SST 11 Podcast | Ep 30 | Student Powered Improvement

Join host Eric Neal as he learns about Student Powered Improvement with Kari Nelsestuen from Community Design Partners. Kari shares information about the program and powerful strategies to engage students and improve ownership and belonging in your school community.

Creators & Guests

Host

Eric Neal

State Support Team Region 11 Consultant and Podcast Host

What is SST 11 Podcast?

Podcast by State Support Team 11

Eric Neal:
Welcome to the State Support Team 11 podcast. I'm your host, Eric Neal. Today we are joined by Kari Nelsestuen of Community Design Partners. Welcome, Kari. How are you today?

Kari Nelsestuen:
Hey, thank you so much for having me. I'm doing well. How about you?

Eric Neal:
I'm doing great. It's great to have you back on the podcast. Can you remind the audience about the work you do at Community Design Partners?

Kari Nelsestuen:
Yeah, we do all kinds of work helping teams to improve systems, to engage their communities in that process and to strengthen teams. And specifically, I think we're here today to talk about some of the work we do around student voice and student involvement.

Eric Neal:
You have a new initiative that you've been working on. I'm excited to hear about it. And can you tell me about student-powered improvement?

Kari Nelsestuen:
Sure. So the first thing is unpack three words. Student-powered improvement is a very specifically chosen three words. Really, if you want to know, it's really about student voice. How can we expand student voice in our schools? But we chose student-powered improvement because it's about improving schools. It's about improving the systems that need improvement and doing that with student perspective and student involvement, and really student power, making students a bigger part of education reform and improvements, doing it with students rather than for students.

Eric Neal:
In my work, I hear a lot about lack of engagement with students. It's something that comes up almost as this barrier for a lot of educators like, "Well, I'm doing this the best I can and these kids are just not engaged." Is it something that you hear a lot or that influenced you to start this work?

Kari Nelsestuen:
It's really interesting. We try to help people reframe that engagement question to not place the blame on the people in the systems, but to really think about this is a systems problem. I have two teenage kids. This isn't their fault that they X, Y, Z. It's because something's happening in the system and the changing system. So I think at the end of it all, we know that engagement is changing and systems need to change with it. And I think that student-powered improvement is about trying to understand what students' perspectives and experiences are and partnering that with them to change the system so that very complex problem of engagement can be moved towards a resolution.

Eric Neal:
I hear you. I always get frustrated when people throw that out. My first go-to question in response to that is, how do you know? Because most times they've not had that conversation with the students. There are things like panorama surveys or different stuff that can measure some of these self-reported type things, but really I'm like, "Have you asked them them if they are motivated or why they might not be? Or are they engaged or why are they not engaged?" And almost universally, I either get a blank look or a no, we haven't done that. It sounds like that might be one of the first steps in this process.

Kari Nelsestuen:
It really is centering our own humility to be like, "We don't actually know." I was a student, I'm sorry to say a very long time ago, and perspectives and experiences and needs have really changed. So I have to continue just personally as a parent, not just as an educator, to revisit my assumptions that I'm making and to just be really curious. We talk about using a beginner's mindset, which means to pretend you don't know anything and go to a student or a group of students to just ask the very basic questions of tell me about a time you loved being at school. Tell me a time you didn't. You're going to learn so much that goes against what you might've assumed from your adult perspective.

Eric Neal:
Absolutely. There's some real inspiring case studies on your website, studentpoweredimprovement.com. Do you have any favorites?

Kari Nelsestuen:
No, I don't have a favorite because there's so many good ones, but I do want to talk about... I can share about one or two of them. I think that the first thing is that this website, while our organization had developed it, is able to share it with the world. The material is from all over the country. There are case studies from Baltimore and case studies from Chicago and case studies from California and educators who are partnering with students in all different ways. And one of the things we really saw as a need was that, as you said earlier, people don't even have a model of what it looks like to partner with students. So these case studies really offer that description and that information and that motivation to like, "Oh, we can do this differently. We can work with students to try to solve this problem."
And so in a way, the whole container is my favorite because there's very, very diverse examples. We did just finish adding classroom level examples. So if I had to choose a favorite, it's maybe recency bias because I've been working hard on those. There's an algebra teacher from Florida who we added her story about changing her classroom. They had taken a survey, as many schools do. She saw the results for her classroom, and she really leaned into not just listening to the perspectives on the surveys, but taking that survey back to students and saying, "Why did it turn out this way? What does it mean to you? What's important to you?" And then she took it even further to say, "Will you co-design some changes for this classroom with me?" And they weren't radical changes, but they made a huge difference.
Students wanted her to be at the door greeting them by name every day. That's a practice many educators already do. It's nothing new. But they really asked her to do that, and she did. And they checked in on how that was going. They also really communicated with her that they needed more of the why, not just why are we doing this lesson, why are we learning this math, but why are you assigning me a partner rather than choosing my own partner? So they were small changes, but they meant so much to the students. And not only did they mean so much just in the change itself, but they meant so much because students actually saw this teacher listened and then something happened because of what my perspective was. So it's a very inspiring story, I think.

