Student Voice - Broad Principles for Guided Pathways Redesign
Incorporating Student Voice
Guiding Principles
A guiding principle for incorporating the student voice in Guided Pathways redesign is to ensure the voice of students facing barriers, particularly disproportionately impacted students.
From this impetus, other guiding principles follow, such as the following:
Principles of Students Voice include
- Educating students and staff about student voice
- Validate student experience
- Respect student input – write it down, respond
- Teach students about representation
- Provide students with some power
- Facilitate the collection of student input
We include the student voice in Guided Pathways as a means of reducing assumptions and increasing awareness of students’ lived experiences in and out of the classroom and the impacts of those experiences on learning and student success.
Design Principles
As we follow our guiding principles when pursuing different methods for engaging students, it is helpful to structure our work with design principles, such as the following:
- Treat student engagement as an ongoing and iterative process
- Ensure equitable student representation
- Create conditions for full student access
- Prepare students for the opportunity
- Intentionally level the playing field in the presence of power dynamics
- Honor student involvement
To get an idea of how the guiding principles and design principles can shape our efforts to incorporate student voice, let's look at how these principles can be applied to the onboarding process.
Applying Principles of Student Voice
Student Voice and Student Engagement are critical aspects to getting Guided Onboarding right. Why?
- Students experience the onboarding processes and are best positioned to tell us how the processes work.
- We implement the onboarding processes and are best positioned to articulate how the processes are intended to work.
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What do your students say about their
Are they surviving your onboarding process? |
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The Resulting Student Voices about Onboarding |
“Degree Works worked for me and making an ed plan was really easy with the help of a counselor. "I did not really use the catalog at home but I did while making my ed plan.” “I didn’t have any on-campus help/guidance.” “Why is the online website hard for students to answer?” “Why do we need online orientation? Online did not help me at all.” “ The schedule planner really helped me line up all my classes so that it fit my schedule. “ |
Useful resources for broad principles
Collecting Student Voices for Guided Pathways Inquiry and Design Why Do It, How It Works, and What It Looks Like in Action was developed by the RP Group, Career Ladders Project, and the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges with the support from the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, Institutional Effectiveness Partnership Initiative, in Fall 2018. While provides specific guidance for engaging students in inquiry and design, it encapsulates the broad principles for incorporating student voice with several examples and resources.
The Center for Community College Student Engagement (CCCSE) has published several reports on based on quantitative and qualitative data. With respect to the latter, a valuable source is their Focus Group Guide that identifies the individuals conducting the focus groups, lays out principles for the selection of focus group participants, reviews Facilitator DOs and DON’Ts, and outlines the focus group session. https://cccse.org/sites/default/files/Focus_Group_Guide.pdf Links to an external site. CCCSE also has several focus group discussion guides, including one specific to student focus groups on their Guided Pathways experience. https://cccse.org/sites/default/files/FG_Discussion_Guide_Guided_Pathways_Students.pdf Links to an external site.