Design principles are four to seven ideas that align with the school’s mission and vision and act as a guiding light for the school-level team implementing change. When schools build design principles as a larger community — engaging faculty, staff, families, students and community members — they help to ensure all stakeholders’ perspectives are represented in the big ideas that guide their work.

This tool suggests steps a team might take to prepare for a design session on co-creating design principles, offers a protocol for facilitating the session and proposes next steps for taking design principles from draft form to final state.