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Fayette County Public Schools – Student Focus Groups1999 - 2004For the Fayette County School System and the Partnership for Kentucky Schools, we provided guidance for five schools that conducted their own student-based focus group research efforts. These were the first schools outside of Jessamine County to conduct their own focus groups from start to finish using the Turn Up the Volume Toolkit as a guide. RKI conducted an orientation session that introduced school principals and other educators to the process. We later provided an all-day training session for planning teams made up of students, administrators, and teachers from the five schools (four high schools and one middle school) that agreed to carry out the project. During this training session, Rona and Kristin assisted the school planning teams in designing their research and interview questions, determining the sample of students they wanted to include in the focus groups, and addressing other logistical questions. We dedicated the afternoon session to training students to serve as focus group facilitators. The schools focused their research on one of the following topics:
Each planning team agreed to maintain contact with the Fayette County Schools Central Office and to have their experience documented. RKI worked particularly closely throughout all phases of the research effort with the planning team from Morton Middle School, which addressed the topic of cultural barriers to academic and social success. Members of Morton's planning team had decided to train their own 8th-grade students to serve as the focus group facilitators. This was the first time we had worked with middle school students as facilitators, since in our previous focus group work with middle school students, we had used high school students as facilitators. As a result, we were interested in working with the students as much as possible to prepare them for their work. We were also interested in learning from Morton's experiment with such youthful facilitators. Rona and Kristin helped the planning team debrief the facilitators after they had run their pilot groups, provided logistical support, and assisted the team in analyzing the results of the focus groups. All five schools completed their focus groups by March, 2000. Morton Middle School later ran a second set of focus groups on the topic of students' opinions on and concerns about school building renovation. RKI and the Partnership will continue to draw upon the lessons learned in our work with Fayette County Schools as we make revisions to the Turn Up the Volume Toolkit and advise other school systems that are interested in conducting similar research efforts. Henry Clay High School began work on student focus groups again in 2001, and has continued to conduct a full study each year. Henry Clay decision-makers say "student voice" and professional level inquiry, guided by students, has become part of their school culture. Students report the success of changes stemming from the annual studies. These include a daily information show produced by students on closed-circuit television, a celebration and orientation to multi-culturalism for incoming first year students, and other structured approaches to making all students feel a sense of belonging to the school. The findings from student focus groups also have informed intensive work to initiate small learning communities at Henry Clay. 
Be sure to check out other descriptions of our work in the area of school improvement.
Also visit descriptions of other projects we have completed for Fayette County Public Schools: the Working Warranty Steering Committee and a Professional Development series. |
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