Casey Chiofolo:
What we got out of that focus group is that students at Respect Academy are economists with their time. If there’s something that they think is higher value to them, either working until 3:00 am the night before and catching an extra 45 minutes of sleep or driving a sibling to school so they can get to school on time and being late themselves, they’re going to choose that route.

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton, and that was the voice of Casey Chiofolo, an assistant principal at Respect Academy, an alternative high school in Denver. My colleague Sofia Tannenhaus spoke to Casey and Julie Smith, co-founder of Community Design Partners, about forging meaningful partnerships with students in order to solve wicked problems in education. And they’ll get to what a wicked problem is, so don’t worry if you’re confused about that phrase now. Sofia does a beautiful job of introducing Casey and Julie, so we’re going to get right into it.

Sofía Tannenhaus:
Hi Julie, hi Casey, it’s so great to be sitting down with you. I’ve been really looking forward to this conversation. Just some quick intros. We have Julie Smith, who is a co-founder at Community Design Partners. And a little bit about Community Design Partners, for those of you that don’t know, they believe that the answers to complex problems are rooted in the community and they use mindsets and tools from human-centered continuous improvement to interrupt and redesign systems, and they really partner with the folks that they work with. So they do really wonderful work, so excited to have you.
And then I also have Casey Chiofolo, who was previously a math and special education teacher and is the newest AP at an alternative high school called Respect Academy, which is part of Denver Public Schools. So thank you both for being here.

Casey Chiofolo:
Thanks for having us.

Sofía Tannenhaus:
So today we’re talking about working with students to solve hard problems in schools, which starts with asking students what they think, which actually happens less often than one might like to think. So I want to start by asking you to cast your mind back to when you were a student, and can you describe a time when teachers asked you what you thought about how things should work in your school?

Julie Smith:
I really can’t, except to say that I was the Hillcrest Elementary School Student Council President in sixth grade, mostly because I ran against three male opponents and I got the whole female vote in the K-6 school. But even at those student council meetings where we did drive projects, it was mostly outside of the learning environment. It was canned food drives or assemblies, but that’s the closest I think that I got to somebody asking me.

Casey Chiofolo:
I think I have a similar experience than Julie. I’m trying to think of a time in the academic side of things where a teacher or a school went for input from students. And everything that’s popping into my mind is extracurricular, like sports or marching band, that stuff outside of the classroom that’s just more naturally like an open conversation between students and the advisors of those programs.

Sofía Tannenhaus:
Yeah, and I had a similar experience to both of you actually, where I didn’t fully get to lean into my leadership capabilities unless it was outside the classroom for the most part. And one thing to add onto that is that I was raised in a household that it was instilled in me that the adult at school are figures of authority that you need to respect. Don’t question them, do everything that you’re asked to do. And so I went into education as a student with that mindset, so this whole self-advocacy or speaking up for others, all of that, that was not a thing for me. And I think that probably resonates for a lot of families still, especially I’ll speak just for Latino families, I think that’s a very common situation. I’m not saying everyone, but that’s what I grew up with. And so I didn’t really lean into any of this until a lot further along in life.

Julie Smith:
Well, and I would even add to that, Sofia, even when I was a teacher in the classroom, I taught elementary school, and I remember being tapped to join a superintendent’s advisory group for something. I don’t remember what it was, but I remember feeling really honored that I was noticed and that they wanted my voice in this advisory group. So I sat in this room with educators from all over the district, and I remember the superintendent empowering us by saying, “We’re going to do some thinking, some planning, generate some ideas for improvement, but at the end of the day, it will be my decision.” And I just remember thinking like, “Oh, so the best that we could offer was to potentially change his mind if he already had decided or make his ideas better.” But there was really no power or certainly no shared power even in the hierarchy as adult to adult in that system.

Casey Chiofolo:
Add on to that, not to say my teachers in high school and middle school weren’t fantastic, I think there was just no system in place where people saw that two-way communication. It was like students are here to sit down, take in lectures, and do what they need to do to get their credit. And I didn’t even realize that that system was so ingrained into the educational model until after I was on the other side. And I was like, “There’s so much more to learn about students and how they learn and we’re a different generation than them and we can’t always assume what’s going to be best for them.”

