When Students Lead the Way: Eagle Rock at the National Summit on Improvement in Education

There's a moment in a lot of school improvement work where you realize the students aren't actually in the room. Not literally, figuratively. Their data is there. Their outcomes are the whole point. But they're not co-designing anything.

Eagle Rock's Professional Development Center has been sitting with that problem of practice for over three decades, and at this year's National Summit on Improvement in Education in San Diego, they brought what they've learned.

The Summit, organized by the National Coalition for Improvement in Education and drawing educators, researchers, and policymakers from across the country, exists to share practical tools and scale solutions for student success. Eagle Rock's workshop fit squarely in that spirit, but with a specific provocation: what if Improvement Science itself gets stronger when students aren't just the subject of improvement work, but co-leaders of it?

Eagle Rock's operating assumption, drawn from over three decades of experience through the Professional Development Center and training with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, is that adult-student partnership done well, grounded in belonging, shared decision-making, and genuine attention to wellness, creates a more durable foundation for school improvement than adult-led processes alone. The Changemaker Cohort is where they've been testing that argument in practice: student-staff pairs from public high schools across the country, working side by side to co-lead real improvement projects in their schools and communities.

Participants left with practical strategies for elevating student voice alongside adult expertise, building belonging through authentic collaboration, and applying shared leadership to strengthen their own Improvement Science work. Less a set of answers than a set of moves worth trying.

If your school is wrestling with a problem of practice that students probably understand better than anyone in administration does, which is most problems of practice, it's worth a look.