Lessons Learned from Listening to Students

There’s a scene in an episode of Ted Lasso where the coaches are trying to figuring out why the latest game plays aren’t working. Why the team is struggling. They’re all together in the office trying to decide what to do.

One of the coaches, Roy Kent (a former player for the team) looks from the coaches office into the locker room and says,

“Why don’t we ask them?”

Ask the players.

The ones who are out there on the field.

Asking them doesn’t deny the coaches’ experience and expertise. But only the players know what it’s like to be out there, in that moment, playing the game.

A great idea!  

Mix things up a bit and collaborate and engage the voices of those currently “playing the game”.  

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona has a vision for education in America and an innovation imperative, that “this is our moment to truly reimagine education” and that “[we aren’t] going to solve tomorrow’s problems with our school and district design of yesterday.”

This is exactly the issue that Transcend (a nonprofit focused on innovation in school design) is working to address. Re-imagining education by doing exactly what Roy Kent suggested—tapping into the wisdom and experiences of young people currently experiencing the education system.

Over the past year they have created and shared discussion guides, survey tools, and helped support communities in talking and listening to young people via focus groups, interviews, and survey responses.

You can find the complete results of their report here.

From the thousands of conversations, several themes emerged which can help guide and shape the solutions for these educational issues and others that will likely pop up.

Table above from Transcend Report (2022, p. 4)

This report and the whole initiative are a great reminder that sometimes we need to step aside and focus on the lived experiences of young people currently in our schools.

Not the experiences we hope or think they are having. But the ones they are actually having.

Just as Roy Kent realized he needed to put aside his experience and coaching expertise and insights and in that moment of crisis, turn to the players themselves and learn something from their insights.

Which, as the folks at Transcend said, can “challenge all of us to raise our aspirations from improving schools to fundamentally transforming them.”