Sofía Tannenhaus:
And a lot of my personal experience, both as a student who didn’t feel empowered to speak up and wasn’t asked for my opinion on things, but then also as I got older and that changed, I went into education and part of the reason was so that I could empower students to express themselves and have their voice heard. So now that I’m in the improvement world and working with school teams and systems, that’s a huge part of what I seek to do is to authentically engage students as partners. So I’m so happy to be talking to you both.
Julie, I want to start by asking what’s the Community Design Partners’ origin story?

Julie Smith:
Well, it kind of ties into this memory journey we all just went down. After I was that teacher and then I did a district administrator role, I went and worked part-time for a statewide policy and advocacy organization and education, and I was doing it part-time and I was running pilots where there was philanthropic dollars to redesign systems of actually educator evaluators at the time. And some really innovative stuff was happening, and the theory was to put teacher voice at the front to share power with that superintendent. So I really was like, “Yes, let’s do it.”
And then I noticed that when the money went away, when that investment went away, even if it was working and it was better for everyone and they were getting better outcomes and evaluations were being more meaningful and change was happening in classrooms that benefited the students, when the money went away, the system snapped back. And I learned that that’s a term. I wasn’t a systems geek like I am now. And I met Kari, who is the co-founder with me as the co-founder of CDP, and she had come out of research and evaluation and had learned about improvement science, but as a researcher, not as a practitioner, I think she would say that.
And she partnered with me then to start understanding how do we embed changes truly in a system. And then we started having much more success and then the goals of that policy and advocacy group around investment and educators got scaled to the state level and they pivoted focus, but still needed the technical assistance to spread it. And so Community Design Partners was born to help that need in the state. And we just kept going and we’re like, “Why stop with teachers?”, because teachers then started needing to listen to their students and students are so tied to their communities and their families.
So then we really started unlocking the power of community voice in schools with students kind of leading that, right, because they were like the center of the Venn diagram, if you will, of all the influences around them. So that’s where student powered improvement, which is a big project of Community Design Partners, was born.

Sofía Tannenhaus:
I wanted to ask you about one important term before we jump into learning more from Casey. But wicked problems, I know that’s a big thing that Community Design Partners talks about, and I looked into it more. It was first published, the first use of the term, was in 1967. What is wicked problem? What does that mean?

Julie Smith:
Well, for us, a wicked problem is a complex problem with no simple solutions. We joke that our mission is to rid the education world of solutionitis, so that when you see a solution that’s making a dent on one of these wicked problems, these complex persistent problems in education, we point to the end thing and think that that’s the thing that made it start to improve. But it’s probably all the steps behind that solution that they found that is actually what started to move the dial, which is a lot of the failure, a lot of the testing of ideas, a lot of the seeking a lot of the building relationships, a lot of the addressing power dynamics or trying to understand each other’s mental models or belief systems.
And then finally, when they all come together to find this solution, it works with them, not because it was done with fidelity, but it was adaptive and probably done with integrity. And so to us, the wicked problems are just those problems that are persistent, that are complex, and that there’s not a simple or a single solution that can be just replicated over and over again with the same outcome.

Sofía Tannenhaus:
So Community Design Partners has somewhat of a radical approach to wicked problems, which is for students and adults in a school to team up and tackle these wicked problems together. So I want to turn it over to Casey because he has a really compelling story of impact to share about chronic absenteeism, which is a wicked problem that we’re seeing across the country, especially it’s persisting after COVID and lots of folks are trying to do something about it. And so Casey has led some really incredible work at Respect Academy. So Casey, can you first start by telling us about your school?

Casey Chiofolo:
Yeah, definitely. So Respect Academy is an alternative high school in the southwest region of Denver, and we serve students who are 17 to 21 year olds. They have barriers that have prevented them from reaching their potential in the traditional schooling system. So some of our students work full-time jobs 40 plus hours a week. They may have some of their own kids to take care of, families to take care of, so this is kind of their second shot at taking their power back and graduating with their high school diploma.

