Resources Archive - Community Design Partners

Empathize

Empathize with students means to try to deeply understand the experiences, perspectives, and feelings of students and apply those learnings.

Involve

Involve students means to engage youth in events and processes with adults to share their unique needs, priorities, and perspectives.

Share decision making

Share decision-making with students means that students play a leadership role in decision-making and have some real decision-making power.

Youth-Led

Youth-led improvement efforts means that student groups lead their own improvement efforts, from determining their areas of focus to carrying out those changes.

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Framework

Explore the student-powered improvement framework of possibilities.

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Building student-powered classrooms: A guide to partnering with students to improve schools

Learn strategies to collect student voice data and design solutions for classrooms together with students.

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Exploring vulnerability together

Explore the mindset of vulnerability and its role in fostering openness, authenticity, connection, and personal growth

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Guiding Principles

Six guiding principles help ensure that student-powered improvement efforts are authentic and meaningful.

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Community circle: Reflecting on vulnerability

Explore aspects of vulnerability together to cultivate the learning environments, deepen understanding, and gain insights.

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Student-powered improvement workshops

Explore workshops, design sprints, and other supports for your student-powered improvement journey.

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Care, truth, and hope

Learn, reflect, and try ways to create spaces of care, truth, and hope with this guide.

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Vulnerability

Learn, reflect, and try ways to foster vulnerability in this guide.

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Three strategies for community engagement

This guide explores three ways to engage community in improvement efforts.

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Triads of trust

Useful in group meetings, this simple strategy offers an opportunity for team members to share their stories, deepen relationships and uncover truths in a small-group setting.

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Notice, own, advocate, cede power

This activity asks team members to name the status quo categories of power so that they can work to share power with other members.

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Reimagine power, privilege, and agency

Learn, reflect, and try ways to reimagine power, privilege, and agency.

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Social identity matrix

This protocol asks team members to share their personal identities and truths, an important activity for fostering truth and care.

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Empathy interview planning template

Use this template to plan the who, what, when, and why of empathy interviews.

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Empathy interviews

Learn about the mindsets, tools, and best practices of empathy interviews.

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Empathy interview question examples

Explore examples of empathy interview questions.

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Consensus decision-making protocol

As part of reimagining power and privilege, both students and adults may need support in coming to a decision. This protocol will help teams arrive at a consensus when presented with difficult choices.

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Recognizing adultism in schools

This activity asks teams of students and adults to name the places where adultism is at play in their schools.

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Personal timeline

This activity builds deeper care and truth among participants by sharing timeline stories of highs and lows. The process helps affirm similarities and differences in order to move forward together.

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Hopes, fears, and community agreements

This protocol helps youth and adults express their hopes and fears for the work ahead and then leads to the creation of shared group agreements.

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Recruiting students for student-powered improvement

Explore considerations and strategies for recruiting students for this work.