This post has been updated with the 2017 release of our new Positive Youth Development paper. Read on for more.

We are pleased to release “How Students Thrive: Positive Youth Development in Practice,” a report that synthesizes research on youth development and its impact on schools. We expect this report to benefit design teams in our network as they begin to develop their school models, and we are excited to share it with the broader school design and education reform communities as well.

The paper makes a case for embedding positive youth development supports throughout a school’s model. As schools respond to the Common Core State Standards, they have focused primarily on increased academic rigor. The standards do, however, make explicit the kind of learners students must become to meet that higher academic bar: independent, responsive, discriminating thinkers who bring discipline, fortitude, and curiosity to their work. In order to get there, schools need to support students’ personal as well as academic development, and they need to embed positive youth development principles in all aspects of their model.

Alternatively, we often see schools that attempt to “fix” students through the provision of supplemental services – an advisory period, a weekly class for bullying prevention, or after-school support groups for at-risk students. When we think of youth development in terms of services, however, we fail to fully prepare students for the rigors of college and career. Rather than focusing on supplemental services, we should consider developmental pathways that are deeply interwoven with academic instruction, so students are always – even in academic courses – being prompted to consider key questions relating to their personal development: Who am I? What am I good at? What matters to me? Why should I care? We see positive youth development as a linchpin that connects all of these principles into a cohesive design.

This report was written in collaboration with Karen Mahler, Psy.D., an independent consultant with more than twenty years of experience working with youth and youth-based organizations. As our work with districts, networks, and new school design teams continues, Springpoint will circulate similar researched-based resources for the benefit of the field. Check this blog or follow us @SpringpointEDU for further updates.

The report is available for download here.