Sofía Tannenhaus:
When you were a teacher, you led an effort at Respect Academy to improve attendance at the school, and the results are quite remarkable. Overall attendance improved by 16% in the first period class, which was advisory, and then you also achieved about a 7% growth in school-wide attendance. So I just have to know how did you do it?

Casey Chiofolo:
I have to start by saying failures have led to success and success is not the end of the story because it’s ever-changing. And Julie has been coaching me every step of the way through, “Oh my God, I have data. What do I do next? I have data, what do I do next?” But essentially the story started right after COVID. We introduced a transformative social-emotional learning advisement class for every student in the school. It was a 40 to 45 minute class first thing in the morning. When we got back from remote learning, we had quickly noticed that students were not attending this class as much as some of their core content, math, science, social studies or English classes.
So us as teachers and administrators at the school tried to solve that issue on our own, changing content and curriculum, changing incentives for the class, changing the message of what the class is for. And we all thought it was great and exactly what the students needed at that given time. We thought coming out of COVID, you’re going to need the social-emotional learning. It’s going to be great. You’re going to benefit from it in a huge way. And that was all of us kind of making the assumptions and putting those on the students for them in this class.
So the goal is to get that message across two students, have them understand the importance of this class. So around the school, we would hear from students all the time that the class didn’t matter, it wasn’t as important as their other classes. They can make up the work really quick from home. It’s just not really impactful for them. So we polled a bunch of students, had some root cause analysis fish-bone sessions with them to really cut down to why they weren’t attending and came up with a couple of themes.
Those themes were not all consistent, but things from it’s too early in the morning or that it was easily accessible from home, that the content didn’t relate to them, all things of that nature. So we wanted to hear more about students and more from students about that on a deeper level. So we pulled students in to have some focus groups with staff and students in the same room to hear each other’s story about this class. And it was a tough group. It’s hard to do the work and really have this intense passion for this work and have students tell you that it doesn’t matter. And I think that’s part of the student powered improvement is that you can’t take anything personally, and if you missed where things should have gone, then you kind of just got to rework and you can’t dwell on that.
So what we got out of that focus group is that students at Respect Academy are economists with their time. If there’s something that they think is higher value to them, either working until 3:00 am the night before and catching an extra 45 minutes of sleep or driving a sibling to school so they can get to school on time and being late themselves, they’re going to choose that route. So we went with that and realized that the whole structure needed to be kind of thrown out, reworked, and started from scratch.

Sofía Tannenhaus:
What’d you do next?

Casey Chiofolo:
So at that point, we pulled some students together for a design group and talked about what the morning could look like, what is going to make them want to come to school and make them feel like they’re getting something out of that morning class rather than just showing up for attendance, getting a grade, and getting out of there. We created something called Character Ed, which is fully student-driven class. They get to pick how they’re graded. They let the teacher know through a survey on a Thursday what they want to learn the following week, things from just a slow start to investment planning to how to apply for a credit card, how to do your taxes, different type of art projects, kind of all over the place.
Within the first nine weeks, we had switched up what we were doing countless times from week to week, and we saw students really engaging and they wanted to be there not only for that credit, but they felt like it was a positive start to their day. So last year we saw about 50% attendance in our advisement class. We increased that by 16% in the first quarter, and that was prototyping with about 60% of our students in Character Ed. The other 40% we targeted for them to be able to work on specific things that would help them in graduation, and the attendance was pretty similar in that group.
Given some systems and state demands and district demands, we had to scale back a little bit on Character Ed for the second quarter down to about 20% of our student population, and we saw an immediate snapback of attendance dropping again. Not lower than we had originally, but nowhere near the growth of 16%.

Sofía Tannenhaus:
I imagine that was somewhat disappointing and a huge learning opportunity at the same time. How was that for you and what did you gain from that setback?

