Digital Promise’s Center for Learner Pathway Innovations (CLPI) develops innovative solutions with education ecosystem partners and scales research-informed practices to reimagine career pathways. Our approach ensures opportunities are accelerated to keep pace with changing workforce needs, future-forward to remain relevant and innovative as technology advances, responsive to adapt to learners’ realities, co-created to reflect community voices, and credentialed to document learners’ growth.
By collaborating with school administrators, educators, students, and community members, CLPI builds school and district capacity for incorporating lived experiences when designing pathways to support students through school, the workforce, and home life. Embracing student voice in the recognition, ideation, investigation, and implementation of pathway design solutions that improve access and opportunity helps ensure that initiatives align with prevailing student needs.
A strong example of this student-centered vision in action is Digital Promise’s League of Innovative Students (LOIS), a model of student co-design and collaboration used to identify key challenges within education systems. Through multiple iterations, the LOIS team has refined a framework that meaningfully brings students to the table. And in its most recent cycle, LOIS partnered with district leaders to provide students with the time, space, resources, and mentorship to identify potential solutions for career readiness.
Drawing on personal experiences and peer perspectives, students designed research tools to evaluate which career supports were effective and which were lacking. Together, students and their Adult Champion (a district-provided mentor) considered current district initiatives, daily student routines, and overall student experiences in their data analysis. As a result, each team concluded the cycle with recommendations for district improvements grounded in student experience and district context.
In one district, LOIS students noted that although their school helped them create portfolios to document their achievements, students were unable to make use of these portfolios after graduation. When students expressed a need for a tool that could better showcase their experiences and learning progress while applying to universities or jobs, the LOIS student team collaborated with school and district leaders to pilot an online platform where students can create digital portfolios that can be exported for use on future applications. After co-designing a process with the LOIS student team to gather insights from the pilot through the end of the academic year, school leaders assessed the potential for wider adoption of the digital tool.
Through the LOIS collaboration, the student team and district leaders identified a focus area and created responsive, future-forward solutions relevant to current student experiences.
—Briza Diaz, education researcher
The intentional process of including students in co-design allows schools, districts, and community organizations to create solutions that reflect student needs while also strengthening broader learning outcomes. When students are engaged in addressing a challenge that affects them and their peers early on, they have the opportunity to practice empathy, develop research and analytical skills, practice collaborating with various partners, and gain confidence through presenting data-driven findings. Through it all, students develop agency and advocacy skills that will stay with them into adulthood.
When adults use their influence to elevate the voices of their students, education becomes a collective effort. By using learner-centered strategies—such as meeting students where they are, providing mentorship and support, and ensuring students feel heard and valued—districts nurture a responsive environment that adapts to student needs. Students involved in the research become invested in the outcomes and spark awareness among their peers. Improving the system then becomes a shared responsibility grounded in partnership and mutual growth.
Today’s students are navigating a complex reality as they balance postsecondary goals, personal circumstances, and a rapidly evolving technology and workforce landscape. CLPI designs flexible, adaptive pathways that support students through community-centered co-research and co-design methods that respond to a diversity of learner needs. By centering student voice and feedback throughout decision-making processes, educational ecosystems become adaptive to learner realities as they prepare them for real-world opportunities.
Approaches like LOIS create a channel for open communication, equipping students with the tools they need to provide meaningful and data-informed feedback. Within these conditions, collaboration with students goes beyond sharing opinions and instead becomes a powerful response cycle that adapts in real time to changing learner needs. Through this process, students can provide valuable insights to guide the design of future-forward and adaptive pathways that are critical to supporting learners as they build agency, well-being, and economic mobility.
