Bristol Public Schools: Student Voice Initiative, Writing and Communication

Bristol Public Schools • Carly Fortin

District-wide, two-lens student and teacher voice study for Bristol Public Schools, funded by Partners for Educational Leadership, designed to set the district's professional learning direction on writing and communication for the coming year. Four differentiated Warren conversational surveys share one driving question about how writing is experienced and taught across the district. Three form the primary wave (Grades 3 to 5, Grades 6 to 12, and Teachers, launching the week of 9/14); Grade 2 follows as a facilitated, video-prompted, audio-response wave on the Calvin Leete model once the primary model is validated. Kindergarten and Grade 1 are out of scope this cycle. All responses are coded against Bristol's own five Functions of Writing, using deterministic parallel codebooks in English and Spanish with multi-label tagging and required human review. No student response is sent to a generative model at any point. The district's trait matrix is carried through as a transparent per-function feedback-emphasis layer, kept distinct from the coding categories. Analysis produces archetypes of student experience, a per-function teacher needs-assessment view, and the headline deliverable: a cross-instrument priority map placing each of the five functions on a student-experience axis and a teacher-capability axis, differentiated by grade band and content area. That map yields the recommended PD focus and the inquiry questions schools will choose from next year. Delivery is a presentation deck plus strategy memo in early November, with a mid-November post-delivery consultation and an ongoing Year 2 licensing conversation running alongside the work.