Learner-Centered Accreditation

Discover how Quincy High School use student voice to earn accreditation and transform school culture?

The Challenge

Quincy High School had plenty of hard numbers. They were already tracking SBA scores, STAR data, WIDA scores, and National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) reports. But numbers alone rarely explain why trends are happening. The school needed a way to layer rich, qualitative insights on top of those metrics, ensuring their School Improvement Plan reflected what students actually experience, not just what the data tables showed.

The Approach

• The Ask: Students shared honest stories about their learning experiences through open-ended questions on the Student Story platform, giving voice to the why behind the numbers.
• The Analysis: Student Story aligned personal narratives with performance data, synthesizing thousands of responses to reveal specific equity focus areas, particularly for multilingual learners and struggling readers.
• The Action: The Building Leadership Instructional Team (BLIT) used these insights to write precise SMART goals, grounding every objective in student voice. Teachers incorporated the same methods into their TPEP growth goals, connecting student input directly to professional development.

Tools Used

• Survey Builder (For gathering open-ended student narratives at scale)
• All Voice (For synthesizing qualitative data with quantitative metrics like SBA, STAR, and WIDA scores)

The Outcome

A Tremendous Asset. Quincy High School earned accreditation from NWESD 189, with the visiting team offering a specific commendation about the culture of listening the school has built. The accreditation board described Student Story as a "tremendous asset," recognizing its role in guiding major initiatives such as the School Improvement Plan and supporting teachers in making informed, data-driven decisions in the classroom every day.

The board also noted that student-driven input was the main reason the school expanded Career and Technical Education (CTE) opportunities that students are excited about. Teachers used the platform to regularly gather student voice and adjust instruction in real time, with the accreditation report noting that Student Story "was very effective" in helping Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) figure out exactly how to make lessons more engaging.

Quincy demonstrates what is possible when a school prioritizes student voice over traditional top-down approaches. By committing to this innovative model, they ensured that real student perspectives would shape the school's path forward.

How to Replicate This Success

Follow these steps to build a learner-centered approach to school improvement and accreditation.

• Layer Voice on Data: You already have the numbers. Use Survey Builder to gather student narratives that explain the why behind your metrics, bridging the gap between performance data and lived experience.
• Identify Equity Focus Areas: Synthesize student stories with All Voice to pinpoint specific needs, particularly for multilingual learners, struggling readers, or other priority populations.
• Write SMART Goals from Voice: Use the platform's custom tools to transform student feedback into precise, measurable objectives that are realistic, time-bound, and directly responsive to what students are asking for.
• Empower Teachers with Regular Feedback: Make student voice part of the regular rhythm for teachers. Use open-ended questions to help PLCs adjust instruction in real time based on what students say is working.
• Connect to Professional Development: Incorporate student voice methods into TPEP growth goals, creating a clear connection between student input and teacher development.
• Start Early: Begin gathering student voice well before your SIP or strategic plan is due. Early input maximizes impact and transforms student voice into your school's greatest advantage.

The Challenge

Choosing the right math curriculum is a high-stakes decision, but too often it happens without the voices that matter most. Students experience the curriculum daily, yet their perspectives rarely shape adoption decisions. The Director of Teaching and Learning needed a way to gather authentic student feedback quickly, without getting bogged down in transcription or data crunching, so insights could inform the decision while it was still being made.

The Approach

• The Ask: The Director engaged diverse student groups with three key prompts: identify strengths, name challenges, and answer a "magic wand" question about their ideal math class.
• The Analysis: Moving quickly from data to dialogue, she met with the High School Principal the same afternoon to review findings.
• The Action: She partnered with instructional coaches to brainstorm solutions and presented a feedback report to math teachers, sparking immediate improvements in support.

Tools Used

• Voice Vue (For capturing live feedback during student interviews)
• All Voice (For synthesis and reporting across all student groups)

The Outcome

Connection Over Collection. Because she was not bogged down by transcription or data crunching, the Director could dedicate her attention to the students right in front of her. This streamlined process enabled her to share feedback with principals, coaches, and teachers in record time.

Instead of analyzing data, the team spent their time designing solutions. As a result, educational practice and curriculum choices were built on a foundation of student need and perspective.

How to Replicate This Success

Follow these steps to gather impactful feedback in your district.

