Students become teachers for a day

Pembina Hills Public School students had an opportunity to voice their opinions on the state of education and how would they like to see it change during the first ever student symposium.

On Tuesday, Feb. 2, about 130 students, administrators and program assistants from every school in the school division descended on Barrhead and the Barrhead Lutheran Church to take part.

Colleen Symyrozum-Watt, superintendent for Pembina Hills Public School Division, said the symposium entitled ‘Student Day’ took the school division a month and a half to plan with the help of Alberta Education.

“The purpose of the day is to gather student voices. But why would we want to hear about what students have to say about their learning?” she asked.

The answer, which was correctly given by a number of students in attendance, is change what isn’t working or what could be improved on and give suggestions from the end user on how the entire system can be improved on.

In 2009, Alberta Education introduced a vision document called Inspiring Education, which is changing how education is and will be delivered to students.

“Right from the school board who make big decisions on what happens in our schools, to what regional office people do, to what happens with your principals, teachers and all the staffing community, we are all aligning,” Symyrozum-Watt said. “And what we want to do is make education in Pembina Hills, not good, not better, but we want to make it great and we know how to do that is to listen to students.”

One of the ways, she said, the school division planned to accomplish this is by taking the attendees through a series of questions and exercises.

In the first exercise students were asked a series of questions and then write their answers on large pieces of paper. The papers were then placed on the wall for all to see and discuss.

Questions ranged from ‘What does it look like when I’m doing my best learning?’ to ‘How am I not feeling when I am a leader of my learning?’

In an effort to understand the answers the students had written down better, the next exercise asked students, who were divided into groups of 10, to see if they could see any patterns or themes in the responses to the questions. They were then asked to condense those themes, patterns and ideas and blend them into one larger idea and then pick which one was the most important to the group.

All the big ideas where then shared and discussed by the larger group.

The students were then asked to review the list of big ideas, by asking the following questions:

What’s missing in order for your best learning to take place?

What gets in the way of you doing your best and what holds you back from doing your best learning?

Students groups were then asked to create statements to describe what the do, say and feel when they’re living big ideas. They were also asked to come up with ways which adults could best support their best learning.

“Today you were no longer students, but teachers. We listened to what you had to teach us, regarding the relative learning that is going on in your classrooms,” Symyrozum-Watt said, adding the division would use the information they collected to create a student learner profile specific to Pembina Hills Public Schools.