This is the second post about our two-year pilot with SparkNC testing what happens when young people participate in designing their own educational experiences. The first post described the intention. This post summarizes what happened and what we learned from it.
Ask most schools how they involve students in decisions. You will hear about advisory boards. You will hear about surveys. You will hear about a "student voice" committee that meets twice a year. A survey collected from students and reported to everyone but them.
Ask the students on those boards how much actually changed because of them. The answer is often quiet, and often "not much."
We wanted to test something different. Not student voice as a checkbox. Student voice as the design engine itself.
How We Did This
When we started SparkNC was a partnership of 17 North Carolina school districts (it’s now up to 30). It gives students a new way to do school. Through "SparkLabs," students earn credit by building real projects in fields like AI, cybersecurity, and game design.
In Tandem partnered with SparkNC for two years. Through a structured, youth-led R&D cycle, students spearheaded the design of the program’s next iteration. Participating students were already Spark Ambassadors and opted in to join In Tandem, allowing them to receive a stipend and participate in nationwide opportunities to share their experiences alongside their featured role in the R&D of SparkNC.
Between roughly March 2025 and June 2026, the Spark Ambassadors engaged in a participatory R&D cycle, learning all the stages of the R&D process. SparkNC leadership named the constraints at the outset: what was locked, what was open, and what the organization needed out of the work. Leadership and the Ambassadors rebuilt the problem statement around how students actually experienced the program. From there the Ambassadors set their own research agenda, brainstormed and prioritized solutions they found most compelling, built prototypes, tested them with real users, gathered feedback, and named the lessons that should shape the next iteration.
This post shares what we found. It also asks a harder question: which of these findings might hold true beyond SparkNC?
Copy the Instructions, Not the Product
Our findings split into two types.
Instructions are the generalizable rules. They should apply across schools and contexts. Think of them like genes.
The product is what those instructions produce in a particular context. In this case, the product includes the specific way in which Spark Ambassadors and SparkNC leaders executed the participatory R&D process, and the changes to SparkLabs resulting from that process. The product should have different details in every context, similar to how animals of the same species aren’t identical.
This matters because in complex systems, like schools, it is unrealistic to scale by trying to copy the finished product. It’s not just that its incredibly difficult to replicate a complex set of behaviors and outcomes across contexts. It’s that even if we could, we shouldn’t. An animal built to thrive in a hot climate should be expected to struggle if transplanted to the arctic. Copying the instructions is both more feasible and more desirable, allowing core ideas to adapt to work in context.
The Backbone: Two Non-Negotiables
Two instructions support everything else we found. These two are mutually reinforcing. Don’t get both, and the rest will not hold.
1. Adult mindsets change through demonstration, not training. A core challenge with participatory R&D in schools is that adults often underestimate what students are capable of. Telling adults that students are capable rarely shifts their assumptions. Adults change their minds when they see students demonstrate that capability firsthand. SparkNC is an excellent example of this. It was designed from the start to be student-centered and was rooted in a belief that students are capable of more. Even with that in mind, past efforts didn’t quite hit the mark. That’s at least partially because organizations are not monoliths; not everyone “gets it” in the same way. The partnership with In Tandem - which structures student engagement to focus their efforts and shine a light on how their participation leads to improvements - helped them take the next step. This wasn’t just a series of student design sessions. Students led strategy sessions, presented directly to leadership, fielded questions, and asked their own. Adults witnessed Spark Ambassadors doing the work. That firsthand experience helped raise the expectations of any holdouts more than any PD workshop might have.
2. Build credibility by acknowledging past failures. To participate authentically, students - like anyone else - need to expect that something will change because of their contributions. That’s rarely what their expectation is. Most students remember giving input only to have it be ignored. Given that history, shifting expectations requires more than another promise. At SparkNC, leadership acknowledged that history rather than pretending it didn’t exist. They listened as students shared their negative prior experiences and asked tough questions. That honesty and vulnerability signaled that adults understood students’ skepticism and helped create the trust needed for them to try again.
Eight Tactical Instructions
These are designed to ensure that the tactical conditions for success are present. The instruction is what should apply anywhere. The italicized text shows why it matters. The example shows how SparkNC executed each instruction.