• Set the Stage: Identify a diverse mix of student groups. Have classroom teachers give them time to review the questions beforehand so they feel prepared.
• Create Comfort: Invite a trusted teacher to accompany the students to the interview session. Emotional safety yields better feedback.
• Capture with Voice Vue: Conduct the group interviews using Voice Vue to record the conversation. Focus on eye contact and listening, not note-taking.
• Synthesize with All Voice: Combine transcripts from all interviews into All Voice to generate one comprehensive report.
• Protect & Share: Toggle the "Hide Names" (PII Blocker) feature to ensure the final report is anonymous. Share the insights with your teachers and instructional coaches to start planning.

The Challenge

A first-year superintendent at Griffin School District faced the daunting task of developing a comprehensive strategic plan while still learning the community. Traditional strategic planning meant hiring expensive outside facilitators, spending months collecting and synthesizing data, and hoping the final plan actually reflected stakeholder priorities. The district needed a way to hear from everyone, including the school board, students, staff, parents, the local tribe, and the broader community, without the heavy lifting that typically derails new leadership.

The Approach

• The Ask: Griffin surveyed the entire community using multiple participation channels. Stakeholders could respond by text message, automated phone call, an AI-powered chat agent, or traditional online survey. The survey remained open for two weeks, ensuring broad access and participation across all groups.
• The Analysis: Instead of spending months synthesizing data, the planning team had immediate access to the strategic plan framework, executive report, and the full power of the strategic dashboard. The team could disaggregate data to any grade, demographic, or stakeholder group, deeply understanding the voice of their community. They could ask complicated strategic planning questions and receive answers linked directly to survey data and reports.
• The Action: The planning team received evidence-based goals generated by the platform and immediately got to work on solutions. The school board, having participated themselves, could see how their vision related to other stakeholder groups and trusted the process, knowing the strategic plan was anchored to authentic stakeholder input.

Tools Used

• Strategic Planning Platform (For real-time analysis, data visualization, and deep exploration of stakeholder voice)
• Student Story Support: Guidance from a PhD qualitative researcher as a thought partner, as well as personalized support from a dedicated point of contact throughout your process.

The Outcome

From Months to Weeks. When the survey closed, the superintendent had a complete strategic plan framework in hand, built directly from community voice. The intuitive process eliminated the need for outside facilitators, protecting the district's budget while maintaining full control over the timeline.

The school board gained confidence in the plan because they could see exactly how stakeholder input shaped every priority. The planning team spent their time designing solutions rather than drowning in data synthesis. Griffin School District now has a strategic plan that authentically represents every voice in their community, from students to tribal partners to parents, all achieved without the traditional barriers of time, cost, and complexity.

How to Replicate This Success

Follow these steps to streamline strategic planning in your district.

• Expand Your Reach: Use multiple participation channels with multilingual support to ensure every stakeholder group can respond in their preferred format. Conversational text, automated phone system, AI agent, and online surveys remove barriers to participation.
• Craft the Right Questions: Student Story allows you to collaborate directly with a PhD qualitative researcher to help craft questions that capture what matters most to your community.
• Set a Clear Timeline: Keep your survey open long enough for broad participation, then move directly into learning and discovery with immediate access to your strategic dashboard.
• Build School Board Buy-In: Include your school board as participants. When they see how their input relates to other stakeholder groups, they trust the process and champion the final plan.
• Deep Exploration Simplified: An intuitive dashboard allows you to drill down to the smallest grain size, with unlimited flexibility for custom reports on any topic or category. Ask questions and receive insights linked directly to your data.
• Start with Framework in Hand: Student Story provides an evidence-based strategic plan framework with goals and recommended priorities based on the voice of your community. Your team can skip the burden of synthesizing data and immediately focus on refining goals and designing solutions.
• Finish Strong: Once your pillars are in place, Student Story blends your goals and refinements with community feedback once again, producing an updated framework for the final stage. From here, your team adds the finishing touches that reflect your district's unique priorities, keeping community input at the heart of your strategic planning from start to finish.

The Challenge

Across the vast ESD 105 region, many rural, low-income, and farmworker students are eager to explore STEM careers but often lack the mentors, role models, and real-world connections that make those pathways feel within reach. The EIR-funded Virtual STEM Role Model Project was designed to change that, pairing students with diverse STEM professionals who could inspire, guide, and expand what felt possible. But to truly understand the impact of these mentorship experiences, the team needed more than numbers. They needed students to tell the story in their own words: Where were they gaining confidence? Where were they still unsure? How were these mentorships shaping their High School and Beyond Plans (HSBP)? The team needed a way to capture authentic student voice quickly and efficiently, both to refine the program based on what students were actually experiencing and to provide clear evidence for their federal grant reporting.

