Cheyenne Fischer is unafraid of being heard.
She is always ready to speak up, whether she’s cheering on her softball teammates, singing in a choir or challenging modern teaching philosophy to a crowd of more than 100 educators.
As one of Grove City High School’s incoming students, Fischer knows a thing or two about navigating the life of a modern student. For the past two years, she has been the voice of the student experience at the Ohio Educational Technology Conference’s FREd Talks.
OETC is an annual three-day conference where teachers and educators learn and experience new ideas and technology that can be integrated into classrooms. Each of OETC’s FREd Talks consist of a keynote speaker presenting to a large group of educators for five minutes using 20 auto-advancing PowerPoint slides. Fischer gave two FREd Talks, one in February and the other in 2019.
“(I chose) two strong topics that I really believed in and I thought that teachers needed to hear,” she says.
In her first presentation, Five Ways Teachers Can Engage Students with Technology, she suggested teachers use websites and video games to increase student engagement and retention of a subject.
“One of the websites I use to study a lot of my stuff is Quizlet,” she says. “I think (it’s) so fun because you can play games with your friends online. It just makes it so much easier. Most of the time, I do really well on tests because of it.”
In addition, she suggested teachers use face-to-face software for teaching outside the physical classroom, unknowingly foreshadowing schools going virtual during the pandemic.
Fischer’s second FREd Talk was all about the need to listen to the student voice. She began the presentation with duct tape over her mouth that prevented her from speaking.
“As a student, I felt like I had no voice and student voice is very important in the world,” she says. “I would be interviewing students about it and they all agreed that they wished they had a better student voice because they couldn’t say something, or they couldn’t agree or disagree with something.”
As the presentation continued, Fischer recommended that teachers break down the wall that prevents students from reaching their full potential. Teachers, she says, must provide high quality feedback and allow time for thorough reflection of that feedback. Working together as a community is the best way to knock down this wall.
Fischer also believes that taking into account the unique circumstances of students is another great way that teachers can make learning more accessible to students.
She plans to give another FREd Talk, now as a high school student, using her voice to inspire teachers and students.
“(Listening to students) is important because sometimes teachers don’t take (into) account what the students are dealing with in their lives,” she says. “If I were a teacher right now, I would probably let each student speak up about what they are feeling about topics individually or privately to give them a voice.”
Brendan Martin is a contributing writer. Feedback welcome at feedback@cityscenemediagroup.com.
