Listening is Leadership: Elevating Student Voice to Transform School Culture

There are a lot of pressures facing school leaders right now: achievement data, staffing challenges, shifting priorities, etc. It’s easy to get caught in the day-to-day demands and feel like there’s no time to slow down. But one of the most powerful things we can do as leaders is pause and ask: Are we actually listening to our students?

OBJECTIVES

Understand how student voice deepens our interpretation of data.
Practice using student perspectives to inform real decisions.
Reflect on how assumptions shift when we listen first.

RESOURCES

Engage in Function-Based Thinking

Student voice isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a critical part of how we create schools where all students feel seen, valued, and supported. When students are invited to share their experiences, and when we take their insights seriously, we uncover things we wouldn’t see from our adult lens alone. We start to notice the disconnection between our intentions and how students actually experience school.

We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We’re a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don’t really understand.

-Malcom Gladwell, Blink

Listening to students helps us make better decisions. It helps us build stronger relationships. And it reminds us who our work is really for. More importantly, it pushes us to examine whose voices we tend to center and whose voices get overlooked. That’s why I see student voice not just as a strategy, but as an equity practice.

Readiness and success shouldn’t be defined by seat time or test scores. They should reflect how students engage, adapt, and apply what they know in real life. That kind of growth only happens when students feel like they belong, and belonging starts with trust. Trust starts with listening.

What follows is a simple process you can use to bring student voice into your leadership practice. Whether you use it with your staff, your leadership team, or directly with students, the goal is the same: to create space for honest reflection, identify where we can do better, and take meaningful action. You don’t need a perfect plan—just a willingness to listen and follow through.

Redesign How Student Voice Influences Decisions

This isn’t about launching a new initiative or adding another thing to your plate. It’s about creating a habit. One that makes space for students to speak honestly, and for adults to really listen. Whether you use this process in a leadership meeting, with your staff, or with students themselves, the goal is to uncover patterns and shift practices based on what students are actually experiencing.

Frame the Experience

You might say something like:

“We often make decisions based solely on the numbers—attendance, grades, behavior data. But today we’re going to look at what happens when we layer in student voice. We’ll start with the data by itself, and then see how our thinking shifts once we hear directly from students.”

Review Data and Draft Plan

Provide a data set about a simple metric such as attendance, discipline, or achievement. In small groups, ask:

What stands out to you in this data?
What assumptions do you find yourself making?
Based on what you see, what’s one action step you might take?

Let folks capture a quick draft of their plan.

Elevate Student Voice

Share student feedback or quotes that that connect to and provides context for the data you just reviewed. For example, if the data is about attendance:

“I miss first period because I have to get my siblings ready.”
“I don’t feel safe in the hallways.”
“I work until midnight, so mornings are hard.”

Keep it simple. Three to five examples is enough. The goal isn’t volume; it’s perspective.

Reflect and Debrief

Ask the team to go back to their original action step and reflect on the following:

Would you keep the plan the same, or change it?
What shifted after hearing what students actually said?
What does that tell you about how we make decisions?

Uproot, Rethink, and Rebuild

Come back together as a full group and discuss:

How might you bring authentic student voice into your decision-making in your own setting?

Identify Amplifiers of Student Voice

A critical element of engaging student voice in decision making is actually talking with and listening to students. Every school already has champions of student voice. Start by noticing who consistently seeks student feedback, builds genuine relationships with learners, or advocates for student leadership in everyday decisions. These individuals may be classroom teachers, campus monitors, attendance personnel, counselors, coaches, or club advisors who naturally elevate student perspectives. If your team can’t identify someone who already has this type of relationship with students, consider who might become that champion.

Commit to Trying Something New

As a group, agree on a process to bring the student voice into the driver’s seat of your data review process, and let the context and insight determine your path.

How will you approach your next meeting or intitiative differently?
Who do you need to invite to the process to ensure that student voice is represented?
What skills do you need to develop to make sure you are representing all perspectives?

Make your commitments clear, and don’t be afraid to pivot if things don’t work the first time. The goal is to find a path that centers student voice, and that can take time.

Learn about function-based thinking to understand the root cause of student behavior.

Engage in Function-Based Thinking to More Deeply Understand Students

Why This Matters

Too often, we bring in student voice after decisions have already been made, just to confirm or validate something we’ve already planned. But when we do that, we’re not really listening. We’re checking a box.

What if we started with student voice instead?

When we make space for students at the beginning—before we’ve defined the problem, before we’ve drafted a plan—we see things differently. We notice things we would’ve missed. And the solutions we create are more grounded, more human, and more likely to work.

This isn’t just about getting buy-in. It’s about building trust and making better decisions. When students see that their experiences shape the way we lead, they show up differently. They feel a sense of ownership, not just compliance.

So the challenge is this: don’t wait until the end to ask for student input. Build it in from the beginning. Make it part of how your team learns, plans, and moves forward. That’s how we shift from leading for students to leading with them.