By Kitamba*

As our Engage New England school design partners transition from the Understand to the Design phase, it is important to continue to collect feedback and input from students. Students are the perfect audience to pressure test emerging design priorities. And, this point in the process is a great time to start providing students with opportunities for voice and choice, which is one of the foundations of Positive Youth Development and will likely be a key part of these new schools.

One approach for design teams to consider is convening a student advisory group that meets regularly. A student advisory group provides design teams with an easy way to access real-time feedback on how various aspects of school design are working, while also encouraging student voice. Below are a few tips for school designers to consider when implementing student advisory groups.

• Make it compelling: Recruit students by explaining the importance of the group and describing the impact their ideas and feedback could have on how the school operates. Consider offering course credit for participation, or schedule the meetings during mealtimes and provide food.

• Make it representative: Ensure that you are obtaining feedback from a group is representative of all student populations by reaching out to a wide audience of students. Think of the important subgroups who should be represented. Try to reach out, in particular, to students who are struggling in your school; they could provide valuable insight into what changes could help struggling students. Consider asking participating students to look around the room and share who else should be there and what kinds of voices are missing from the group.
• Make it actionable: If you are getting feedback from students, have a game plan for how to will summarize feedback and incorporate it into your design process. To collect and synthesize information quickly, consider using some of the tools in the shared drive, such as the focus group note-taking template. If you need support figuring out a game plan to translate student feedback into input for your design, please reach out. We’d be happy to help.

• Make it work for students: As you engage students as co-designers, consider how to translate for students the user-centered design principles and information you learn. There are great materials on the d.school at Stanford’s website, including design challenges and activities to use with students. One note of caution, if data will be shared with students, use special care to ensure they don’t receive any confidential information about other students. It is very important to protect student confidentiality particularly with regards to other students.

• Make it optional: In addition to getting good feedback and ideas for school design, the goal of student advisory groups is to allow opportunities for student voice and choice. For this reason, it is a good idea to make participation in student advisory groups encouraged but optional, in other words not mandatory.

Student advisory groups are a great way to engage your students as co-designers in doing high school differently. If you want to convene a student advisory group but need more support, please let us know. Springpoint and Kitamba would be happy to help.

Kitamba is a full-service firm offering strategic consulting and implementation support, product development, and investment and advisory services. They have been working closely to support school partners in the Engage New England network since this summer, pulling on their expertise in data innovation, strategic planning, and education.