Research We've Discovered

The research we have gathered over the course of the "Kindness club" has been qualitative research about the benefits of student-led initiatives. For our Action Research Project, we took this route because as student-teachers, we thought it was important to see for ourselves how it is important to incorporate student voice and action into initiatives to create authentic change and positivity, rather than to tell the students what they must do and to have them follow out of obligation.

A few notes we had to make was to ensure that we still maintained structure and thoughtful ideas in the group without overstepping our place. That's why, we had minds-on activities to start the session and helped develop themes for each week, but allowed for the students to voice their ideas and opinions about what the initiatives should be and plan how they were to carry them out. Even in the Instant challenges, we ensured to allow the students enough space to work based off of their own creative ideas, keeping structure through give time-limits as to ensure students were not sitting around.

Ultimately, our question was: how can students create their own change in the school community. We asked this question as we wondered if a student-led group could engage students more than we could have. Our worry would be that students would feel as though they did not know what to do with the group or did not care.

What we discovered was that the students did in fact care. In asking the students their favourite parts of the group, we were told the following information:

Student A: "I liked that we got to secretly say nice stuff about other students on the kindness wall. We were like spies."

Student B: " My favourite part of the group was the challenges because they were funny and we got to work together to try and win."

Student C: "My favourite thing about the group was that we got to make posters and put them around the school. I think students will see them and it will make their day better."

The positivity seemed to have an effect on the school as well, as students would get excited when they saw their name on the "Kindness Wall". Carson Grove elementary already has an interesting sense of community--many students who are currently attending are Syrian refugees and many more are ESL learners. Further, the school is one of the last "open-concept" schools in Ottawa, meaning that classes are divided only by dividers and there are no walls surrounding the classes. This causes for students to see much more of each other as they walk through the halls. We decided that with such a community, it would be a great place to see the results of our research take root.

One thing we noticed was that it was imperative to ensure time was managed wisely, as this was our primary role. While student-led groups can have quite a few positives, a negative aspect that we were aware to look out for was if students felt there was a lack of direction or too much free time, they may have become bored, distracted or disinterested. As we only have a few short weeks to gather research and to see results, we ensured that students were on task and interested at all times.

What we saw towards the end was that the students in out group seemed to see themselves as "leaders". Giving them the power to use their own ideas and voice to enact positive change seemed to continue in class. While they were already awesome kids, and we are not taking credit for their awesomeness, we did see them try to help out in the classroom setting, or reward other students for their positive acts. This spurred positivity in the lives of other students as well, since they would brighten when they realized they had been noticed by their peers.