This BELE learning brief highlights how near-peer mentors and Youth Organizing Coaches can help school districts listen to and respond to the experiences of students. The brief explores four key insights on how the role can be implemented in schools to uplift student voices and support education leaders to partner more meaningfully with students.

The promise of social and emotional development as a lever for increasing educational equity rests on the capacity of educators to understand that all learning is social and emotional and all learning is mediated by relationships that sit in a sociopolitical, racialized context – for all children, not just those who are Black and brown.

Students and student voices must lead our work in building equitable and liberatory schools. The Youth Liberation Symposium, an entirely youth-led virtual symposium featuring youth from across our network of 18 school districts connected to learn about the history of education liberation struggles and dive into questions around their own activist identity. The symposium culminated…

Negative experiences have a powerful impact on the human brain, which is wired to recognize threats more readily than rewards. Research in neuroscience has revealed that the brain responds to perceived social threats in the same manner as threats to survival. For marginalized students who are highly attuned to potential dangers, survival mechanisms can kick…

Each school has a “sphere of success,” a set of students for whom current practices are working to get on the path to college and career-readiness. Regardless of how successful a school is, not every child is within its sphere of success. In order to bring increasing numbers of young people into that sphere, educators…

Our Leading for Equity Framework provides a frame of reference that enables leaders to navigate the complex territory of equity challenges and to develop the capacity to engage in purposeful leadership action. In its simplest form, the Framework helps build habits of mind that are continually in practice. In its more elaborated form, it provides…