The two adults showed students a strategy for naming root causes of poor mental health. They passed out colorful sticky notes, and students began posting suggestions on a whiteboard, building off one another’s ideas. Soon, the board was full. The root cause that the group decided to work on first was the shaming of students. As one described it, “Adults tell us what we do wrong, but never what we do right.”

After a lengthy and lively discussion, the students decided on an initial course of action: to flip the script of the school’s morning announcements. The practice was to announce the percentage of students who had not yet passed various state assessments. The students wanted to focus on what was going well by announcing the passing rates instead. They chose this problem first because the solution could be designed and tested right away  — a quick win —  and because they predicted it would positively impact their peers’ motivation to do well academically. With support from administrators, they put their plan into action and then surveyed students about whether they noticed the change. Many did. That success launched the team forward toward designing more changes.

This story illustrates one example of , an approach where adults in schools redesign school systems with, rather than for, students. Over the past three years, ‘ facilitators, coaches and advisers have trained educators from over 300 schools and organizations to do this important work. They also host events like design sprints, where educators and students examine a problem and design solutions together; help measure outcomes; and tell success stories. Ultimately, the goal is to enable educators and students to sustain these initiatives themselves.

Student-powered improvement is not a single program or model. Rather, it is an approach that is driven by six and occurs along a continuum, from empathy and involvement to shared decision-making and implementation of student-led improvements. Here are some examples from our archive of :

• Empathizing with students means that adults try to deeply understand their experiences, perspectives and feelings and use what they learn to change how things work. For example, teams of teachers, counselors and administrators from several high schools near Seattle wanted to increase the percentage of graduates who were prepared for college and careers. They conducted regular interviews with students who were likely to be admitted into college but less likely to enroll. The teams asked questions like, “Tell me about a time an adult has talked to you about your future” and, “What’s the best and worst part about being a senior?” After analyzing the responses, one counselor said, “The interviews have helped us close the gaps between the support we thought we were giving and the support students told us they were actually receiving.” Creative ideas emerged, such as using Google Voice for texting students and holding Zoom office hours for seniors.
  
• Involving students means engaging them in working with adults to improve the school, such as prioritizing which problems to focus on or designing and testing solutions together. For example, 23 Baltimore middle and high school students joined 11 teachers for a Design Camp in the early days of the pandemic. Over the course of a week, they spent 13 hours sharing their experiences, priorities and perspectives. Together, they designed new ways to strengthen engagement and connection during virtual learning, such as “Tea Time” — a regular check-in on emotional wellness that strengthened understanding of one another’s lives.
  
• Sharing decision-making means students play a leadership role and have real power. For example, students in California joined a budget committee in a district that faced looming cuts. They learned about the budgeting process and decided they needed more information, so they designed a school climate survey for their peers across the district. After analyzing the data, the students voted to use a percentage of funds to support restorative justice practices.
  
• Implementing youth-led improvements means that student groups are in charge of these efforts, from determining their areas of focus to carrying out those changes. For example, rural and suburban districts in Oregon sponsored a network for over 50 high school students. They focused on improvements to help ninth-graders be on track to graduate. They interviewed peers about their ninth-grade experiences and, based on those findings, designed solutions like mental health kits, increased classroom discussions about race and virtual spaces, such as Zoom, for connecting.

An important aspect of these efforts is to place a priority on including students who have historically been marginalized. For example, in the opening story, the teacher worked with Impact Tulsa, a regional nonprofit with expertise in the student-powered improvement efforts, to learn about strategies to bring in a diverse group. The cohort of eight included students who identified as Black, Hispanic, Native American and white and had diverse gender identities. 

Educators across the country who have adopted a student-powered improvement approach to change describe several key benefits. When done over time, educators report that this work is transformational for both students and teachers, providing an increased sense of empowerment and engagement within the classroom and throughout the school. For the students and those who benefit from their ideas, there is an increased sense of inclusion and belonging. Ultimately, the approach results in solutions that are more likely to effectively address students’ needs. 

To get started, educators at hundreds of schools have taken a and received customized results on the student-powered improvement .

If schools are to improve so they can more successfully serve students, what better way than to involve students directly in the process? As one student from the opening story wrote at the end of the year, “I feel more validated and important to the school and community now.” Another wrote, “I’m excited to make a genuine difference.”

