There recently were two notable schoolwide assemblies: one on gender, in which marriage and family counselor Maureen Johnston gave an introduction to topics in gender, and another, the honor council town hall, which aimed to enable discussion of honor through small groups led by student moderators.

These assemblies were widely received unpopularly: students did not feel engaged by the way the topics were presented. But students’ disappointment with these meetings was not merely because they were forced and time-consuming.

There was a sharp contrast between the assembly on gender and the presentation Alissa Gao (9) delivered during a school meeting some days before. Alissa engagingly and thoughtfully shared her personal experience of being bisexual within the Harker community, all with a touch of humor. Narrated by a student herself and executed not in abstractions but in real experiences, Alissa’s presentation could not have been delivered by a someone outside our community.

Speakers chosen with little input from the student community have an inherently insurmountable task: to present an engaging, hour-long talk to students without knowing what they actually want or need to learn.

As the success and popularity of Alissa’s presentation demonstrates, students themselves will inherently have a better understanding of the student body’s interests and needs than any external organization such as the school administration.

But students presenting is not enough for an effective meeting alone. The honor council town hall meetings aimed to create a more relatable and open discussion on the honor code by having each group of four advisories be led by a couple of student moderators.

Because moderators were given a script to use, any teacher could conceivably have stood in for the student moderators in the discussion. The crucial advantage of a student speaker—that they can use their own intuition and understanding to attune their presentation to the student body—could not be employed.

Creating greater engagement with school assemblies would require core changes in the way that assemblies are presented and organized. Students themselves must have a say in the process of deciding topics if assemblies are to address students’ concerns with any specificity. But topic choice alone is not enough: presentations must be specific to their audience.

A call for students to be able to call the terms of assemblies may seem anarchic. Though it is tempting to believe that students would eschew assemblies completely if meetings were made optional, or would choose trivial topics if meeting subject choice were given to students, this is not the case.

The ample turnout and popular approval of the Women’s Health Discussion organized by Jenna Sadhu (12) and teachers illustrates that students are willing to attend meetings if they are presented in an engaging, relatable way and cater to realized needs of the student population. The critical difference that made the discussion so appealing was its wholly grassroots organization: as a student herself, Jenna was able to identify a topic that the student body would be interested in and also present it in a way that was relatable. A purely optional meeting commanded a sizable following, all attributable to topic choice and presentation.

A new system that can account for the student body’s desires must be created—whether by making assemblies optional, polling students about topic choices, better-informing speakers about the student body or encouraging more student speakers. Employing volunteer, student speakers in assemblies stands out as a particularly attractive option, as a student presenter is not a speaker to an audience, but a peer to peers.

Regardless of the tact taken, the contrast in reception between the fiat, plenary assemblies and the volunteer, grassroots, optional presentations makes it patent: presentations would be more engaging, effective and impactful if the administration were to more directly consider the wishes of the student body itself.

This piece was originally published in the pages of The Winged Post on November 16, 2017.