Students Planning K-12 Education

For more than twenty years, I have been studying ways that students are improving K-12 schools across the United States and around the world. Meaningful Student Involvement happens in a lot of different ways, including engaging students as partners in planning K-12 schools. Happening on the personal, classroom and system levels, this article is more concerned with the latter two locations.

School planning includes any facet of education that proceeds action, including teacher hiring, curriculum planning, building design, and countless other processes.

Students have been involved in a lot of ways doing these thing. As far back as 1972, a study was written on a curriculum writing project where high school students in several cities researched, wrote and assisted with teaching classroom curricula. Almost fifty years later in 2008, students at Black Hills High School in Tumwater, Washington were involved in hiring their new principal, writing curriculum and several other activities designed to engage them in improving their school. At Round Rock School in rural Texas, students were involved in designing a new school in 2004. Their contributions were attributed with directly improving learning and teaching at the new building.

High school learning is sometimes treated as a mysterious enigma wrapped in a riddle best unwrapped through a magic ball. However, at a few high schools students themselves have removed the veil to show they are powerful learning planners.

For example, students at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, are responsible for planning learning throughout their high school careers, on the individual and group levels. From 2000 through 2005, I helped advise a course at Lewis and Clark High School in Spokane, Washington, focused on engaging students in planning learning. Focused on social sciences, the course was a student-led, project-based opportunity to engage in the community around the school and beyond.

Sistas and Brothas United was a student-led education advocacy group in New York City that engaged students in the Bronx in designing a new public school in the early 2000s. Working with the district and a coalition of organizations, students helped plan and design a new high school called the Leadership Institute for Social Justice. Finally, one of my favorite examples comes from 1994, when elementary students revised classroom curriculum used to teach them.

Each of these examples with their own considerations and deserves further analysis. When considered as a whole though, they begin to illustrate the important, engaging ways that meaningful student involvement in K-12 education planning can transform learning, teaching and leadership throughout the entirety of the education system.

For more information on the power of students to transform schools, check out my book called Student Voice Revolution: The Meaningful Student Involvement Handbook. Have questions, a story, comments or other thoughts? I’d love to read them! Share them in the comments below.