Ten years ago, I was the superintendent of Tennessee’s Achievement School District, which aims to improve student learning in the state’s 5% lowest academically performing schools. At the time, I believed that if we removed some constraints our schools were facing from their central offices, educators in those schools would have the flexibility to make instructional, structural and content decisions that better met the needs of students in their classrooms. I thought that school autonomy was the silver bullet for school improvement.

I was wrong — kind of.

We gave schools more autonomy, but that alone didn’t improve student outcomes. Our singular focus on governance failed to account for the support educators needed to translate autonomy into effective instruction.

The experience was humbling. I learned that a shift in governance doesn’t guarantee a shift in focus. It changed the way I think about what it takes for districts and charter management organizations to implement meaningful change.

Student learning is education’s real purpose

Systems of governance, those who lead them, and the context in which they operate are essential to improving student learning. However, it’s all too easy to find ourselves more preoccupied with the power of these systems than their purpose. It’s all too easy to focus on those who hold “the power” rather than what they’re doing with that power. And it’s all too easy to forget that education’s purpose is to empower students through learning, not adults through bureaucracy.

We know how to improve student learning. It’s all about fundamentals; there are no silver bullets or shortcuts. names three elements that contribute to learning: what is taught (the content), how it’s taught (teachers’ knowledge and approach), and how students engage (the ways students interact with the content, the teacher, and peers).

To quote Elmore and colleagues, “that’s it” — that’s it regardless of governance structure, regardless of geography, regardless of district size, even regardless of funding.

No matter the context, if we want to improve student learning, we need to ensure that decisions are centered on the three components of Elmore’s instructional core — particularly student engagement.

Content and pedagogy are critical, and each needs additional support; however, each already has momentum. We’ve seen school improvement work center increasingly on high-quality instructional materials. Professional learning and educator prep programs have long recognized that instructional practices can be optimized to benefit students’ learning. This work should continue.

Students want educators to challenge them

Student engagement has seen the least movement, perhaps because it’s the least understood. On a recent school visit, one student shared something that illuminates the confusion: “Mr. Smith (a pseudonym) does his ‘door work’ — says good morning, smiles and gives fist bumps to each of us when we walk into class — and as soon as he shuts the door and starts the lesson, he flips a switch and acts like he doesn’t know us. Like he has to play the role of teacher and we have to be the obedient students. It’s weird.”

Students want authentic engagement beyond upbeat greetings at the classroom door; they want to be engaged in everyday instruction. But it rarely happens.

Uplifting interactions between teachers and students in hallways, advisory groups and special events are fabulous ways to boost school culture. But — in and of themselves — they do not strengthen students’ ability to substantively engage with academic content.

I invite you to reflect on your own meaningful school experiences. When I reflect on mine, I remember that the teachers who made the biggest difference in my education and life, weren’t the ones who just uplifted me. They were the ones who challenged me academically — the ones who invited me to go deeper and farther, to figure out what I thought and communicate it, to apply my own problem-solving methods. That’s what affirming relationships do.

In her book, , Gholdy Muhammad defines affirming relationships as relationships in which each party recognizes and cultivates the unique value the other brings. To borrow a phrase from improv, if uplifting interactions are saying “yes” to students, affirming relationships are saying “yes, and….”

The “and” builds students’ agency. That is the key to engagement with content because it positions students as active contributors to and shapers of their own learning, rather than passive recipients of knowledge.

For example, a teacher could design a unit of instruction around recall of a text about how the water cycle works, or a teacher could design a unit of instruction that positions such a text as a source students use to obtain information in order to figure out what happened to a puddle on the sidewalk that they observed had disappeared.

Each scenario asks students to learn the same content. But, by allowing them opportunities to leverage their own experience and curiosity to drive learning, the latter affirms students.

Unfortunately, most classrooms default to the former.

We’ve been brought up to think of affirmations as accolades of “good job, I knew you could do it!” That’s how we have gotten used to communicating our confidence in students.

Praising and encouraging students undoubtedly builds overall social-emotional well-being, which is a necessary prerequisite for engagement in academic content. But these methods alone don’t provide adequate opportunities for students to contribute to their own learning.

In addition to instructional “attagirls,” we should affirm students by trusting and expecting them to bear the majority of the cognitive lift in their learning. That’s true even when it’s not easy for them and even when it requires adults to step back and cede some instructional control to student exploration.