Eric Neal:
I love that you have those examples because I think you're on the right track with a lot of educators, I think it can feel really scary, this idea of involving students on that level, that you might lose some sense of control or maybe things don't go the way that you wanted to. And I think seeing some of those examples, that why, really resonates with me a lot. I am a person that really, I have to know the why. It will drive me insane. And sometimes there's just policy things and the why is because it's in the law and we have to do it. I'm fine with that as long as it's been acknowledged and I know what that why is. But I think you having those examples to show teachers that have done it or building teams that have thought about these things and try to do that, helps take away maybe some of that hesitancy to give that a try.

Kari Nelsestuen:
Yeah. I do really think the first round of this site was all about those examples, motivational, inspirational, and now as we've developed and learned more and more, there's more of the tools to actually get it done. So what did that teacher actually do over three class periods to unpack the data with her students? What did that protocol look like? How could you replicate this yourself? Because it's not enough just to have a story. Then you need the how. And there's a lot more of that out there. And honestly, we're still learning every day about how to do it better.

Eric Neal:
I love that. I am very interested on implementation and ways to take these great ideas and turn them into practices that actually get you the results that you're trying to get.

Kari Nelsestuen:
Yeah.

Eric Neal:
Last time you were on, we talked about empathy interviews, student-powered improvement seems to have the same student-centered feeling about it to me. Do you feel like there's a connection there?

Kari Nelsestuen:
Absolutely. I love talking about empathy interviews. I think the connection is less to the interviews and more to the overall concept of empathy. Empathy interviews, which for those of you listening who don't know about them, they're really a story-based question that's really open-ended. Tell me about a recent class that you enjoyed being in and then taking that story where it goes. But student-powered improvement is all anchored in empathy. How can we really listen to other people's stories and their lived experiences and try to move closer to understanding? We'll never truly understand, but how do we do that with students more?
And what I would say about student-powered improvement, it's about how do we expand beyond just empathy? So it is amazing if you're in a place where that sort of empathy is happening, when we're telling stories and we're listening, but how do we take that even further and say, "Oh, I've listened to you to you, and now I want to partner with you. I want you to be on our design team as a student with five other students to help us go further." Rather than just taking your stories or having empathy for your stories and trying to design, how do we take this even further and maybe even share decision-making with students at the end of the day. So empathy as the base, but building from there.

Eric Neal:
While you were talking, I was making some connections in my mind. We have so many different initiatives and things that are going on. This really feels like something that could be applied throughout that right side of the MTSS pyramid, just integrated into the way that you work and the way that you put your framework in your system together more than this siloed separate thing. And it's like, "Oh, it's time to be student-powered. Let's do that. Oh, then we go back to doing the other things we're doing."

Kari Nelsestuen:
Yeah, it's really not a thing that you do. You can in some ways, but it's really about a collection of guiding principles and mindsets and checking in on who's at the table from the beginning, and are we authentically centering the users, the students in our systems, not just in what design, again, but how they might play a role in improvement.

Eric Neal:
I saw a statistic that was troubling recently talking about empathy that students have, and they think that things like social media and some of the isolation that they're experiencing in their lives are... There's been, I think they said, a 10% reduction in the amount of empathy that students are feeling and showing in schools. So I had love that this seems like a way to bring that back. And by them participating in modeling instead of, "Hey, we're just going to do an SEL lesson real quick," or something, seems to probably have a much bigger impact.

Kari Nelsestuen:
Yeah, some of these case studies have these beautiful examples of back to empathy interviews, but not just adults interviewing students, but students were interviewing their teachers and for the first time understanding the challenges of teaching and understanding teachers' fears and teachers' stress, and they came out of those experiences with so much more empathy towards the teachers in their building because they had this inside look. It seems so often it's just, "Oh, they're the teachers." But when you really unpack the human experience... In one of these design camps, the students actually, their change idea was to create care packages for their teachers because they had heard and wanted to do something. Just to your point, I am not giving up hope that empathy is on the decline. I think we just have to make opportunities and practice that muscle.