Casey Chiofolo:
So again, I’ll go back to nothing’s ever going to be perfect all the time, you’re going to keep learning from some failures and changes and be able to push those solutions. But overall, I think that student engagement, not only in first period but the rest of the school day, is up. Student attendance from the rest of the school day is up, maybe that’s because if they’re here in the morning, they’re going to stay throughout the day. Then it was fun. It was really hard the first three weeks, I won’t lie. Character Ed was like, “Wait, you’re not going to tell me what to do as a student. I want my teacher to just tell me what to do so I can do it and earn credit.” We’re like, “No, you’re going to tell us what you want to do and we’re going to create it for you and with you, and we’re going to have this experience together.”
So there were some barriers to overcome. That’s just not a traditional thing that students are used to. They’re 17 to 21. They may have been in school for 10, 12 plus years already, and someone’s coming at them and saying, “Oh, it’s your turn to create something.” But yeah, that was just our personal passion project, kind of just went with it, got data from students, kept talking to students, and then trusted in them to tell us what they really needed.

Sofía Tannenhaus:
Going in the order of what you described, I have a few questions. So first, those focus groups that you described with students and teachers, what did the prep entail before having students and teachers come together for a focus group? So in what ways did you share with students what would be happening and why? In what ways did you ensure that the adults would be in a space where they could truly learn from students during that time?

Casey Chiofolo:
We needed the problem of practice really defined first. So having students help us define that, and then using that problem at hand to begin just experimenting and brainstorming with different ideas of where we could go, what road are we going to take? So we pulled students from the root cause groups who had already been involved in this empathy about their experience and the structure of the school, and we prepped them in that, “We want you and we want your opinion to fuel progress and growth, and this isn’t working and it hasn’t been working for years, and we don’t know how to fix it, so we really want you to help us fix this.”
And on the other side of things, we had staff who have been part of creating this advisement for the last three years, so them really understanding that this might hurt and it’s not personal. It’s nothing against your skill or you as a professional, but there’s clearly a change that needs to be made and we can have students help us make that change.

Sofía Tannenhaus:
Yeah, I imagine you did some kind of norming because we do this in, at least in the college access network that I lead, is we look at data, and data has oftentimes been used to hold people accountable and it causes harm, but we use data to learn. And so we’d say, “Hey, you’re about to see some data and feel what you’re going to feel.” And so when I hear that these teachers had designed this thing and it wasn’t working super great, I can imagine how some of them would be feeling. And so it’s important to say, “Hey, we’re doing this for this reason, and you might feel some kind of way, and that’s okay, and we’re here together to make it better.” So that’s great that you did some of that work with them.
I also was struck by the fact that students were indicating the different things that they wanted to learn about and cover during this time, and so it’s really student driven. What did that entail for teachers? Because I could imagine if I’m a teacher, I’m trying to create a path for least resistance sometimes. And so if I hear, “Oh, so Johnny wants this and Mary wants that, this means that I have a lot of extra work to do.” So how did you frame that for teachers and what did you do to make it serve students but not overwhelm adults?

Casey Chiofolo:
The schedule itself is a little bit complex. So we would meet for Character Ed Monday, Tuesday, Thursday. Wednesday, we would still lean into social-emotional learning, catering that to be condensed and more specific for students. And then Fridays, we have office hours, so there’s no actual classes for students to go through, so Character Ed wasn’t on Friday. So at that point, three sections, so 60% of the school was 320 student rosters, would meet out in our community space garden and talk about the week ahead. So we would have a Google Form that we would interview students about what are your passions, your interests, do you want to teach a class? Do you have things that you can bring in? And everyone would vote on it. If there are any other ideas in that moment, we would just build the format. So at points, the form got huge and we would pick three or four depending on all hands on deck if we can get some social workers or counselors to help us run things the next week to be able to do as much as possible.
But that’s a great question, if yours isn’t the one that’s voted week after week, how do we share in this love and share in the equity of what we’re going to be learning? So we would never discount something that was under-voted. We would have it return the following week. This is for students, so yeah, it’s extra work for teachers, but it’s not something that’s going to take hours and hours of prep time since the students are already passionate about these things. So yeah, I mean Google Form kind of led us in the path that we were going to go on Thursday so we’d have planning time on Friday to execute that. Students were able to earn extra points for the class if they came and helped us plan on Fridays. And then on Monday we would go from there. So Monday, Tuesday, we would explore in these different topics, different activities, and then Thursday would repeat the process.

