Taking a step back and giving students a chance to speak their mind, Wednesday’s staff meeting looked a little different as student panels led the discussion.

Hoping to improve student learning, F-L school counselor Ryan Kiefer believes the panel helps teachers understand the classroom environment from the student perspective.

“I think it’s just another perspective,” Kiefer said. “We sent out those surveys earlier this year, but to actually have live students give their individual perspectives. For educators I think it’s valuable to us as we try to make the environment better for you students.”

The students helping to lead the staff meeting were chosen based on specific criteria.

“We tried to get a very diverse panel,” Kiefer said. “But also ones that we felt would be bold enough to actually give an honest opinion in front of teachers, obviously which would be intimidating, we just selected based on that kind of criteria.”

Wednesday’s meeting allowed the students to share their opinions on various techniques teachers implement throughout the school day.

“It was a great conversation with the teachers on how we can make our education system better such as technology issues, simple education problems, how we can use our skills to solve these problems, such as note taking strategies and Brain Breaks.” junior Carter Bianchin said. “I think teachers need to hear back from the students, it’s very important because it’s a two way street. We need to hear back from the teachers and teachers need to hear back from us.”

Economics teacher Fred Kaiser agrees, as he appreciated having students involved.

“I thought it was a nice change from the normal staff meetings,” Kaiser said. “Getting input from students on several different topics was very interesting. I enjoyed getting the students input on a wide range of topics from cell phone policies, to lesson planning ideas and how to connect with the student population and engage them.”