1.Put students in proximity with decisionmakers
More rapid feedback loops protect effort and reinforce trust.
▸ SparkNC leaders were in every session to prevent designing toward dead ends.
2.Define what’s fixed and what’s flexible
Boundaries sustain trust more than promises of unlimited influence.
▸ Students and adults mapped what was locked (credit, policy) vs. open before design began.
3.Create quick wins early
Visible change in months — not years — validates student expertise.
▸ Ambassadors saw real SparkLabs changes within a single term; deprioritized ideas stayed on the table.
4.Use a structured, repeatable process
Whether it’s a continuous improvement model or an R&D cycle, give structure to the process.
▸ A defined R&D cycle — co-define, ideate, prototype, pilot, evaluate —framed the process and kept it on track.
5.Invest in expert, third party facilitation
It takes a lot of judgment to adapt in real time. Internal facilitators carry the baggage of their role, no matter how good they are.
▸ An outside facilitator with decades of experience repeatedly adjusted the engagements, the process and the timelines to keep moving forward.
6.Start narrow to go deep
One contained success becomes the proof point for broader adoption.
▸ Pilots focused on specific SparkLabs components first, not redesigning the entire Spark experience.
7.Recalibrate when buy-in shifts
Adapting the plan together when conditions change is itself co-creation.
▸ When some Lab Leaders showed low buy-in for the Lab Assistantship, students and adults redesigned to lower the friction without dropping the goal.
8.Honor student contributions directly
Students are value-add partners, not charity recipients.
▸ Ambassadors were paid, built résumés and portfolios, and presented at high-profile events as thought leaders.
What the Instructions Built
These instructions are practical, not theoretical. Over a year, three student teams turned them into three working prototypes, each of which is on its way to becoming part of how the next scholars experience SparkLabs.
The Passion Project AI App was built with Playlab from four use cases the Ambassadors developed. The team piloted version one, sent Playlab prioritized recommendations for the next iteration, and wrote a user guide for scholars covering when to use the app, when to go to a lab leader instead, and how to keep the project their own. The App has gone beyond a prototype and is now embedded in the experience of the recently launched Spark 2, supporting all scholars in completing a passion project.
The Lab Assistantship Protocol is a four-part framework that lets lab leaders and advanced learners co-design a leadership role: a capacity scan, a strengths-and-interest scan, a guided matching conversation, and a working agreement. It will be incorporated into New Leader Orientation and used by their Director of Learner Engagement to support lab leaders in partnering with learners to build leadership pathways in their labs. It is one of the official focus tracks available to Spark Ambassadors, who can choose to take on an in-Lab leadership role supporting their peers.
The Alumni Network Playbook was built from surveys and interviews conducted with current and former scholars, covering how to reach alumni, how to spread opportunities across more of them, what events they would attend, and what an alumni-facing site would need to include. SparkNC will use the Alumni Network Playbook and partner with student designers to guide the development and launch of a new alumni program. This is another focus track available to Spark Ambassadors, who can choose to co-design the alumni network and website.
Each prototype started as a hypothesis. Each one changed direction at least once, based on real feedback from real users. That is the process working as designed.
Implications for the Field
The model In Tandem developed with SparkNC is not likely to be replicated elsewhere. Other education settings are unlikely to share the precise set of expectations and relationships that existed between students, their schools and the SparkNC team. But the core instructions should be replicable.
Other education agencies should not assume they can build credibility with students the way SparkNC built credibility with Spark Ambassadors. But they should try to build credibility with their students.
Other education agencies should not assume they can get the same “quick wins” SparkNC got, but they should design to get quick wins.
And other education agencies definitely should not blindly adopt a Lab Assistantship Protocol, an Alumni Playbook or a Passion Project AI App. But other education agencies should absolutely try to apply a process to create tailored solutions to the particular problems they aim to solve.
In the end SparkNC’s student-centered improvement process doesn’t tell anyone else what they should build. But it should give them a good idea of what an authentic and impactful student-centered improvement process looks like.
Stay tuned for the next post, which will introduce In Tandem’s next pilot, an attempt to apply these instructions in a very different context.