Teaching Meaningful Student Involvement

Meaningful Student Involvement, or MSI, is a model for school improvement that strengthens the commitment of students to education, community and democracy. MSI re-envisions the roles of students in equitable partnerships with adults throughout the learning environment. It promotes student engagement by securing roles for students in every facet of the educational system and recognizes the unique knowledge, experience and perspective of each individual student.

I began promoting this approach to schools in 2001, when I worked for the Washington State Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction and wrote a simple Idea Guide. After founding SoundOut, I published a series of booklets on Meaningful Student Involvement in 2005.  In 2007, I piloted the SoundOut Curriculum with ten schools in the U.S., Australia, and the U.K. The basis of the Curriculum is the MSI Learning Process. Facilitated with high fidelity, it has shown to be extremely effective in integrating my Frameworks for Meaningful Student Involvement in schools. Tthe program has been used in almost 300 middle and senior high schools since 2007, vibrantly and successfully engaging students as partners throughout education.

Recently, there has been a growing amount of interest in teaching students and educators about Meaningful Student Involvement. If you are one of these folks, you might find the following information useful.

Recently, I wrote a simple summary of MSI. Here is a very basic article that I wrote for Educational Leadership magazine that summarizes the approach. Following is a powerpoint that I made focused on teaching Meaningful Student Involvement. Here‘s a separate powerpoint. Here’s more information on the roots of my work.

Written by Adam Fletcher, this article was originally posted to http://commonaction.blogspot.com. Learn more at adamfletcher.net!