The New Zealand Council for Educational Research's (NZCER's) Families and Communities Engagement (FACE) project is investigating ideas and practices involved in bringing together teachers, families, local communities and students to contribute to collective conversations and decisions about education. This report concerns a sub-project of FACE that aimed to develop and research a process to engage small groups of secondary students in two schools to become critical and informed contributors to curriculum and education design. Both schools were girls' schools and had previous relationships with NZCER researchers. Over a series of weeks and months, the authors developed workshops to support small groups of students (mostly in Years 9 and 10) to undertake small-scale research on their own and/or others' views and experiences about learning and school. In one school, a dozen students from two classes were approached by a teacher and invited to take part in the project. In the other school, they introduced the project to one Year 9 class, and those students who were interested opted to work with the authors. The authors also collected their own research information throughout the process. As researchers, the authors also encountered a range of tensions and questions. They hope that schools keep these in mind as they continue--or embark on--establishing learning communities designed to engage students as co-contributors to education design. These tensions are: (1) Reifying students' "naive" claims versus inculcating them into "their" paradigm; (2) Presenting views versus entering into dialogue; (3) Creating expectations for change versus managing expectations about change; (4) Meaning making versus destabilising experiences; (5) Quick broad coverage versus long-term in-depth investigation; (6) Working "in" schools versus working "with" schools; (7) Students as connectors versus students as contributors; and (8) Students as a homogeneous group versus students as heterogeneous. Interview guide for student researchers is appended. (Contains 5 tables, 8 figures and 14 footnotes.)