Sofía Tannenhaus:
Thanks for the clarification, I didn’t realize they would vote on topics and the whole group would get that. I thought it was individuals would each get different topics, so that makes more sense. And I love that students even had an option to teach something themselves. That is so wonderful.

Casey Chiofolo:
Yeah, and I think part of the fear in the first three weeks from everyone was like, “Oh my God, is this not going to work? This is madness,” was like students would come in for attendance for five to 10 minutes and then they would go pick which activity room they’d want to be in. So I was like, “It’s not passing time, but it sounds like passing time and this is scary. Why aren’t students in their seats learning?” But they were able to take the initiative for the choices that they wanted to learn that day.
Then we got into the system, we got in the flow, we closed up some cracks, and then it was much more smooth once we were used to that, the new system at hand. But the mindset’s what matters, if everybody’s buying into the idea that you can’t solve student problems with still solutions and not to just jump straight to solutions, you’re going to have impactful change.

Sofía Tannenhaus:
Yeah. That reminds me last time we spoke how when it goes from being steps in a process to actually embracing an improvement mindset, a learner’s mindset, and a way of being at the school like, “This is just how we do things,” the improvement tools become in service of your goal. And so to anyone listening, whether you’re at a small school or at a traditional comprehensive school with many, many, many students, the mindset piece is what’s most important I think.

Julie Smith:
Because it’s like student voice initiatives are often these extra initiatives, kind of like when I was student council president and I got to do the extra things with the school. But it’s just inviting students into the system of improvement that exists, right? Everybody’s dealing with these wicked problems. And the thing that I will say is extra when you do that is you do have to unlearn some of your potential belief systems or things that you subconsciously hold to be true about who has the power to make good decisions. So there is a little work, and this is not a commercial for student-powered improvement, but on student-powered improvement, we have all these open source resources about that kind of stuff, which is under our guiding principles. And it really is about a lot of adult unlearning to invite students in. And we’ve heard it over and over again, students don’t want to have the power. They’re like, “Uh-uh, that’s too much. That’s too much to understand. That’s too much work,” but we do want to share the decision-making power with you.

Casey Chiofolo:
Those resources were such a positive roadmap for not only the experience that I talked about at Respect, but some of the other projects that we’ve been working on to get that student voice up and the student change from student voice. But we empathized with students and we started small and we needed to get good at that as a group, and we needed to be able to stop talking when it wasn’t our turn, and to listen and digest, and then involving students in all different areas. Just another step of the process on the roadmap, getting students to brainstorm with us, and then having students eventually lead.

Sofía Tannenhaus:
Casey, what do you see as the enabling conditions? If you could summarize, “This is what led to our results,” what do you see as the enabling conditions at your site?

Casey Chiofolo:
Total buy-in for sure, all hands on deck. This is rough around the edges, and we’re going to learn a lot and we’re going to fail a lot and we can’t give up and we need to take risks for sure. Letting students know that failing and taking risks is okay, and if we get it wrong the first time, it’s not set in stone and we can change it up. Then just an overall mindset of flexibility. We’re going to try something new and it might be extreme or it might be a tiny little change, and if it’s bringing positive change into our school, we can absorb that and scale that up from there.
The first project we had in student-powered improvement was just in two math classes. It was like, “Well, we only have nine classrooms in the whole school, so why not just expand this into nine classrooms? Some comprehensives have more than nine math teachers alone.” So we started an initiative just in our math classes with empathizing with students and finding out their math agency, and we spread that into all nine of our rooms. And then we continued to build outside of the classroom with this new Character Ed and all of the findings that we did in the story. So it’s kind of just happening everywhere, but it definitely started with just one small mindset that we scaled up.

