Using Sociocracy As A Tool For Student Voice

Students often don’t have a say in how their schools are run, or how to direct their own learning, despite the fact that including student voices in schools has many proven benefits.

Among others, these benefits include: increased academic motivation (Quaglia 2016); higher GPAs, fewer absences and less chronic absenteeism (Kahne et al 2022); an increased sense of agency, belonging, and competence (Mitra 2004) and increased self-esteem, life skills, democratic skills, and improved relationships with adults (Griebler & Nowak 2012).

If teachers and administrators want to include students in decision-making, practical tools are needed. A good starting place is to decide what decisions students are included in and how.

There are three levels of student voice in decision-making:

1. Teachers and administration make decisions with feedback from students
2. Students are included to co-decide with teachers and administration
3. Students are fully empowered to make their own decisions in a given domain

Once students are given a clear role in decision-making, a school will need to decide on a process to make decisions. Majority rules and sociocracy are two options for this.

Majority Rules vs Sociocracy

I’d been in education for over a dozen years when I decided to found a democratic school to help empower students. In my quest to start an inclusive, collectively governed school, I came across the concept of sociocracy. I interned at a democratically governed school and was impressed by the inclusion of students in decisions from the school rules to budget and hiring. However, I found the problems of tyranny of the majority persisted despite the democratic ideals of the school. Half of the students would be for an issue and half against, and there was no clear way to resolve school-wide conflicts.

Sociocracy offers an alternative to include all voices. Sociocracy, or ‘democracy as it could be’ called, arose in a school in the Netherlands founded by Quakers. Under this system, all voices are heard as decision-makers take turns in ‘rounds‘ for each person to speak. Decisions are made by consent in smaller representative committees, meaning a decision moves forward if there are no objections. Objections can be resolved by including concerns and amending proposals.

Sociocracy has a rich history in schools as well as businesses, nonprofits and NGOS and other participatory organisations.

Sociocracy in Schools: Successes and Challenges

Sociocracy is used in at least 50 schools worldwide. Students make decisions about things as varied as how to study the curriculum, how to spend discretionary budgets and the implementation of school-wide policies. These schools have achieved great successes through sociocracy, while also encountering challenges, as can be seen in the examples of three schools in the US.

New Roots Charter School is a public high school in Ithaca, New York, which serves students aged 14-19 in the 9th-12th grades. New Roots has implemented sociocracy in their representative student council for six years. The student council is composed of two students from every classroom, and the principal is the liaison to the rest of the school who helps implement policies. I studied New Roots’ student council and published a peer-reviewed qualitative study about how student council members perceived their student voice in the school using sociocracy.

Noteworthy successes of this system have included students having input on a gender-neutral bathroom policy, implementing a COVID-19 mask policy with whole-school input and leading an initiative for an Earth Day celebration that featured volunteer service opportunities in the community. Yet sociocracy is limited beyond the student council. Some teachers and students don’t understand how the process works, which means that feedback from the whole school is limited outside of specific projects and policies.

Pathfinder Community School in Durham, NC is the school I founded serving ages 5-14, which ran from 2018-2020 and was permanently closed due to COVID-19. You can read more about the school in my book, ‘Let’s Decide Together‘.

Students at Pathfinder had a $200 monthly stipend to spend in a participatory budget. The students used these funds to purchase art supplies and furniture, fund field trips and start school clubs. They were fully in charge of deciding school rules and agreements on how to learn and live together while meeting student needs. Among other successes, they started a free snack store to make sure all students had snacks available to them, as well as a food-sharing shelf after noticing some students were experiencing food scarcity.

However, there were still challenges. Older students and younger students had very different needs and often disagreed about policy decisions for the school. It was also unclear how parents should be involved in decision-making at the school, which led to conflicts.

Flextech High School in Shepherd, Michigan, USA has operated with students participating in sociocracy since 2017 (per the video presentation available here). With student input, the school’s whole schedule was changed to allow for more time to get to classes, and students said they felt more included in decision-making. However, the school’s participatory budgeting project was rescinded at the last minute by the administration, disappointing students who had invested time and energy into the process.

Successful Case Studies

There is both qualitative and quantitative evidence that using sociocracy in schools helps students to feel included and is correlated with increased reflective abilities. In my interview-based study of New Roots Charter School, most students interviewed said their voices were included, that sociocracy works well and that they trusted their administration to follow through on student council decisions. One student said:

‘I used to go to another school … there wasn’t sociocracy being used and I knew that there wasn’t really anything that I could say that would change anything going on in the school. But when you’re using sociocracy and everybody’s voices are being heard … everyone had to agree [to a new policy], so it’s pretty empowering for students.’

At Rainbow Community School in Asheville, NC, students performed exceptionally well on a test assessing perspective-taking abilities. Administrators credited the sociocratic practices used in classes, which included talking by taking turns in rounds and promoting listening skills.

Tips for Practical Use in Schools

There are several sociocratic tools that are easy to implement within schools without changing the whole school to a sociocratic system.

Rounds for Feedback

In the classroom, you can try starting with rounds for student feedback on teaching and learning strategies. Find a ‘talking object’ to pass around in brief classroom meetings (5-15 minutes long) and prompt students with questions such as:

• ‘How is the classroom structure working for you?’
• ‘How do you feel about our behaviour norms?’
• ‘What teaching strategies or styles work best for you?’ (Hands-on, lecture, paired partner work, etc.)
• ‘What kind of work do you enjoy most?’ (Group projects, solo work, etc.)

