Dive Brief:

• Digital Harbor High, a Baltimore magnet school, has adopted a program intended to ease racial tensions at the school and encourage students to talk to one another.
• The school turned to the program, called SPIRIT, after a classroom incident last year turned into several days of violent confrontations between the school’s African-American and Latino students.
• The program emphasizes student-driven collaboration around how to fix what’s not working in the school, with students encouraged to talk to each other about their lives and the challenges they face.

Dive Insight:

The adoption of a student-led solution to what might traditionally be thought of as a disciplinary issue is an unusual one — and indicative of a larger move toward more student-centered learning in some schools. Educators are trying to find ways for students to drive their own learning as education shifts from delivering information to teaching students how to seek out and contextualize information.

In the case of SPIRIT, the impetus came from a realization that a lack of mutual understanding was driving tensions — and that this could provide an opportunity to teach students about the challenges that lie outside school walls.

“What hopefully this process does is it develops young people’s leadership by offering them a space where they can express their problems and their solutions and build relationships across race, ethnicity, culture, economic status … anything. In order to see that many of the problems that they have affect people all over, and that it’s more effective to solve those when people band together,” Andrew Reinel, an organizer with CASA de Maryland, the group that helped Digital Harbor put the program in place, told PRI.