that some policies are fixed and can't be undone by their feedback. 9. On common roadblocks, she says adults often assume young people don't know much, and that administrators must get comfortable having the status quo challenged. 10. She describes her long-standing dream of a co-op school with no principal, where a student representative sits at the leadership table and decisions are made collectively. 11. Asked about AI's effect on trusting student feedback, Dustin raises teachers' concern that ChatGPT makes it hard to know if feedback is genuinely the student's own words. 12. Cecilia answers that the fix is relationship-building, not detection tools: knowing a student's language well enough that you could recognize their voice with names removed. 13. She describes school-specific relationship practices: restorative conversations mediated by a student advocate, and a stipend-backed after-school club every teacher must run. 14. A recent Cultivate survey result stood out to her: students strongly agreed their teachers cared about them, but scored lowest on believing their teacher thought they could do hard things. 15. She reads that as a signal the school may be lowering academic rigor in response to pandemic-era learning loss even as relationships stayed strong. 16. Dustin adds that student voice also depends on students' relationship with the school as a whole, not just individual teachers. 17. The conversation is a three-person interview, conversational and reflective in tone, with Dustin and Ghazali building on Cecilia's answers throughout. 18. Cecilia closes by warning against gathering feedback as a box-checking exercise, saying leaders must actually listen and get comfortable being uncomfortable. 19. Best suited to school administrators and teachers who want concrete systems for collecting and acting on student feedback. 20. Less useful for listeners outside K-12 education leadership or school culture work.

As heard by us

A practical case for turning student feedback into a planned loop with visible follow-through.

Student voice turns into an everyday school habit in this Teachers Talkin' roundtable, as educators look at how feedback can support participation and agency.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want student feedback to survive the school-year whirlwind and turn into visible action students can recognize.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Teachers Talkin'