Jennifer Lowery wrote a wonderful article “Decision Making That Sustains People and Deepens Relationships” in the April 2021 issue. I appreciate her sharing her story and inspiring others like me.

In her article, she writes: “We decided, as a team, to stand for every child every day. Once we tug at their hearts and provide them with guiding principles of success, they move the mountains with their own hands.” These words RESONATE AND REMIND US to keep the best interest of every student at the forefront of all decisions.

KRAIG M. STEINHOFF
SUPERINTENDENT,
OAKES PUBLIC SCHOOLS,
OAKES, N.D,

Soul Care

Paul Imhoff’s three-part plan, “Soul Care for the Superintendency” (June 2021), for attending to one’s personal needs is good practical advice for all superintendents. In essence, he suggests: (1) Make a soul-care plan; (2) Be accountable; and (3) Share your journey.

Imhoff’s plan brought to mind a few other needs school leaders ought to keep in mind: Practice what we teach; focus on “understanding” rather than adherence to a set of rules, regulations and procedures; help public schools become learning communities where there is enjoyment in learning and where decisions are made on their merit rather than on their authorship; promote that the way the public treats educators demonstrates the extent to which the public values education; and recognize that education has two sides.

One side is teacher-centered, based on the idea that learning occurs as a result of the transmission of knowledge from teacher to student. The other is student-centered and assumes that learning is a process of discovery by the student. We want students to gradually take over more and more responsibility for their own learning and for consistency between what we practice and what we teach.

LOUIS WILDMAN
EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION ADMINISTRATION,
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, BAKERSFIELD,
BAKERSFIELD, CALIF.

Student Voice

The Anaheim Union High School District’s commitment to deeper, more equitable student engagement, described in Jaron Fried’s article (“Fitbit’ for Monitoring Student Voice”) in your February issue, was inspiring.

As a former teacher in Spanish Harlem and the founder of TeachFX, the program referenced in the article, I believe equity and engagement are core to student learning. Decades of research from luminaries, including Elizabeth Cohen, Rachel Lotan and John Hattie, have shown that students need to speak in order to learn.

But our internal analysis of over 100,000 hours of classroom audio from school districts across the country shows that the average student speaks for fewer than 26 seconds total during an hour of synchronous online instruction — and attendance in those classes is often only half or one-third of the full class roster, meaning students have precious few opportunities to verbalize their thinking and, hence, to learn.

We’ve also found major disparities in our dataset when comparing students’ oral engagement by subgroup, with Black and Latino students speaking less than half as much as their peers in many districts and with English learners speaking nearly three times less than non-English learners. The implications of this are troubling as we strive for equity in our schools.

Our firm is working to help schools and districts pinpoint where disparities in student voice and engagement exist, then design specific plans to address those disparities via targeted professional learning and personalized, class-by-class feedback to teachers. We’re enabling districts like Anaheim’s to collect and analyze district-level equity of student voice data.

JAMIE POSKIN
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR,
TEACHFX AND EQUITABLE CLASSROOMS,
MENLO PARK, CALIF.

Letters should be addressed to: Editor, School Administrator, 1615 Duke St., Alexandria, VA 22314. Email: magazine@aasa.org