Julie Smith:
I just want to underscore that because when you led with total buy-in, I was about to jump in because it wasn’t total buy-in. That was not the enabling condition. The enabling condition was that you and one other math teacher had buy-in and you did it in your classroom, and you built total buy-in on your staff. So most people won’t get total buy-in before they start. Total buy-in is where they end. So I’m glad you kind of showed us the path to total buy-in. For a huge initiative like a schedule change, yes, maybe total buy-in. But to improve your classroom or this aspect of something, you just need you. I can’t say that enough. Whoever you are out there, the yous out there, you just need you.

Casey Chiofolo:
Yeah. We started this work four years ago with one person and one coach, shout out again to Jeremy, and then we built that up from there with a couple more coaches with just the math crew. Shout out to Anthony, Paul, and Karen. And then from the math crew went up from there and then from the teacher crew went to the full school, and Julie came in and did a full school training at the beginning of our school year. So this is a four-year in the making mindset change, environment change, and whole philosophical change in the building.

Sofía Tannenhaus:
And a beautiful example of you start small with a coalition of the willing and you do some awesome work, you learn a lot, and then share it out with others, invite them in. And before you know it, here you are and this is just what’s happening at your school. And we see that also in the other networks I’m involved in is you just need a few people that are not happy with the status quo and want to do something about it and care deeply and want to learn, and they’re hungry for something. So I see very much that that is what happened here as well.
I want to reference something that Dr. Brandi Hinnant-Crawford said, she’s a professor and improvement guru. We are big fans of her, and she said, “User-centered too often means using the user.” Those are her words. She was on the High Tech High Unboxed podcast and she expanded on this a little bit.

Alec Patton:
Here’s Dr. Brandi Hinnant-Crawford from that episode.

Dr. Brandi Hinnant-Crawford:
People mean well with being user-centered, but sometimes they just want to take information from the user. So they’re like, “Okay, yeah, I’m going to have this empathy interview with you, or maybe a focus group with a group of students or with some parents or community members, and we’re going to gather this information from you, and then we’re going to go off, us experts, and figure out what’s best for you and then bring it back to you. So we were user-centered because we talked to you, we got some insights from you,” but that’s where it stops. I think often it stops when it’s time to make decisions and anytime where power has to be shared, that is when the being user-centered kind of goes by the wayside.

Alec Patton:
Now, back to Sofia.

Sofía Tannenhaus:
This is all related to what we’ve been talking about, so what are your reactions to that and what have you done to combat that?

Casey Chiofolo:
An empathy interview to me is not just sitting and listening to a student, it’s feeling and experiencing both sides of a story with the student. And they’re the users, right? We are here for them. That’s why schools exist because we have our students and we want our students to achieve. So when you take that info from them, it starts by building relationship. You’re not going to get the info that is true and down to the deep root without building the relationship through empathy. If your student thinks that you’re just going to take what they say and run with it, and maybe you make change with it, awesome. And then if you don’t, you’ve lost. So just keeping the fact at the forefront that if you’re building the relationship with the student, intentionally asking the student about their experience, involve them in the whole process because if they don’t feel like they’re involved later, you’re back at step one.

Sofía Tannenhaus:
Julie, what does Community Design Partners do to make sure this isn’t what happens?

