Building democracies in K-8 schools is a promising approach to increasing young people and educators' civic knowledge, skills and dispositions. The Rendell Center for Civics and Civics Engagement leveraged strategies and concepts from the fields of civic education, student voice, and distributed leadership to build a youth-adult school governance…

Including students in school governance isn't just a way to teach them about civics, it's a smarter way to run a school. Schools tend to govern themselves as a single-loop learning organization. The better model is a double-loop organization that would promote greater participation, deliberation, feedback and, ultimately, more buy-in from…

Regardless of a school's size or whether its setting is rural, urban, or suburban, the establishment of a student council organization can serve as a unique and valuable learning laboratory for civic education. Student council teaches students many intangible life skills and allows students to take on different roles and learn when to step back,…

In order to suggest a method of including evening and part-time students in the governance system of Delaware County Community College, the author sent a questionnaire to the Dean of Students or related official at 32 community colleges in Pannsylvania and New Jersey to determine the involvement of such students at other institutions. Twenty-two…

The Windber Area School District (Pennsylvania) has combatted "bigness" and impersonality by developing schools-within-a-school, a concept which has particular application for large clusters of grade strata. Although there are several ways to group students, in Windber every two grades (7 through 12) constitute a unit which has its own…