In a small conference room off the main office of a large high school near Tulsa, Oklahoma, eight students gathered with a language arts teacher and a youth development specialist to identify a problem that they could tackle in their school. Students immediately talked about the mental health crisis among their peers. “When hard things are happening in our lives, we’re just told to try harder and do better,” said one student. “I don’t talk about how I’m feeling anymore.”

The two adults showed students a strategy for naming root causes of poor mental health. They passed out colorful sticky notes, and students began posting suggestions on a whiteboard, building off one another’s ideas. Soon, the board was full. The root cause that the group decided to work on first was the shaming of students. As one described it, “Adults tell us what we do wrong, but never what we do right.”

After a lengthy and lively discussion, the students decided on an initial course of action: to flip the script of the school’s morning announcements. The practice was to announce the percentage of students who had not yet passed various state assessments. The students wanted to focus on what was going well by announcing the passing rates instead. They chose this problem first because the solution could be designed and tested right away  — a quick win —  and because they predicted it would positively impact their peers’ motivation to do well academically. With support from administrators, they put their plan into action and then surveyed students about whether they noticed the change. Many did. That success launched the team forward toward designing more changes.

This story illustrates one example of student-powered improvement, an approach where adults in schools redesign school systems with, rather than for, students. Over the past three years, Community Design Partners‘ facilitators, coaches and advisers have trained educators from over 300 schools and organizations to do this important work. They also host events like design sprints, where educators and students examine a problem and design solutions together; help measure outcomes; and tell success stories. Ultimately, the goal is to enable educators and students to sustain these initiatives themselves.

Read the full article about student-led improvements in schools by Kari Nelsestuen at The 74.