Learning to cultivate affirming relationships with students through core content instruction will be new — and uncomfortable — for many of us. There are many habits to break and systems to redesign. However, supporting instructional leaders in promoting content-embedded affirming student engagement is essential.

Focus on what works in the classroom

In the coming year, as we continue to grapple with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the impending , I suspect that we’ll be told that many things are “essential” in education. Dedicated educators, parents  and community members will propose innumerable solutions that all purport to accelerate learning and have outsized gains on student outcomes.

We should not fall into the silver-bullet trap I did 10 years ago. We should not be distracted by trending debates or catchy headlines. Instead, we should be laser-focused on what we know makes a difference for real students in real classrooms.

For any school or district intervention, in any context across the country, we must be crystal clear about how it will bolster the instructional core — whether it’s building leaders’ capacity to model affirmation for their teachers or adopting a curriculum that makes space for student voice and choice. Every decision should serve education’s purpose: empowering students with the knowledge, skills, and confidence they need to be thoughtful, productive, engaged citizens.

Yes. And….

We should remember that it is also our purpose to foster students’ compassion, respect, and sense of responsibility — to show our students that exercising one’s own power need not and should not come at the expense of someone else’s ability to exercise theirs.

As a country, I can think of nothing more effective we could do toward those purposes than redesigning our education systems and classrooms to prioritize affirming relationships. Students then can have opportunities to engage authentically with the content they’re asked to master. They then can witness teachers live into their own expertise in a way that invites others’ thoughts and perspectives into the room. And they then can begin a life-long practice of “yes, and-ing” each other.

is a nonpartisan quarterly journal from The Bush Institute that operates from the belief that ideas matter. They shape public policies, spur action, and lead to results. Each issue presents compelling essays that address a central question or theme. Along with Bush Institute directors and fellows, The Catalyst convenes leading experts and writers, as well as new and rising voices, to address each topic.

This fall, on the heels of six months interviewing “about 100 teachers in 15 cities” who were working on substantial improvement efforts, Cohen is publishing his first book, . It’s an effort to answer a question he asks at the outset: “What would it actually look like for teachers to be at the center of discussions about school transformation?” 

Change Agents comes out tomorrow (Oct. 25). I sat down with Cohen last month to talk about the book — and about what’s next for public education as leaders move past the pandemic. 

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ: The book is built around profiles of Partners in School Innovation—tell me about them and how you came across them. 

Justin Cohen: About 15 years ago I was working for the D.C. Public Schools, and we were exploring a multi-district collaborative around early identification of young people who were on track to not finish high school. It never really went anywhere, but I got to meet a man named Derek Mitchell, in Prince George’s County, and he went on to Partners in School Innovation (PSI) years later, doing improvement science and continuous improvement in schools. 

At PSI, Derek introduced a notion that you know, continuously improving an unfair system isn’t enough. put it this way: “making incremental improvements at the margins of a system originally designed to sort children by race, class and language will only make inequitable sorting more efficient.” And so Derek insisted that continuous school improvement needed to have a racial equity lens—and PSI has been working on that for the last 13 years. 

He recently reached out to me, saying, “I’m really excited about what we’ve been able to do. What about telling this story at a broader level?”

A chance to capture their approach, codify it and make it replicable in more schools.

Right. Totally. From the outset, I envisioned something like Atul Gawande’s , which took some of the lessons of improvement science and showed how to do incremental change in health care on a day-to-day basis…but for education. I was especially interested in writing something for teachers. Something for educators to pick up and read during the very limited time that they have, that’s practical, teacher-friendly, and — hopefully — inspiring without indulging in what my editor likes to call ‘toxic positivity.’ 

I particularly enjoyed the part focused on conditional reasoning — that is, the “if/then” statements at the heart of almost any attempt to shift human behavior. It’s at the core of pragmatic, realistic change thinking. Every school improvement — every self-improvement — starts with a commitment to trying something new (“if I do this…”) in the hopes of seeing different results (“then we’ll see this outcome…”). But that doesn’t mean that humans naturally start their problem-solving that way. It’s an acquired pattern of thinking. What are some tips for teachers trying to get themselves and their colleagues into thinking about improvement more constructively? 