Julie Smith:
We’re really explicit about how much it happens from the beginning as a start. We talk about tokenizing the users, and we talk about decorating your work with the youth. So we make sure that when we … First of all, I just want to acknowledge that when you start small, you might not be able to go, “Great, we’re going to involve students in the whole thing,” right? There might be for many system reasons why that’s not possible. So you need to start somewhere. And so let’s say that doing empathy interviews is your only place to start. And so you go out and you talk to a handful of students, you hear their stories, you empathize with their lived experience and perspectives.
Part of our process in the empathy interview process is the feedback loop that comes back. So let’s say we talk to 10 students, we theme it out, it is our responsibility to bring those themes back to those 10 youth to confirm that these themes reflect their lived experience or adjust the themes for them too. And then let’s say we take those themes, we do ideation or design of solutions in an all adult room, we have to bring those because for whatever the resource reasons, we can’t get the students to do it with us. We just take the time to bring the solutions back to at least those 10 students and say, “What do you think?”
So at the very least to get started, making sure that that feedback loop is ongoing, because then what happens is you’re like, “Well, why am I doing this? Why don’t you just come into the room and have the conversation with me?” But I guess we start by explicitly saying, “This is a risk of this work, and if CDP is involved, we’re going to help you monitor how these students are feeling.” And then again, in those guiding principles, we really do help adults examine the privilege that’s at place by just being an adult in a youth space, meaning the schools are youth spaces, so that you can potentially see your blind spots, which we know that they’re not intentional. Everybody who chooses to go into education wants to empower students to be the best that they can. And so it’s just helping them reflect and hold up a mirror from the beginning, I think, of the risks, and then tools to unlearn, and then permission to just get started.

Sofía Tannenhaus:
Do you have any advice for any administrators that might be listening and just super eager or open to do this type of work? What would you suggest they keep in mind?

Casey Chiofolo:
I think seeing both sides of it now, being a teacher at Respect Academy for six years and just stepping into an administrator role, it’s just the importance of trust in your staff and their mindsets and their belief that students are first is super important. We need to be able to trust them. Nothing’s going to be perfect the first time. And if there are failures in the building, we can’t hold those failures against individuals. There needs to be this cycle of, “Yes, we’ve learned from the failure, we’re going to get better from that now and make improvement and make change from that.”

Julie Smith:
Yeah, and I’ll build on that and then I’ll add something new. I don’t think that trust can just be given. And Casey, we’ve talked about this a lot, trust is the outcome of when we really have invested in the relationship, when we deeply understand the hopes of another in the school, and we handle those hopes and that person with care and that relationship with care. So I would say to the administrators start by leaning into the quality of the care and connection of the adults in the room or in the building and care for those. That will be profound in the way that you start to care for the youth in your building.
And then I would say that a place to start, most schools, maybe not all, most have some culture and climate data that they’re collecting right now. If you put one of those out to the youth, one of those data points and say, “Huh, why is this unsatisfactory?”, and you just start listening, just get curious and just try something. Talk to three students about a data point when they walk through your building and just see what you hear is a great starting point.

Sofía Tannenhaus:
Yeah, getting curious and trying to understand the perspective of someone positioned in a different space in your system to see how they’re experiencing that.

Julie Smith:
Yeah, yeah.

Sofía Tannenhaus:
Yeah, and I love that about also humanizing the data. You’re going directly to students rather than looking at a percentage and saying, “Hey, tell me more. How are you experiencing this?”

Julie Smith:
Yeah.

Sofía Tannenhaus:
I love that.

Casey Chiofolo:
And one last thing I’ll add is let everybody explore their passions. If you’re letting teachers explore their passions of what they think education can be and what students want education to look like, you’re going to have so much deep culture and cultural learning in your school. It’s just going to thrive.

Julie Smith:
I think a lot of administrators do have solutions, so I always talk to the administer like, “If we could do your solution with 100% fidelity, you’re right, I bet we would hit our smart goal or whatever. But the implementation of that, if you can’t get it to 100% fidelity, I just wonder if we tried their idea, which might not be as good as your idea, and they did that with 100% fidelity, whatever fidelity means, you might have a better,” because nobody’s going to want, it’s a fail if it’s this movement in the school of adults and youth. So letting go of what you know to be true is something that’s important too. I don’t know if that was said well, but-

Sofía Tannenhaus:
That was perfect. It was such a joy to chat more with the both of you. Casey, beautiful work at your school. And to the two of you, I really admire your partnership and what you’ve been able to accomplish together, and I sincerely hope that the listeners will be able to do something at their own sites as a result of hearing about your experience. So thank you.

Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed is hosted and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Herschel. Huge thanks to Julie, Casey, and Sofia for this conversation. We’ve got a link to Community Design Partners’ library of student-powered improvement resources in the show notes. Thanks for listening.