Improving Learning Through Consulting Pupils

Within the international movement for school improvement, pupil consultation is one of the strands that offers greatest hope. Consultation is a way of ensuring that teachers have access to their pupils’ perspectives and can lead to a transformation of teacher-pupil relationships, to significant improvements in teachers’ practices, and to pupils having a new sense of themselves as members of a community of learners. Improving Learning through Consulting Pupils discusses the potential of consultation as a strategy for signalling a more partnership-oriented relationship in teaching and learning. It also examines the challenges of introducing and sustaining consultative practices. Topics covered include: the centrality of consultation about teaching and learning in relation to broader school level concerns; national debates about young people’s right to be heard; teaching approaches that pupils believe help them to learn, those that obstruct their learning and suggestions about how individual teachers might develop their teaching; the social realities of classrooms for different groups of pupils; teachers’ responses to pupil consultation; what they learn from it, the changes they can make to their practice and the difficulties they can face; and, the things that can get in the way of pupils trusting in consultation as something that can make a positive difference to their experiences of learning in school. While consultation is flourishing in many primary schools, the focus here is on secondary schools where the difficulties of introducing and sustaining consultation are often more daunting but where the benefits of doing so can be substantial. This innovative book will be of interest to all those concerned with improving classroom learning.