There’s one acronym in the book. ROCI: Results-Oriented Cycles of Inquiry. The foundational idea is that you get together with a group of your peers every week for collaboration. During those meetings, you set a target: some sort of process improvement. And whatever that thing is — a 15-minute check for understanding at the end of each lesson or whatever — you’re all going to commit to doing it together. You make time in the subsequent week to watch each other try this thing out. And then, the next week, you talk it over. 

A big part of this is that it’s not top-down school reform, right? It’s not a principal calling everyone in a room and dictating The Plan. It’s ground-up, teacher-led inquiry. 

Yes. That’s the core thing that differentiates it from a lot of the last generation of reform. This is about asking teachers at the classroom level, “What do you want to try differently tomorrow?” And then, let their judgments and expertise guide next steps. The inquiry process is just as important as the resulting improvements. It’s about building that habit, building that muscle of trying something new, seeing whether it works, observing each other to give feedback on whether or not it works, and then doing more if it continues to deliver results, and stopping doing it if it doesn’t. 

I mean, I know that sounds really basic, but people spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year on gym membership they don’t use. Habit-building is hard!

You know, it’s the flip side of , this notion that If you invest heavily in early childhood education, you get better results overall for marginalized and underserved communities, because in the early years, kids’ habits haven’t been formed, their long-term trajectories remain fluid, they’re at a point of . Most people get that. But nobody talks about the flip side: Shifting adult behavior is super hard. I mean, anybody who’s ever tried to lose weight or shift their TV habits knows this. 

Yes. In the book, I take great pains to avoid a cheerleading, “it’s easy, you can do it!” kind of mentality. Because it’s actually hard, even if it’s rewarding. One of the things that really comes through is the joy people experience when they get to see the results of shifting their practice on their own terms versus shifting practice because somebody told them to or because the state, said “We’re gonna shut your school down if you don’t change.” For the last 25-30 years, it’s been all stick, no carrot. 

But in this teacher-led approach, there’s at least a sense that you can control some of the destiny, and some of what you decide to do.

Meaningful teacher agency … that’s clearly not what we, the country, have been doing. 

It’s not. And one of the key things about this, right, is that when school improvement is driven by teachers, it’s more durable. Even when funding dries up and top-down pressure for reform goes away, when improvement consultants’ PowerPoints go away … those habits don’t. Teachers don’t just stop meeting with their peers to talk through the new things they’re trying. Once they get used to that, they keep doing it. 

Also: part of giving teachers agency is about giving them the opportunity to fail. I know that failure has been rhetorically weaponized against teachers — and families and children, in some cases — like, “failure is not an option anymore.” 

And as a person who’s indulged in this language at times, I think we have to admit that that’s not helpful and is even psychologically jarring in some cases. We have to create enough room for people to try things and maybe not succeed the first time, particularly when we’re talking about institutions like schools. We have millions of teachers operating in tens of thousands of schools and districts. 

This is a good segue. Because you’re clear, in the book, that there are good reasons that we wound up in the place we’ve been in, that we tried the reforms we’ve been trying. The absence of data on student outcomes, on student achievement, meant that, for example, kids were assigned to English as a Second Language classrooms because their last names sounded Hispanic, not because they necessarily needed those services. Educational inequities and civil rights violations thrive when we don’t keep track of what kids know and can do. So maybe we need to modify the policies imposing these consequences on schools, but … can you say more about a policy agenda that leaves more room for teacher-led inquiry and improvement? That leaves room for teachers to fail?

I’m gonna do this in a roundabout way. 

I remember, after the financial crash of 2008, thinking that it’s really nice that economic policy and monetary policy has some very clear available mechanisms. A new president shows up, appoints you to the Federal Reserve Board, and when you walk into the building, figuratively speaking, there’s a big lever labeled, “Interest Rates Down—Borrowing Up.” That’s just what happens. We know how these forces work. 

But we do not have that in education. There isn’t a “Student Achievement” lever to pull when a new administration arrives in the White House. It doesn’t exist. I think we have to acknowledge that. 

I’m not allergic to accountability. In fact, I think my book offers a very deep, very intense form of accountability at the individual practitioner level — a level of accountability that is more or less ignored by today’s policy regimes. 

