Transforming Education Systems WITH (not just FOR) Students

Youth voices matter. Far too often, transformative education efforts, albeit with the best intentions in mind, happen in serviceof students, but fail to truly center youth voice within the work. What would happen if we not only included youth and students as central end users in our work, but intentionally amplified their voices to transform their own education system? 

That’s precisely what happened in Denver over the past few months. Our partners at Turn Corps (in collaboration with RootEd and the Denver Scholarship Foundation), spearheaded a community-based outreach effort that intentionally amplified recent alumni and student voices in efforts to transform schools. The goal of this work was to identify priorities and develop an alumni and student-driven policy framework to be leveraged by Denver policymakers. The lessons we’ve learned have been vast and important. At 2Rev, our theory of transformation is contingent upon co-construction and engendering ownership of the work across an entire education ecosystem. While that was always inclusive of students, the work in Denver has shown us the impact that can be made when we truly transform education WITH young adultsand youth. Alumni who have graduated from DPS within the past 10 years, and who have recent life, work, and higher education experience to draw upon, are best positioned to reflect on their K-12 experience and develop a framework to help the next generation thrive. 

Consistent with how we approach transformation in other systems contexts, we set out to better understand the Denver education ecosystem through community visioning and a landscape analysis as part of a thorough “discovery” process. While we have engaged in this work in multiple contexts and always strive to include a broad, diverse cross-section of community stakeholders, our partners asked that we design experiences that would explicitly target recent Denver Public School (DPS) alumni and current high school students. The goal was to ensure that emerging recommendations represented the authentic opinions and suggestions of Denver youth. So, we co-constructed a series of four three-hour design studios that were designed to engage alumni in visioning exercises and then use the design cycle to quickly prototype ideas about the kind of education ecosystem they would create for today’s students. While much of the structure of our sessions were designed to produce similar data (e.g., What do kids need to know and do in the future of work that awaits them? How might we design a school experience that ensures students’ learning of these skills and knowledge?), it was fascinating to compare and contrast the ways in which recent high school graduates (vs. broader community representatives) view the shifting landscape of work. They’re also able to apply a critical lens in rethinking what school can/should be designed to “do.” Figure 1 captures the essence of the elements identified as critical components of a redesigned educational experience. 

Figure 1: Alumni- and Student-inspired Prototypes

By comparison, the word cloud shown below in Figure 2 below was created from data compiled through another partner’s community visioning work (in a different city). I use these graphics as a point of comparison to highlight the various types of responses that are derived when asking similar questions. While the invitation to the visioning sessions in the second case was open to students, attendees were primarily adults - i.e., educators, some community members and parents. These words describe the ideal learning experience that they believe youth need in order to be successful in the future. While the question isn’t exactly the same as the one above, the premise is the same - we asked participants in both contexts to describe the kind of learning ecosystem they think students need in order to thrive in the future. 

Figure 2: Community-derived Transformed Learning Environments

While this isn’t a comparison of “apples to apples”, there are still insights to draw in comparing the ways in which an audience of students vs. an audience of adults reimagines what school can be. In looking specifically at the words that emerged across both groups (and leveraging my knowledge of how the sessions unfolded), it’s pretty clear that adults tend to think more explicitly about the system as a whole and often have a harder time coming up with technical solutions to the adaptive challenges they identify. For example, adults might indicate that school environments need to be more “flexible and student-centered.” That’s great, but these ideas are still abstract and adaptive concepts. Alumni who have the most recent and relevant experience, on the other hand, are quicker to offer specific, technical solutions to challenges they see. For example, students might not say they want “flexibility,” but they did indicate that “acknowledgement (and credit) should be given for all learning - that happens both inside and outside of school.” They might not say the words “student-centered,” but their ideas around student agency (our words) clearly outlined their desire to empower student voices in sharing power with adults in very explicit ways within classrooms, schools and the district. 

In looking across the data from each of these engagements, this same theme became very clear: adults describe the kind of “sandbox” they would create in helping students be successful in the future, whereas the young adults offer concrete examples of the types of sand, toys, and materials that are being described by the adults. We are all talking about the same thing, but often fail to pause and deconstruct the intersection and opportunity that exists within this synergy. 

The opportunities that this cohort of young alums and students prioritize are those that are most relevant to their lives - those that will have the most profound (and immediate) impact on them as learners. Change is complex and includes adaptive and technical shifts in the way we do things. Adaptive solutions take time and require cultural and/or mindset shifts, while technical solutions are those that are clear and can be accomplished with minimal investment or learning. An insight about change that we’ve learned from Switch (Heath & Heath) is that we can facilitate change by using technical solutions to chip away at the adaptive challenges we see. This is the opportunity that I see with the youth-centered approach used in Denver. Youth and young adult voices are not only important in transformation, they are critical and should be central to our efforts, as young people are quicker to offer technical solutions that will positively impact their experience in more immediate ways. Adult voices are also not only important, but critical to transformation, as they tend to think deeply about the adaptive systemic changes that can support sustainable transformation efforts. As an education design lab, 2Rev asserts that empathy is a primary driver in transformation efforts. Our work with DPS alumni has made that even more clear for me. If we can all work together to listen and understand the great insights that each voice brings to the conversation, oh what possibilities lie ahead in transforming our school systems! 

Sometimes as adults, we get stuck in the complexity of change and the plethora of possibilities and constraints that exist. It can immobilize us. It also often seems “easier” and “faster” for many to proceed in transformation efforts without building in the time to actively elevate students in the work. As my colleagues often say, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” Our partnership in Denver has reminded me that if we can simply ground ourselves in the lives of those closest to the issues in education (students and recent graduates), they can help us unlock the clearest and most direct paths to transformation. We must never steer too far from students if we want true transformation.