How does authentic youth-adult partnership transform education? At UP, we believe every school and district that partners with us can experience the power of our process for change. Monument Mountain began its journey with UP seven years ago and has since built sustainable systems where youth and adults share a seat at the table. Together, they shape new policies, influence teaching and learning practices, and model what true systems change looks like across the entire educational ecosystem.

 

Looking back on seven years of partnership with UP for Learning, Sean Flynn, a Guidance Counselor at Monument Mountain, shared his reflections and hopes for the school where he was a student and where this fall he begins his 28th year of work.

 

As a student, Sean described his experience as “deeply impacted by teachers who had an abiding faith in youth voice, leadership and agency.” In particular, he remembered teachers in the Social Studies department who focused on how to develop learners and cultivate student-led learning as well as the Student-Faculty Union in which student voice was embedded.

 

Together with his colleagues and students, Sean helped carry that culture and belief in the capacity of young people and in the importance of strong teacher-student relationships into their respective roles as teachers, students, coaches and counselors. As a community, they found that culture enhanced by UP for Learning’s Mission, Vision, Core Beliefs and Practices. UP’s work was so aligned with Monument Mountain’s culture, and supportive of their aspirations, that Sean and six of his colleagues joined the youth-adult partnership team in its first year. While the individuals involved have changed over the past seven years, the number of youth and adults coming together as authentic partners has grown annually. 

 

Timeline:

Years 1-3: Youth and Adults Transforming Schools Together (YATST) Team

  • Youth and adult members of the YATST Team worked as authentic partners to plan and prepare for bimonthly work sessions, and out of those work sessions came subcommittees focused on four topics: social and mental health, program changes, school climate and culture, and communication and participation. Each group has used a 60-day design cycle to identify concerns, brainstorm and propose actions, implement and receive feedback, and then refine. 

 

Years 4-7: Student Adult Advisory Board (SAAB) – “From a Club to a Culture”

  • Renamed the Student Adult Advisory Board and restructured to include one member from each of Monument Mountain’s 52 teaching advisories, SAAB set out to include and engage all perspectives in the school community and focus their work through committees on Academic Advancement, Communication, Environmental, Wellness, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
    • The Academic Advancement Committee built understanding of proficiency based learning within their school community.
    • The Communications Committee built awareness and use of the Student Square app that they created to accompany the Parent Square app previously created to make communication clearer and easier across stakeholders. 
    • The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee developed more affinity spaces for students of color and provided structures and practices for anti-racism work across advisories. 
    • The Environmental Committee built better composting and recycling practices in their cafeteria. 
    • The Wellness Committee worked to address mental health and physical health issues in the school community.  
    • You can hear the youth and adults speak about the work on this recording of the 2022 UP Annual Meeting. 

 

Years 6-7: Restorative Justice 

  • SAAB collaborated with the Restorative Justice (RJ) group at Monument Mountain to reflect on the restorative justice work the school had been doing, to bring RJ practices into their own work, and to co-design a training for the new peer mediators. The first collaborative work session included the Three Tiers of Restorative Justice, sharing experiences, learnings and challenges, and role-playing different scenarios. The result was a strong foundation for their collaboration going forward. 

 

Year 8 and beyond: Nurturing the culture 

 

Sean described UP’s contribution as “equipping us with the tools and practices to implement the next stage of work in youth-adult partnership and youth participatory action research. UP has constructed the platform for many more students and teachers to be involved. UP’s partnership gave us the language and protocols to bridge the work from our history and put our spirit into action in ways that students really responded to – challenging us – and ultimately joining us as authentic partners.” 

 

As UP steps back from the partnership, Sean reflected on how important it is to “pay attention to what resonates at this moment in time and engage where people are while holding onto the abiding character that inspires our shared work.”