Chapter 6: Engaging Youth Voice: Collaborative Reflection to Inform School Relationships, Processes, and Practices: Collaborative Reflection to Inform School Relationships, Processes, and Practices

Principals face tremendous pressure to use data in order to inform practices, processes, and policies in their schools—all with the endpoint of improving student achievement. This pressure has both been caused by and resulted in a proliferation of data, so much so that school principals are often awash in data that flow from various district and state sources. However, school leaders too often underutilize one source of very different, yet invaluable, data: the perspectives and experiences of the students who populate our schools. In this chapter, we describe a process for using digital media to capture reflective conversations between principals and students in a way that can generate a powerful source of informative school data, while also facilitating the development of principals, students, teachers, and other staff. In doing so, we describe how this process provides opportunities for students to voice their perspectives on school practices and the value of casting reflection as a collective process, while exploring a specific case application. We believe that the unique context of every case example and application is important, and ours here is no exception. Specifically, the case example we describe involves reflective conversations between a female African American assistant principal and both a female and a male African American student. We call this process discursive digital reflection (DDR) (Janson, Parikh, & Maxis, 2012).