Roberts & Kay, Inc. -- Governor's Scholars Program (GSP)

Governor's Scholars Program (GSP)

1996 – 1997

RKI worked with the Partnership for Kentucky Schools and leaders of the Governor's Scholars Program, a five-week program for rising high school seniors, to train students interested in facilitating conversations about the high school experience in their own high schools. RKI produced a guidebook for students interested in convening and facilitating those conversations. In addition, after the training, RKI invited a randomly chosen group of Governor's Scholars to serve as paid facilitators for student focus group research as part of the Students Speak study.

Summer, 1998

Building on what we had learned in 1997, in 1998 RKI conducted a four-week course on qualitative research and dialogue for the Partnership for Kentucky Schools at the Kentucky Governor's Scholars Program, on the campus of Northern Kentucky University. During the four weeks, the Governor's Scholars learned about and practiced the entire process of designing and carrying out focus group research. They also learned about dialogue as another form of productive talk. In particular, we worked with the Scholars on designing research and interview questions, practicing effective facilitation techniques, analyzing information from focus groups, and reporting their findings or results. Scholars worked in teams of two or three students to create and conduct a focus group on a topic related to teaching and learning.

Here are some of the topics Scholars chose to research:

Kentucky teachers and their teaching styles
extracurricular activities and their effect on student performance
the student voice and how it is being heard
the teacher-student relationship
violence in schools
Advanced Placement curriculum
the role of the arts in school

RKI worked with approximately 40 Governor's Scholars through this course. These students represented rising high school seniors from all over the Commonwealth, from both large and small communities. Of the 40 participants, five students chose to form a "documentary team" that observed and documented the other Scholars during the learning process and then later reported their discoveries and experiences to the entire group.

RKI provided the Scholars with a variety of descriptive materials related to focus group research, and modeled aspects of this research at every stage. We developed the RKI Guidebook to Qualitative Research and Dialogue (pdf, 239 KB), which provided Scholars with basic information about the main aspects of focus group research and dialogue. We constructed the course as a mixture of instruction and hands-on learning, in the belief that Scholars would benefit most from "taking ownership" of their projects.

In keeping with the Partnership's commitment to fostering students as forces of change in their schools, in their communities, and in Kentucky, this course aimed to equip students with enough information, skills, practice, and confidence to empower them to return to their communities with the ability to conduct their own focus groups and/or dialogue sessions.

Visit other descriptions of our work in the area of school improvement.

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