Student “voice” means encouraging students to share their thoughts in a class discussion. It also means teachers take students’ opinions about class structure, public policy, and the design of assignments seriously.

Today’s post kicks off a series offering ideas on how teachers can promote student voice.

‘Help Multilingual Learners Thrive’

Juan Suarez is a bilingual educator, leader, and advocate with over 15 years of experience serving multilingual learners in public schools across Chicagoland:

I truly believe that oracy isn’t extra. It’s essential. As an educator, my goal has always been to amplify student voice as best as I can. For multilingual learners, student voice isn’t just about getting them to speak. It’s about belonging, feeling seen, and knowing they are appreciated. Multilingual learners may not say much at first, but they have lots to say, lots to share. Their background, their experiences, and their contributions are what make multilingual classrooms an awesome school community.

As a former high school ESL teacher, I quickly learned that cooperative learning activities were my go-to strategies for engaging students and amplifying their voice. It sounds simple, yet, it’s effective. Turn and talks, think-pair-shares, round tables, and Socratic seminars. These strategies weren’t just personal teaching preferences. They proved incredibly effective at drawing out student voices. As a teacher, I saw myself as a facilitator and as a guide rather than a lecturer. My role was to create the space for my students to do all the talking and truly engage in oracy activities.

A key practice I find to be highly effective for amplifying student voice is assigning roles during instruction. When students are working in groups, give them a job: the discussion monitor, the writer, or the presenter. This strategy can help them find their voice and transform their participation. It makes them a vital part of their team’s community. I believe this approach creates synergy and builds a powerful “we” culture where every student feels valued and heard.

Now, in my role as a program director and multilingual leader, I’m all about building our teaching staff’s ability to implement those same practices. This comes in the form of building systems for oracy so that teachers can prioritize it in instruction. Building curriculum frameworks is a top priority for bilingual directors. Oracy has a place in those frameworks to guide instruction and support teachers. Bilingual leaders are key advocates who can build conditions to help teachers and other administrators collaborate on a common goal: to make oracy visible in classrooms and to help multilingual learners thrive.

‘Highlighting Student Voice Is Not a Box to Check’

Maru Gonzalez, Michael Kokozos, and Christy Byrd are educators, community-engaged scholars, and co-authors of Teaching Storytelling in Classrooms and Communities: Amplifying Student Voices and Inspiring Social Change:

Every educator can recall a moment when a student shared a bold, brilliant, or breakthrough idea—only for it to be ignored or trivialized because of their age.
Too often, young people’s insights or ideas are dismissed as naïve or idealistic. Even when decisions being made directly impact them, the message they frequently receive is to be seen and not heard. As educators, we have the opportunity—and obligation—to actively counter false narratives about youth engagement and build spaces that elevate and celebrate students’ stories and perspectives.

Highlighting student voice is not a box to check, a feel-good activity, or a token gesture; it’s about co-creating classrooms where students can ask questions, share lived experiences, challenge assumptions, and shape their learning environment.

Research affirms what many of us have already witnessed firsthand: When students are engaged in meaningful ways, they thrive. These experiences strengthen self-efficacy, increase academic engagement, and foster social connection. For instance, when schools involve students in shaping policies—whether about bullying, dress codes, or school climate—they send a clear message: Your experiences and perspectives matter; your ideas shape what happens here.

And the impact of highlighting student voice endures well beyond the classroom. The stories students share and the actions they take reverberate into neighborhoods, movements, and futures they are already beginning to imagine or reimagine.
Below are five simple practices to help you center and amplify student voice in the classroom and beyond:

• Cultivate a student-centered classroom. Collaborate with students to design lessons together—make sure every voice is heard and their ideas actually shape what you do. Start by tapping into topics that matter to students (think: their hobbies, real-world issues, or questions they’re curious about) and let them weigh in on decisions, like how to approach a project or what “success” looks like. When you do this, students start seeing the classroom as theirs—not just yours.

• Nurture critical reflection. Reflection deepens learning by encouraging students to ask questions and make meaning of what they’ve learned. Critical reflection offers an added layer of analysis, challenging students to examine personal biases and assumptions, engage in perspective taking, and consider the ways in which social and economic factors shape their lives and the lives of others. By building in time for critical reflection—whether through journal prompts, pair-share activities, or large-group debriefs—we create space for students to share ideas that are more thoughtful, informed, and grounded in deeper understanding.

• Elevate the contributions of young change makers, past and present. Young people have long been at the forefront of movements for justice and equity. From Claudette Colvin, who at 15 and months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat did the same, to present-day youth organizers like Greta Thunberg leading climate-justice marches and school walkouts, history is full of examples of young people using their voices to demand change. Incorporate stories of youth civic engagement into your curriculum and encourage students to explore how people their age have shaped history. These investigations can be the starting point for developing students’ own agency and action.

