Partnership
Including student voices on adult decision-making teams is not only a good way to build your team’s capacity to facilitate inclusive partnerships, the student voices present will provide a powerful lens to ensure your decisions and actions are stronger because they are informed by those most impacted.
Considerations for Adult Leaders
Formalizing a role in decision making, or standardizing operations to require student involvement is a powerful commitment to long-term development of inclusive partnerships in your school.
We encourage you to include a diverse selection of students for these roles. Often student-leadership roles are considered “selective” and only open to those with high grades or strong attendance. Non-traditional student-leaders are often more important in these spaces.
Adults are trained in how to work collaboratively with youth partners.
Tensions / Potential Challenges
TENSION: Maintaining an inclusive partnership with students is important for distributing leadership. Student and adult capacity may be stretched across multiple priorities.
TRY: Starting small, and leveraging existing groups. Inviting members of your student voice committee or other student groups to feedback meetings is a great place to start. Just be sure to communicate to them what decisions you made and why, otherwise they might feel tokenized.
If you have an established SVC, consider inviting them to the process. Or, have uniquely designed groups for specific purposes, such as departments forming their own student voice committees for their content area.
Strategy, Tool, or Resource
- Include student(s) or your SVC as members of the CIWP Team. Involve them in team meetings and provide a voice for them in the process and final decision-making.
- Together, review your school’s Student Voice and Civic Life 5E’s Data. Here is a sample report - contact ekornfeld@cps.edu or your network chief for your school’s report
Some tools to support youth-adult partnership on the CIWP Team: