Background: Behind the Toolkit

The materials in this Toolkit will help you learn to use focus group research methods to improve outcomes for students. The Toolkit is based primarily on the experiences of the Jessamine County Public Schools (Nicholasville and Wilmore, Kentucky), and, more recently, on the experiences of five Fayette County public schools (Lexington, Kentucky). These instructions also incorporate lessons from our many years of focus group research with students, educators, and other groups. The materials include many tools that you may use or modify to conduct this powerful inquiry process.

We encourage you to send us any newfound knowledge, experiences, or suggestions as we continue to refine this Toolkit to meet the needs of school communities. (Call the Partnership at 859-455-9595 or e-mail Carolyn Witt Jones at cwjones@pfks.org. See the Acknowledgments and Access page for full contact information.)

The Jessamine County Story

In the spring of 1998, educators at the Jessamine County Public Schools in Kentucky learned about a research effort that uncovered how a sample of middle school and high school students were really experiencing their schools. The Partnership for Kentucky Schools had just completed the study, entitled Students Speak: How Kentucky Middle and High School Students View School (87 kb, pdf), which involved two middle schools and two high schools in Kentucky.

Jessamine County educators told Dr. Carolyn Witt Jones, Director of the Partnership, that they wanted to know more about the research. Carolyn met with them and declared, "You can do even more than learn about it. You can replicate it and learn how to do it from now on in Jessamine County."

We fast forward a few months to September, 1998, after Jessamine County's installation of its new Superintendent of Schools, Linda France, an expert on curriculum and on how students learn. Linda and the principal of the county's newly opened East Jessamine High School, Tom Welch, asked Carolyn to come back to Jessamine County for a conversation about how to conduct research on the student experience in their district.

Carolyn brought along her longtime colleagues Steve Kay and Rona Roberts, from the research and development firm Roberts & Kay, Inc. in Lexington, Kentucky. Steve and Rona had conducted the Students Speak study, as well as a number of other qualitative studies for the Partnership, beginning in 1991.

In that first meeting, Superintendent France described a pressing need. During the summer of 1998, in response to devastating school shootings in Kentucky and around the country, a school-community committee had met in Jessamine County to make recommendations to the school board about policies to improve school safety. The committee had completed its work and had forwarded its recommendations, but no one knew how students would respond to the suggested policy changes.

Linda wanted the board to have the benefit of student views on the proposed policies. She also wanted to know more about students' views regarding the climate in which they were learning, since she views school climate and school safety as closely interwoven. In addition, Linda wanted the information on climate because it would help Jessamine County Schools move forward on its long-term commitment to sustaining a welcoming, inviting climate for students, educators, and members of the community.

Principal Tom Welch expressed an additional interest. He wanted students at East Jessamine High School to learn highly useful life skills as part of their regular school work. Tom had heard that students themselves could learn to conduct the kind of focus groups that formed the basis for the Students Speak research. Tom wanted East Jessamine High students to be central players in carrying out research on school safety and school climate.

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"Our students can do anything. They are going to be really good at this."

– Tom Welch, Principal
East Jessamine High School

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Researchers Steve Kay and Rona Roberts had just finished teaching an intensive course on focus groups and qualitative research to 40 rising high school seniors at Kentucky's 1998 Governor's Scholars Program. (More about this project.) They told Linda, Tom, and Carolyn that they thought a qualitative study of school climate and school safety would be productive, and they believed high school students could learn to facilitate the focus groups that would serve as the main research method for the study.

Carolyn said that the Partnership would be interested in co-sponsoring the research effort if the Jessamine County school community would be willing for its experiences to serve as the basis for teaching other school communities in Kentucky and elsewhere to carry out similar research. All present agreed: This research opportunity could bring benefits to many people at once. So, they took the plunge. The experiences of Jessamine County and lessons learned from that effort appear in countless examples throughout this Toolkit and serve as a testimonial that student-based focus group research can be done.

This second edition of the Turn Up the Volume Toolkit now includes stories and examples from the 1999-2000 Fayette County Public Schools focus group effort and the 1999-2000 Jessamine County Public Schools focus group effort. We have included a list of Kentucky schools that had conducted student-based focus groups as of Spring, 2001 (and their research topics).

Next: Reasons Real People and Real Schools Produce Student Focus Groups