• Embrace diverse modalities of expression. Like us, students express themselves in a variety of ways and through different mediums. Offer a spectrum of choices beyond traditional response formats to honor diverse learning styles and backgrounds. Encourage artistic interpretation, technological integration, and project-based inquiry as pathways for students to authentically articulate their understanding and share their unique perspectives.

• Amplify students’ voices beyond the classroom. Once students develop confidence in sharing their stories and ideas, explore partnerships with local libraries or community organizations to further elevate their work. Provide guidance and support to students interested in exploring additional leadership opportunities, whether serving on a teen council, participating in student government, or engaging in community initiatives.

To highlight student voice is a deliberate and continuous effort that transforms classrooms into collaborative environments. Here, young people actively participate in their learning and the shaping of their space. Intentionally providing meaningful opportunities for sharing, choice, and contribution deepens engagement and understanding while building crucial communication, critical thinking, and civic skills—ultimately preparing students to be informed, empowered, and impactful community members.

‘Do We Highlight, Center, Amplify, or Cultivate Voice?’

Mia Hood, Ed.D., is the author of Pop Culture Literacies: Teaching Interpretation, Response, and Composition in a Digital World. She designs curriculum, coaches writers, and teaches literacy education at the City University of New York and professional writing at New York University:

While it’s easy to agree that student voice matters, deciding what exactly we should be doing with it in the classroom is trickier. Do we give voice? Do we highlight, center, amplify, or cultivate it? Each verb points toward a particular understanding of what voice means and why it matters.

Let’s start by assuming that students show up in our classrooms with important things to say and the potential to express them in distinctive and compelling ways. From this starting point, I offer three definitions of voice that reflect and, with hope, contribute to an authentic, democratic, and culturally sustaining pedagogical practice:

• Voice means having a say. Students get to make decisions about matters of their classrooms, schools, communities, and lives.
• Voice means having a meaningful opportunity to express oneself, whether creatively or critically, and be heard.
• Voice is the craft of using language to communicate effectively. It’s how we shape language to influence others to feel, think, or act in new ways.

Here are three ways I honor this expanded definition of voice in my classroom:

Give students a say in how they’re assessed. How we assess shapes how we teach, and so I find assessment to be the best place to start in giving students a voice in classroom matters.

• Co-construct assessments by having students brainstorm topics, prompts, questions, and formats they want to see on upcoming exams and assignments.
• When using a rubric, invite students to develop their own rubric row, in addition to the rows you’ve offered. Students must identify a worthy criterion for evaluating the success of their work and articulate the distinctions between performance levels.
• As they submit their work, have students reflect on and share which aspects of their work best demonstrate their new knowledge, understandings, and/or skills. Use their reflections to guide your feedback.

Guide students to listen to and learn from each other. Self-expression without an audience is just words. When we position students to be each other’s audiences, opportunities for self-expression become richer and more meaningful.

• Build discussion cadences that nudge students to really listen to each other. The most basic cadence I use is write-speak-write. Students respond to a question in writing, discuss the question, and then write a second response shaped by that discussion. In the second written response, students must incorporate a peer’s idea, whether that means accepting, rejecting, or reworking it.
• Require students to cite not only the authors they’ve read but also each other. I ask students to write about classroom discussions or activities in their essays, summarizing what their peers said and reflecting on how those ideas shaped their thinking.
• After reviewing their writing, give students a chance to review each other’s writing—not to evaluate it but to get them to engage with each other’s ideas. I group students by the themes they explored in their essays, share excerpts of their writing with their groups, and invite them to discuss extension questions connected to common themes.

Invite students to apprentice to those who’ve used their voices successfully. Young people today have unprecedented access to digital tools and platforms that allow them to use their voice however they wish. In the classroom, we can teach students how to develop, hone, and modulate their prose to use their voices successfully. Immerse students in a wide and diverse array of examples of people who’ve done so. Study these mentors’ craft—their diction, syntax, figurative language, rhetorical devices, and structures—and connect their craft choices to their purpose and impact.

The key, so that students don’t hew too closely to a single voice, is range. Expose students to voices of people young and old, living and departed; people like and unlike them in identity, experience, and expertise; and people who’ve used their voices to act upon the world—whether the inner world of an individual reader, the specialized world of academia, or society.

Ultimately, what matters is not what educators do with student voice but what students themselves do. A classroom that empowers students to make decisions, express themselves, and develop their craft within its four walls empowers them to do the same in the wider world.

Thanks to Juan, Maru, Michael, Christy, and Mia for contributing their thoughts!

Today’s post answered this question:

How do you highlight student voice in your classroom and why do you do it?

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at lferlazzo@epe.org. When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it’s selected or if you’d prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

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