The Approach

• The Design: The team implemented a virtual mentorship program connecting students with diverse STEM professionals and near-peer mentors across multiple cohorts. To evaluate impact on students' High School and Beyond Plans (HSBP), they used Student Story Survey, focus groups, and qualitative analysis to capture comprehensive student feedback from implementation and control groups.
• The Analysis: Student Story Survey captured structured feedback with built-in voice analysis capabilities, Voice Vue facilitated live focus group conversations where students shared authentic experiences without the burden of manual note-taking, and All Voice brought everything together, synthesizing current data alongside legacy surveys to surface key themes. Students were queried on mentorship impact, STEM confidence, career uncertainty, and the support systems shaping their decisions.
• The Action: Armed with clear insights, the team moved quickly to refine mentorship pairings, strengthen program supports, and share findings with stakeholders across the ESD 105 region. Student voices shaped every decision, from adjusting how mentors connected with students to identifying which supports mattered most. Federal grant reporting became a natural byproduct of this work, with authentic student perspectives providing the evidence funders needed to see.

Tools Used

• Student Story Survey (For collecting structured student feedback across implementation and control groups)
• Voice Vue (For conducting live focus groups with students, capturing authentic dialogue without manual transcription)
• All Voice (For synthesis and analysis across all data sources, identifying themes from multiple cohorts and participant groups)

The Outcome

Equity-Driven Insights at Scale. Student Story AI enabled the team to efficiently analyze student voice data across multiple schools in the ESD 105 region, revealing meaningful patterns about mentorship effectiveness and career readiness gaps that would have been invisible in traditional quantitative metrics alone.

The dual benefit was transformative: the team gained actionable insights to strengthen their equity-driven programming while simultaneously fulfilling grant reporting requirements with authentic student voice evidence. By combining structured surveys through Student Story Survey, focus group discussions captured through Voice Vue, and comprehensive analysis in All Voice, the program could balance depth and scale, hearing individual stories while identifying patterns across cohorts. This approach centered student perspectives in both program design and accountability, demonstrating how technology can serve both improvement and compliance without compromising either.

How to Replicate This Success

Follow these steps to elevate student voice in mentorship programs and career readiness initiatives.

• Design for Impact Measurement: Identify students participating in your mentorship or career exploration program, and establish a comparable control group. This structure allows you to measure differential outcomes and demonstrate what's working.
• Deploy Student Story Survey: Launch surveys that capture both confidence levels and open-ended reflections about mentorship experiences, career aspirations, and perceived barriers. The built-in voice analysis reveals patterns in how students talk about their futures.
• Create Space for Authentic Sharing: Build trust by framing conversations around student hopes, uncertainties, and real experiences. When students feel psychologically safe, they share the insights that drive meaningful program improvements.
• Facilitate with Voice Vue: Conduct focus groups or individual interviews using Voice Vue to capture every word without manual note-taking. Stay fully present with students while the technology handles transcription, allowing you to notice subtle cues and follow promising threads in real time.
• Engage Industry Contacts Throughout: Use quick, open-ended Student Story Surveys or Voice Vue interviews with STEM employers and industry partners to regularly verify that program content matches real workforce needs. When industry contacts see their feedback actively shaping mentorship experiences and student preparation, their engagement deepens and students gain relevant, current insights that support post-secondary STEM success.
• Practice Member Checking: Throughout the project timeline, circle back regularly with all stakeholders (students, mentors, industry contacts, educators) to share emerging findings and confirm you're interpreting their input accurately. This ongoing validation ensures the program stays aligned with stakeholder needs while demonstrating that their voices are valued and actively shaping program direction. When stakeholders see their input creating tangible changes, engagement and investment naturally increase.
• Synthesize Everything with All Voice: Upload survey responses, interview transcripts, and even legacy data from previous years. All Voice identifies cross-cutting themes around mentorship quality, confidence shifts, support gaps, and career decision-making that would take weeks to find manually.
• Protect Privacy, Amplify Voice: Use privacy features to anonymize student data before sharing. Then distribute findings to program staff, district leadership, community partners, and grant funders, showing how student perspectives are driving your decisions.
• Act on Insights Immediately: Don't wait for the end of the grant cycle. Use real-time findings to adjust mentor pairings, add needed supports, and celebrate what's working. When students see their feedback creating change, engagement deepens.
• Build Your Evidence Base: As you refine programming based on student voice, you're simultaneously building compelling evidence for grant renewals and future funding. Authentic student perspectives demonstrate impact far better than metrics alone.

