Beyond the Buzzwords: Putting Student Voice into Practice

At Digital Promise, we follow through on our commitment to center students in our work through our League of Innovative Students (LOIS) initiatives, hosted by the Center for Learner Pathway Innovations (CLPI). This national cohort of high schoolers does more than provide feedback; they engage in hands-on design sprints with solution providers to improve edtech tools and partner with district decision-makers to drive systemic change. For example, in the spring of 2025, three students from Tuscaloosa City Schools partnered with Uprooted Academy, an AI-powered college counseling platform, to apply human-centered design principles to co-create a new “wellness toolkit.”

Walking the Talk: Engaging Students in Defining Powerful Learning

As an organization whose mission is to expand opportunity for learners and prepare them to thrive on every path ahead, we are committed to engaging student voice in our own work, in addition to supporting our external projects. The development of Digital Promise’s Powerful Learning Framework, a unifying structure designed to drive cohesive, forward-thinking innovation and ground systems design in educational research, provided an ideal opportunity to incorporate student voice and perspectives to influence how we shape teaching and learning experiences.

Powerful Learning fosters individuals’ agency, purpose, and curiosity through connection to ideas, self, people, and place. Powerful Learning experiences empower learners with knowledge, skills, and dispositions that prepare them for the future.

• Agency: Learners build knowledge through action, choice, and voice.
• Purpose: Learners have the opportunity to develop an authentic and meaningful contribution.
• Curiosity: Learners explore new ideas and experiences to better understand their world.
• Connection: Learning occurs when learners make connections to ideas, themselves, others, and place.

To authentically integrate student voice into our organization’s strategy, the LOIS team partnered with the Digital Promise Powerful Learning team to ground the framework in students’ ground-level insights, ensuring our definition of powerful learning reflects the needs of the learners we serve.

First, the Learner Centered Experience team ran a design sprint with students at Tuscaloosa City Schools to understand what a powerful, impactful learning experience looks like by designing the learning experiences they would like at their school site. Their diverse ideas—spanning financial literacy, arts integration, and student-created and managed apps—provide concrete examples of what powerful learning can look like from a student perspective. See Ahmed and Ahlem’s YouthMade video submission showcasing their experience as part of the LOIS program.

Expanding the Circle: Key Insights from Students

To gain further insight into what makes learning powerful and impactful, and to incorporate student input into our future work, we partnered with Desert Sands Unified School District to host a focus group with additional students. All together, feedback from students in Tuscaloosa City Schools and Desert Sands Unified contributed their transformative insights on the definition of powerful learning experiences, including:

• Elevating Agency: Students engage more deeply when they see themselves in the curriculum and have authentic choices. Consequently, the team wove agency throughout the entire powerful learning definition framework.
• Psychological Safety: Students reminded the team that a loving, encouraging environment is a foundational condition for all learning.
• Future Design: These insights are already shaping the next generation of the powerful learning team’s related programming and upcoming partnerships.

By moving beyond consultation to true partnership, we ensure that student voice isn’t just an added perspective, but a foundational driver of the future of powerful learning.