District coaches describe Elevate student‑voice program; subcommittee hears privacy, fatigue and implementation questions

Waunakee instructional coaches presented the Elevate student‑voice program and told the curriculum subcommittee how the district has used it in classrooms to gather student perception data and co‑construct improvement plans.

District staff said Elevate is meant to be formative and “non‑evaluative” and described a cycle of surveying students, reviewing de‑identified results, co‑constructing classroom action plans with students, implementing changes and re‑surveying to measure growth. Coaches said the district has run Elevate for several years at different grade levels: the intermediate school (piloted for grades 3–5 this year), the middle school and the high school, where implementation varies because of semester scheduling.

Why it matters: staff described Elevate as a tool to standardize language about classroom learning conditions (for example, “meaningful work” or “feedback for growth”), to surface perception gaps between teachers and students and to create jointly owned action plans. Coaches said that when teachers intentionally use the follow‑up conversations and resources, student survey fidelity and classroom changes follow.

Program details: coaches said the survey takes 5–10 minutes; results are available the Monday after administration. Students log in with district email but responses are reported only in aggregate to teachers and coaches; administration and district coaches see only aggregated or focal‑group views and cannot see individual student responses, the presenters said. The packet shown to the subcommittee includes separate question sets and agreement scales for grades 6–12 and for grades 3–5; the intermediate school pilot will use the 3–5 language for grades 5–6 next year to match the building’s configuration.

Rollout and participation: staff described a mixed implementation model. At the intermediate school and middle school, participation has been voluntary and expanded gradually; coaches said participation grew from initial pilot cohorts to larger voluntary groups. At the high school, staff described a planned phased rollout by department and semester so that all teachers would ultimately experience the cycle without subjecting students to repeated survey fatigue. Coaches said the district has reached a fidelity rate above 80% this year when teachers explicitly connect survey results to classroom action.

Concerns raised: subcommittee members asked about survey fatigue, how anonymity is preserved when teachers later debrief students and whether Elevate can support evaluation. Presenters said Elevate is meant to be non‑evaluative and is framed as action research; they acknowledged teachers sometimes need coaching on how to handle critical feedback and described coaching and facilitator networks provided by Elevate for support. Coaches also noted a tradeoff between voluntary participation (high teacher buy‑in) and a more mandated model (broader reach but more rollout risk).

Evidence and next steps: staff said many classes have completed at least one cycle and said the district can use the program’s reporting (and tools such as NextPath for other data) to compare engagement signals with achievement measures. Several subcommittee members asked whether Elevate participation could be studied against local or state achievement measures; coaches said the analytics could be combined with course rosters to run comparative analyses (subject to privacy rules and permissible data use).

Ending: The subcommittee had no formal action on Elevate at the meeting; staff said they will share the full presentation with the broader board and continue discussions about scaling and measures of academic impact.