The Challenge

Graduate employment numbers were trending downward over 2 years, and the computer science program needed to pinpoint exactly why. It appeared that employers were hiring at normal rates, and it was suspected they were recruiting new graduates from other schools. Without input from close industry partners or a clear understanding of evolving employer needs, the curriculum committee was left wondering how to improve graduate hiring rates.

The Approach

• The Ask: The college distributed targeted surveys to over 50 hiring managers and alumni supervisors using the Survey Builder, then conducted 12 Voice Vue sessions with key industry partners to explore skill gaps, workplace expectations, and communication needs in depth.
• The Analysis: Using All Voice, the team synthesized quantitative survey data with qualitative Voice Vue transcripts, identifying three critical gaps: Git proficiency (78 percent of employers), collaborative problem-solving (65 percent), and professional communication (82 percent).
• The Action: Armed with concrete data, the curriculum committee integrated Git workflows into programming courses, added team-based capstone projects, and introduced professional communication modules. Each change was directly tied to employer-identified needs.

Tools Used

• Survey Builder (For structured employer feedback with rating scales and open-ended questions)
• Voice Vue (For in-depth advisory sessions with live transcription and sentiment tracking)
• All Voice (For synthesizing survey results and interview transcripts into actionable insights)

The Outcome

Data-Driven Curriculum Within 14 months, graduate employment rates increased by 23% as feedback from industry leaders, partners, and key college faculty was directly translated into curriculum improvements.

Faculty reported that the stories reshaped curriculum discussions: "Instead of making assumptions about the causes of declining numbers, we focused on what employers told us they actually needed." The program strengthened its reputation for responsiveness and industry alignment, resulting in deeper employer partnerships, the creation of a new advisory board, and graduates better prepared for real-world workplace demands.

How to Replicate This Success

Follow these steps to align your curriculum with employer expectations.

• Identify Your Stakeholders: Build a list of hiring managers, alumni supervisors, and industry partners who can speak to the skills your graduates need. Aim for diversity across company sizes and roles.
• Design Targeted Surveys: Use the Survey Builder to ask industry leaders which skills and qualities they value most in new graduates, and leverage the survey;s question generator to create open-ended prompts that reveal real industry needs.
• Go Deeper with Voice Vue: Schedule live listening sessions with key partners to explore nuanced feedback. Use the follow-up question generator to guide the conversation and get the most out of each session. Focus on real-world scenarios, potential industry shifts, employer expectations, and current hiring practices.
• Synthesize with All Voice: Combine survey responses and Voice Vue transcripts to generate a comprehensive report that identifies patterns and priority areas over all data.
• Act and Communicate: Share the Voice Report with faculty, curriculum committees, and program leaders. Start with the Top Themes and Data-to-Action sections to get on the right track. Then explore the data further using the chat agent or generate custom reports for different stakeholder groups and demographics to uncover patterns and insights. Use these findings to guide curriculum improvements, shape strategic discussions, and keep your teams aligned on what matters most.
• Use Member Checking: After analyzing your survey results, share key findings and your next steps with participants to confirm you're on the right track. This not only validates your work but also shows participants that their voices are valued and being heard.
• Build a Feedback Loop: Conduct quarterly pulse surveys to anticipate industry needs and adapt your program in real time. By positioning employers as active partners in shaping learning, you deepen their investment in both your graduates and your program's success

PLC Meeting Documentation

How can instructional coaches capture, share, and preserve the insights from every PLC meeting?

The Challenge

Professional Learning Communities are where the real work of instructional improvement happens, but too often, the insights shared in these meetings disappear the moment the session ends. Teachers juggle note-taking with active participation, key decisions go undocumented, and absent team members miss critical context. Without a reliable way to capture and share PLC discussions, schools lose institutional knowledge and struggle to maintain continuity across meetings.

The Approach

• The Ask: The instructional coach launched Voice Vue at the start of each PLC meeting, allowing the tool to capture the full conversation while teachers focused entirely on collaboration and problem-solving.
• The Analysis: After each session, the coach reviewed the auto-generated transcript and AI summary, highlighting action items, instructional strategies discussed, and student data insights that emerged from the conversation.
• The Action: The coach shared the meeting summary with all PLC members, including those who couldn't attend, and archived the transcript for future reference, creating a searchable record of the team's professional learning journey.