And look, I’m not saying this to level a judgment on the people who crafted those policies or on the people who’ve spent decades earnestly trying to implement them. But the exact measurements that those regimes insisted upon — academic tests — haven’t shown good results. And we’re not talking one or two years. We’re talking about a generation here. That’s just a fact. 

So I think we need to let go. We need to admit that this test-and-sanctions approach didn’t work. 

I mean, policymakers will have to institutionalize the work of continuous improvement at the practitioner level. Things like, at the more local level, creating time for collaboration or relaxing some of the annual test-based accountability, and creating multi-year, more robust accountability around different longitudinal measures. Think of things like civic participation, graduation, and post-secondary attainment, all the things that we know test scores were supposed to be a proxy for.

Are things moving in the right direction, then? We replaced No Child Left Behind with the Every Student Succeeds Act, which significantly weakened federal school accountability systems, but retained some transparency mechanisms whereby schools were still publishing data on students’ progress? After all, the last administration wasn’t really interested in implementing the law, and then the pandemic . 

I think a weakened and watered-down system that we know is not working … I mean, let’s just put it out of its misery. I mean, there are a lot of people who believe that fully erasing federal testing and accountability policy would return us to some educational policy Eden. I mean, the era before this one wasn’t some perfectly equitable moment in public schools. 

My view is that we need to, you know, erase the whiteboard and start over with some core principles in mind: transparency around outcomes, equity, ensuring that no school gets to go too long getting the same results over and over again without being prompted to rethink what they’re doing. 

So we still need and should want accountability. But we need to get away from these punitive regimes and focus on doing the real improvement work that we know actually works. 

You could make the case that, operationally speaking, we’re kind of moving that direction, right? There’s just so little appetite for top-down accountability right now. 

We need to think of accountability as starting with the inquiry cycle at the practitioner level. Plan to assess. Pick a target. Meet as a grade-level team to discuss the target. Watch each other try new things. See if it had an impact. Lather, rinse, repeat. Just keep doing that. 

So: I think that at each level out from the school — district, state, federal — needs to set up somewhat longer cycles of inquiry that look at whether these short-cycle returns are adding up into meaningful, long-term, equitable improvement. 

It’s going to be extremely hard. It opens up big questions of autonomy, empowerment, who decides what and where, but it beats sticking with the ineffective accountability approaches we’re currently using. 

There are 3 million teachers in the country. It’s one of the biggest professions in the country, and if we think that the education profession and the schools in general are going to get better without a deep investment in making sure those millions of people get better and better every day, we’re kidding ourselves. 

Sure. Part of the whole systemic education reform argument is that you can build policy structures that create conditions for success, that reduce the importance of individual teacher quality as a variable, right. And while I get that, as a project, it’s obviously nonsense to skip past teachers, to treat them like plug-and-play widgets. So I’m wondering, then, in rethinking teachers’ agency, in broadening their roles as agents of change … does the book have a message for their trainers? For schools of education? 

I mean, yes. Schools of education, in many cases, teach people completely wrong things about the processes of teaching and learning and the history of racial equity in this country. If you show up as a new teacher with no awareness of the history of racial exclusion here and no knowledge of why systematic inequities manifest in your community and building, and without, say, awareness of the cognitive neuroscience of how children learn how to decode, you are not prepared to be a teacher. A lot is going to need to happen on campus to prepare you to be truly ready to lead a classroom. 

I did not write this book to solve this problem, but fortunately, the cycles of teacher-led inquiry can help bring those folks up to speed. 

Those cycles provide accountability that’s about learning opportunities, right, which, I think, is an extension of the analogy above. If you sign up for a gym alone, you maybe waste that membership. But if you’re part of a running group that meets on the corner at 6 a.m. every two days, you’ve got accountability to one another—and a commitment to improvement. 

Yes. The more you collaborate, the more you can observe, the more you can unearth things. It’s all about opening “the closed door” of each American classroom. So often, teachers operate in relative isolation from each other, with no idea about what’s going on in other classrooms. 

And then, frustratingly, observation has gotten too tightly wound up with evaluation. We need to undo that. You’re not gonna like your job if every time someone shows up to observe you, it’s all negative and you’re anxious about how they’re gonna hurt you. 

If nothing else from this book gets through, I hope this does: most of the time, when you open your classroom door for a peer or a superior, it should be a rich learning experience. You should learn interesting things about your practice as an educator.