Framework - Community Design Partners

Student-Powered Improvement Framework

Explore the possibilities

The framework for Student-Powered Improvement includes four types of student partnerships for improvement. It was designed to help educators and youth understand the type of student voice activities that currently exist in their school, imagine more possibilities, and prevent efforts that tokenize students. All four types of partnerships are valuable. Choosing which type of partnership to design depends on the capacity, knowledge, and resources of your context. The most important thing is to get started somewhere on the framework.

Explore the four types of student partnerships

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

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

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

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

Students + Improvement

Any type of student partnership can be applied across improvement projects as teams seek to see the system, set a goal, and design change.

Student experiences and perspectives can help us see the system from their perspective and uncover important root causes of the problem we are trying to solve.

Students’ experiences and perspectives can help set goals that are more relevant than those only considered by adults. Students also offer important insights into conversations about whether goals are realistic while also ambitious.