Our Senior Director, Elina Alayeva, joined the Student Centered Podcast to discuss Springpoint’s Positive Youth Development paper. Listen to the full interview here.

She and host Arthur Baraf talked about the ways in which positive youth development theory (PYD) lays the foundation for new school model design. She touched on how a PYD approach enables teachers and leaders to craft learning experiences that build off existing student strengths and interests as a driver for learner agency and autonomy.

The paper is grounded in research, but serves as a practical resource for educators interested in using PYD to shape their school designs. Guided by 5 key PYD tenets, the paper includes sets of questions that leaders can ask students in order to identify the presence of positive youth development practices in their school. The paper also features the voices of students from schools with strong youth development approaches.

As Elina notes: “Adolescent development and learning science tell us that as young people are reaching to adulthood, the thing they crave the most is respect and autonomy and agency. When you think about school the traditional high school doesn’t present many opportunities for students to develop some of those competencies. And so when we think about a classroom or school where kids are active agents in their own learning…it means that students feel like they have agency in how they learn, in understanding and having transparent accountability and assessment, in understanding what the expectations of them are, and how they can reach those expectations.”