After listening to student feedback, present proposals to make changes in the classroom and see if the students consent to trying out the new strategies. Be sure to follow through on any decisions made so that students learn to trust that their feedback will be not only heard, but also acted upon.

Domains for Student Power

In sociocracy, a ‘domain‘ is a concrete area of decision-making power. In a school, this could be something like:

• School clubs
• Decorating a classroom or keeping it tidy
• Organising one-time events like end-of-school celebrations
• Specific classroom learning projects
• A discretionary budget for students
• Improvements to your community, such as a committee to improve school culture
• School-wide policies, including the schedule, dress code or student behaviour code

Remember the three levels of student voice and ask: What domain of decisions do students have feedback on? What decisions are co-decided with teachers and administration? Are there any decisions that belong entirely to the students? Make the answers to these questions absolutely clear.

In a classroom where students decide how to keep the space tidy, the teacher can facilitate and give feedback on the decisions, but they may also let students try out different strategies. Find domains that feel safe enough to try giving over entirely to students. Decisions can be made via consent (see below) and should be checked in on frequently to see how the decisions are working.

Consent Decision-Making

In consent decision-making, the group is polled with the question: Is this good enough for now, and safe enough to try?

I teach ‘thumbs consent’ with three options:

• Thumbs up: I like it
• Thumbs sideways: I’m okay with it
• Thumbs down: I’m not okay with it / I have an objection

Objections are a reason why a proposal wouldn’t work or might harm the group. Objections present an opportunity to make proposals better and can lead to proposal amendments.

At Pathfinder, a daily ritual was to clean the school, with every student having a specific chore to complete and be checked off by a ‘chore checker’. One student strongly objected to the requirement to participate in clean-up time. We treated this as an ‘objection’ to the ‘proposal’ of daily clean-up time. We tried a new proposal for just one day of no clean-up time, which we evaluated at the end of the day.

School visitors came on that day with no clean-up, and we asked them how they felt about the messes everywhere. Students were embarrassed by the mess and found it hard to do their work. They concluded that clean-up time was a necessary part of the school day and that everyone should participate in it. The reluctant student was elected ‘chore checker’ and became an eager participant in the daily ritual.

Let’s take another example: deciding on a school dress code about wearing hats in class. The first step would be to ask the stakeholder groups what they think about the issue by taking turns in rounds. Let’s say that students want to wear hats for personal expression, but teachers object because they feel disconnected from the students during class since they can’t see their eyes. There are three ways in which this objection might be resolved:

1) Amend the proposal – One amendment could be: ‘Let students wear hats in the hallways, but not during classes’.

2) Take the concern and measure it – Ask: ‘Do the students feel they can express themselves?’ and ‘Are the teachers and students feeling connected during classes?’

3) Time-limit the proposal for a short duration – In this example, you could try out the new hat policy (hats in the hallway but not during classes) for one week, and then evaluate the proposal by asking the measurement question. You can also just ask: ‘In general, how is this new policy going?’

This is a real example from Integrale Tagesschule Winterthur in Switzerland. They agreed on students wearing hats during free time and lunch, but not in classes. Students and teachers both had their needs met by the proposal.

Selecting Classroom Roles

Classrooms may have roles such as chore keeper, or student representative to a larger student council. Selecting students into roles using sociocracy is a powerful tool for building responsibility and accountability, as well as allowing the community an opportunity to give each other feedback.

In sociocractic selections, people can nominate themselves or each other. Roles are clearly defined at the beginning and nominations are read publicly and openly, with each person giving reasons why they nominated someone. A candidate is selected via consent for a well-defined term.

At New Roots Charter School, one student council member said:

​​’I like how we nominate people to be representatives. And I find that when I’m going around to each crew and getting the representative, most of the time, it’s not by who’s the most popular in the class. The people who are picked are really good representatives. They represent the crews, and everybody is in a crew [so the whole school is represented].’

Roles students could fill might include:

• Club president, secretary, or treasurer
• Meeting facilitator (even simply holding the talking object and passing it for feedback rounds)
• Timekeeper (reminding the teacher when there are five minutes left in class)
• Student council representative
• Classroom helper (i.e. passing out papers, making sure things are tidy, etc.)
• Line leader moving around the school

Conclusion

In the quest for including student voices, sociocracy offers some powerful tools. I encourage you to experiment in your school with increasing student feedback, finding decisions that teachers and students can share, and also finding domains that are safe for students to collectively decide on themselves. By empowering students, we can help create more engaged citizens and a stronger democracy, as well as give students of today the feeling that they can make concrete changes and influence decisions that affect their daily lives.

Resources

• School Circles – an independent documentary that explores the practice of democratic schools in the Netherlands. ‘School Circles connects the theory of sociocracy to its practice within schools, taking us to new possibilities of organising ourselves and our communities.’
• Sociocracy in Schools – resources for schools by Sociocracy for All.
• Let’s Decide Together – a book by Hope Wilder for practising sociocracy with ages 5-14.
• Full free PDF of the New Roots research study.
• More resources for schools on the Progressive Education site to promote Student Voice.

Hope Wilder is a former school founder and certified sociocratic facilitator. She is the author of ‘Let’s Decide Together‘, a practical workbook for teaching shared decision-making with children aged 5-14 using sociocracy.