Among adults who work to support youth voice, there are a lot of questions that are wrestled with regularly.
- How do we best prepare youth to be meaningfully involved?
- Do we select students to become involved by our judgment, or theirs?
- How much authority should young people have when they’re involved?
- What happens if students think they have too much power?
- Can this make any different to their grades?
- Doesn’t student voice take away from learning time?
- What happens to the students who aren’t involved?
In a great video from the UK, an East London school called the George Mitchell School is featured for their superb approaches to recognizing many of these questions, and others. I encourage everyone to watch it as soon as possible. The video identifies the successes of engaging youth voice throughout the learning environment for a lot of different reasons, and shows some of the ways young people can and should become engaged throughout our communities.