Tools Used

• Voice Vue (For live transcription, AI-powered summaries, and meeting documentation)

The Outcome

From Lost Conversations to Living Documents. PLC members reported feeling more present during meetings, no longer distracted by frantic note-taking. Absent teachers could catch up in minutes instead of relying on secondhand recaps. Over the semester, the archived transcripts became a valuable resource for onboarding new team members and tracking the evolution of instructional strategies.

One teacher shared: "I used to dread missing a PLC meeting because I'd never really know what happened. Now I can read the summary, search the transcript, and feel like I was there." The team also noticed improved follow-through on action items. When decisions are documented, accountability follows naturally.

How to Replicate This Success

Follow these steps to transform your PLC meetings into documented, shareable learning experiences.

• Set Expectations: Let your PLC team know you'll be using Voice Vue to capture the meeting. Emphasize that this frees everyone to participate fully without worrying about notes.
• Start Recording: Launch Voice Vue at the beginning of the meeting. Position your device where it can clearly capture all voices in the room.
• Facilitate, Don't Scribe: Focus on guiding the conversation and asking probing questions, using the auto-generated prompts if you're feeling off-course. Let the tool handle documentation while you stay present with your team.
• Review & Highlight: After the meeting, review the Voice Report and refresh your memory by reviewing the Topics Report. Add any clarifications and highlight the most important action items and decisions.
• Share & Archive: Distribute the summary to all team members, including those who were absent. Save the full transcript to your team's shared drive for future reference and institutional memory.

Lesson Reflection Surveys

How can teachers gather meaningful student feedback after each lesson or unit to continuously improve instruction?

The Challenge

Teachers pour hours into lesson planning, but rarely get honest, timely feedback on what actually worked. End-of-year surveys come too late to help current students, and informal "thumbs up" checks don't capture the nuance teachers need. Without a quick, consistent way to gather post-lesson reflections, educators are left guessing which strategies resonate and which fall flat.

The Approach

• The Ask: At the end of each unit, the teacher deployed a brief questionnaire using the Survey Builder with three targeted questions about what helped you understand the lesson, what part was confusing, and what could make learning easier next time.
• The Analysis: The teacher reviewed the Voice Report to identify patterns across student responses, noting which activities students found most valuable and where confusion consistently appeared.
• The Action: Based on student feedback, the teacher adjusted pacing for the next unit, added more visual examples where students reported confusion, and doubled down on collaborative activities that students said helped them learn.

Tools Used

• Survey Builder (For quick, targeted post-lesson reflection surveys with open-ended questions)
• All Voice (For combining and synthesizing historical survey results)

The Outcome

Real-Time Course Correction. Students noticed their feedback was being heard. When the teacher explained changes based on their input, engagement increased and trust deepened. Over the semester, the teacher built a library of reflection data that revealed which instructional strategies consistently worked across different units and student groups.

One student wrote: "I like that you read what we said. I'll give better answers on the next one." The teacher reported that these micro-adjustments, informed by student voice, had a bigger impact on learning outcomes than any single curriculum change.

How to Replicate This Success

Follow these steps to build a habit of post-lesson reflection in your classroom.

• Keep It Short: Design a minimal survey using Survey Builder. Focus on what helped, what was difficult, and what students would change. Brevity is key.
• Avoid Survey Fatigue: 1 to 2 well-crafted open-ended questions tend to elicit more meaningful responses from students. Quality feedback, paired with our analysis engine, delivers guiding insights you can use immediately.
• Let the Tool do the Work: Let the tools generate questions for you, or optimize your existing ones. Asking the right questions will ensure you receive the most meaningful feedback while minimizing low-quality responses.
• Time It Right: Deploy the survey at natural breakpoints, such as the end of a unit, after a major project, or following a new teaching strategy. Spacing them out is another element of reducing survey fatigue.
• Review Quickly: Check the Voice Report while the lesson is still fresh. Look for patterns, not just individual comments. The "Data to Action" section will be helpful in reflective thinking.
• Close the Loop: Tell students what you learned from their feedback and what you plan to change. This builds trust and encourages more thoughtful participation in the future.
• Track Over Time: Store your survey results to monitor progress across units. Over a semester, see what strategies work and where adjustments are needed. All Voice makes it easy to analyze past surveys and identify meaningful trends.