This toolkit is designed to help any school or district conduct focus group research with students to learn their opinions about school and learning experiences. It provides detailed steps of the process to select a working team made up of adults and students, choose your research topic, plan the logistics, facilitate the focus groups, and analyze data. It includes templates for flyers, letters, interview questions, and other tools as well as examples from the schools in Kentucky where the kit was created and piloted.
The tone assumes educators are the main audience and would be organizing the working/planning team of students, teachers, administrators, and others. However, the process could be easily run by student or community leaders and provide an opportunity for students to conduct action research in partnership with adults.
See our Building Support for Student-Centered Learning: A Toolkit, for more communication tools to support student-centered approaches to learning.
Source Organization: The Partnership for Kentucky Schools