Eric Neal:
Absolutely. Why do you think there might be some teachers or schools out there that could be worried about tapping into student voice or struggle to implement this approach?

Kari Nelsestuen:
What I have found is that anywhere you go, there's going to be at least a little pocket of this. Sometimes it's a single teacher in a building who's really leaning into student voice or partnering with student voice. Sometimes it's system-wide, but it's partly because it's not the way we've ever done things. We're used to having, you said the word control. I think that's right. Adults make the decisions. Adults have the control. It's the way it's always been done, and again, stressing the importance of the mindsets. When you go to a place where people feel safer to be vulnerable and take risks and develop trust in their system, then some of those things go away and people can lean into student-powered improvement more.
So it's not a chicken and egg thing necessarily because sometimes you can change the mindsets by just doing the thing. And sometimes you have to work a little bit on the mindsets first before people will be engaged. But I think I've seen a lot of places where it's just experiencing a partner with students at a real small level, testing a little change idea, what we call a quick win, and then being like, "Wow, if I had left it to my adult brain, I wouldn't have even tried that, and look how well it worked."

Eric Neal:
Yeah, that makes sense that experiencing it is always better than just hearing it. Show me, don't tell me, show me. What are some other ways that student powered improvement can overcome these worries or challenges?

Kari Nelsestuen:
I will just stress again that bias to action. This doesn't have to start as a system-wide thing. It can start as a small idea. Let's bring in some students. Let's get their perspective. Let's ask them why this will or won't work. Let's try it for a couple days, and then have them say, "Tell us how it went." Or they lead the discussion of how it went and decide what to change. So I think bias to action is a huge thing.
And then overcome the barriers by taking the time to imagine the possibilities, just using the resources on the website or your own experience about a time when you had a voice in something and what it felt like. It doesn't have to be in a school, but really anchoring in what having a voice has meant to the adults in the system can serve as a motivator for like, "Oh, yeah, that's true." There's an interesting statistic we have on the first page of the site, and it is that students in schools where they even have a perception that they have a voice are seven times more likely to be academically engaged and motivated. So even if it's just a perception, and this is early study, it's not a randomized control trial or anything like that, but just even thinking about the power of agency and voice in a system that has a lot more potential impacts than just the voice itself.

Eric Neal:
That's great. So is there anything else you'd like the audience to know about student-powered improvement?

Kari Nelsestuen:
There's so many things, but I think that I would recommend that people watch the short video where students talk about it. I'm an adult. I appreciate being invited here, but the students can say it best. I know in the video there's a young man who talks about no one knows what's going on with a student more than another student. Another student in the video says that he knows we're all, we meaning adults, are well-intentioned, but we were in the high school a long, long time ago. And so just calling some of those things out, I think it's really important and thinking not just what does it do to our climate of our school and how we do business and our relationships, but the long-term outcomes too. When students have a voice and potentially even decision-making power, what does that do for them as future citizens of the world and employees of organizations? You can tell from my talking and talking, there's just so much potential.

Eric Neal:
Absolutely. Is there anything else you have coming up that you're excited about?

Kari Nelsestuen:
Yes. We're pursuing another new story. We're constantly adding stories because there are so many. And this one, a student powered-improvement story, where a school took it all on. They invited students to help them redesign the start to their day because attendance was so low in first period. And we're not at the end of the story yet, but the early indicators are. Students got their hands on it. They completely redesigned what they did during first period, their advisory period. Now there's a lot of choices, a lot of things that never happened before, but they say are the things that they really need. And so far this year, attendance has shot up. So I'm really excited about that, especially because Community Design Partners is doing more and more work in that space of attendance and chronic absenteeism. So I'm excited to see where that story and that whole huge problem of practice is going.

Eric Neal:
Great. If people would like to know more about you and the work that you do, where should they go?

Kari Nelsestuen:
Right. Well, we've mentioned it a couple times. All of this work is on studentpoweredimprovement.com. And it'll tell you about us. Interestingly, this is a resource developed through a project and partnership, so we also have our own Community Design Partners website of communitydesignpartners.com, but you can find out about CDP, as we call ourselves, in either place.

Eric Neal:
All right. Well, thanks again for joining us, Kari. It's been a real pleasure.

Kari Nelsestuen:
Thank you so much for your time, and good questions.

Eric Neal:
Thanks. That wraps up this episode of the State Support Team 11 podcast. If you'd like to know more about us and the work that we do here at SST 11, go to our website, sst11.org. Give Us a call at [phone] or hit us up on Twitter, we're @sstregion11. If you'd like to get a hold of me, I'm at [e-mail]. Until next time, I'm Eric Neal. Thanks for listening.