Trust is a Two-Way Street: Amplifying Student Voice to Improve Outcomes

Natalia Benjamin taught high school Ethnic Studies and Multilingual Learners in Rochester, MN for 7 years where she currently works as the Coordinator for Multilingual Learning. She is dually licensed in K-12 ESL and reading, and was named the 2021 Minnesota Teacher of the Year. Natalia is passionate about the liberation of marginalized students and focuses on advocacy for multilingual/multicultural education, identity work, Heritage Speakers, language justice, and student-centered humanizing pedagogies. She is committed to teacher development and teaches a course for educators on Race and Ethnic Studies in Heritage/Bilingual education at UW-Whitewater as a guest professor.

Christopher “Chris” Chatmon is CEO and Founder of Kingmakers of Oakland (KOO) an award winning nonprofit that supports school districts around the country to improve the educational and life outcomes of Black Boys. For 10 years Chatmon served as the first Executive Director, African American Male Achievement (“AAMA”) for the Oakland Unified School District (“OUSD”). The office of AAMA was the first of its kind in the country to operate within a Public School district. Chatmon also served as the first Deputy Chief of Equity and Sr. Advisor of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in OUSD, Oakland, CA.

The current CEO of Character Lab, a non-profit advancing insights that help teens thrive, Dave's career has focused on improving outcomes for kids. He is a former teacher, coach, child-welfare attorney, non-profit founder, district administrator, and improvement scientist. Building on what he learned from those experiences, Dave is focused on building the systems that support the selection, design and implementation of impactful programs, practices and policies for kids. A key feature of those systems is reducing the friction in engaging youth in all phases of the decisions that affect them.

Hello! I am Nathan Mirin, a recent High School graduate from the Philly area. For the past two years, I have been a part of the Character Lab Internship Program (lovingly known as CLIP) first as an intern and later as a peer mentor. In those roles, I read over hundreds of surveys to give feedback about ways to improve the studies focusing on the experience of a potential teenage participant.