Cultivating Relationships in Secondary Classrooms: Practices That Matter

Relationships Support Learning and Development

Research on the science of learning and development demonstrates that when young people maintain positive school-based relationships, their learning and well-being is supported and enhanced. While true for all young people, positive relationships are especially crucial for young people experiencing the effects of poverty, trauma, and discrimination, which can inhibit relationships and trust-building with school adults. In addition, being connected to one or more caring adults is of particular importance for middle schoolers and high schoolers, who increasingly seek a sense of belonging as they explore their unique and multifaceted identities and interests.

While studies indicate that positive connections enable youth learning and development, secondary learning environments often make it difficult for students and school adults to build relationships. For instance, school schedules may make it so that students see seven or eight teachers a day for 45- or 50-minute intervals, while their teachers see more than 150 students on a daily basis. Schedules like these make it challenging for educators to know each student well, despite their best efforts.

The research brief Cultivating Relationships in Secondary Schools: Structures That Matter illustrates how secondary schools can institute structures such as small learning communities, cohorts, advisory systems, and looping that provide greater opportunities for students and school adults to develop caring and supportive connections. However, having relationship-centered structures in place does not guarantee that positive relationships between youth and school adults will develop. The relationship-building practices that educators use within those structures are key to fully realizing the promise of positive relationships to support learning and development.

This brief elevates activities and approaches that school adults can use to put relationships and caring at the center of their practice. Drawing upon Design Principles for Schools: Putting the Science of Learning and Development Into Action, the brief describes personalization tools and practices that can cultivate positive student–teacher relationships and empathy-building. It also highlights approaches that school adults can use to promote a sense of safety and belonging, including practices that foster community-building, restorative approaches to conflict resolution, identity safety, student agency, and social and emotional wellness.

Practices That Personalize Relationships

Individual connections between students and school adults are at the core of relationship-centered schooling. Secondary school teachers and staff can incorporate a range of everyday practices and tools to enhance their relationships with students and support student learning.

Daily Practices for Personalization

When implemented consistently, several classroom routines can deepen relationships between students and teachers. For example:

• Everyday routines, like greeting students as they arrive to class or holding short conferences throughout instructional or advisory periods, help teachers to connect with students and understand their progress. Maintaining an open-door policy and holding weekly office hours, where students are able to connect with staff during lunch periods or after school, also invite students to have conversations with educators and staff. These practices make young people feel valued by school staff and reinforce that their teachers care about their growth and success in the future.
   
• Active listening and question posing can be practiced by educators and staff, where they encourage students to share their beliefs, interests, and experiences. In this way, teachers can better understand what students bring to the learning setting, which serves as a foundation for building knowledge. Students thrive when their interactions with adults are consistently characterized by interest and inquiry.
   
• Expressing authentic affirmation, such as “I believe in you” or “Thanks for sharing,” conveys care and respect and can boost students’ success and sense of connection. Affirmations may be shared in individual interactions between students and staff and reflected in the physical classroom environment. For example, staff at Bronxdale High School in New York City developed the “Affirmation Station” as a living forum in which sticky notes are used to express appreciation and support for students. (See Figure 1.) School staff can extend these practices by inviting youth to discuss their challenges, doubts, and worries in order to normalize the feelings and experiences that accompany adolescent development and encourage problem-solving.

The tenor and authenticity of the implementation of these personalizing practices matter for their impact. They are most effective when they lead to trustful, respectful, and reciprocal interactions that help students’ cognitive, social, and emotional capabilities and cultivate a positive self-concept.

Empathy-Building Tools

Practices that build empathy between students and school adults can positively impact relationship development. Research shows that empathy-building tools are powerful not only for the similarities between students and practitioners they surface, but also for “sidelining” bias and building transformative relationships. Tools that support empathy-building include:

• “Getting to Know You” Surveys. Administered at the beginning of the year, these surveys can include questions about students’ families, interests, hobbies, goals, and educational strengths. In one study, students and teachers who learned about their commonalities reported more positive relationships with each other. Students in that study also earned higher grades when teachers learned what they had in common, and achievement gap disparities for Black and Latinx students closed by more than 60%.
   
• Empathy Interviews. These one-on-one conversations between and among students and teachers use open-ended questions to surface insights into specific experiences that help uncover ongoing needs and challenges. Interviewers tailor four to eight open-ended questions to the purpose of the interaction, which can range from identifying challenges in schools and classrooms to brainstorming ideas for change. These questions include probes like “Tell me more” or “Why” to elicit the experiences and points of view of the interviewees. Each person engaged in the empathy interview is both an interviewee and an interviewer, enabling each individual to share their perspective and to understand the point of view of the other.

These and similar tools communicate care, interest, and appreciation for student experiences. They facilitate personal interactions between students and teachers and can help to illuminate and mitigate biases that impede relationship-building, often with tangible results on achievement.

Practices That Promote Safety and Belonging

Fostering a sense of safety and belonging within each and every student is also an essential component of relationship-centered practice. As educators and staff come to know students well through personalization practices, it is also important that they implement approaches that enable students’ social, emotional, and identity development to support their learning and sense of connection.

Creating a Sense of Community

Educators and staff can promote belonging and safety by intentionally building community, which can combat a sense of anonymity that many adolescents may experience in their schools. Teachers and staff can foster inclusion and community through practices such as:

• Regular community meetings to help build classroom environments where students have a sense of belonging, voice, and agency. Consistent community meetings, which can be held during advisory meetings or in regular course periods, are opportunities for students to build connections, raise issues that matter to them, and work to solve problems facing the community. They also afford opportunity to celebrate accomplishments and growth.
   
• Establishing shared values and norms, particularly those codeveloped with students. For example, teachers and students can establish norms of interaction for group work or develop classroom community agreements and display them in the classroom. When collaboratively developed, the practices build in student ownership and investment in classroom norms while helping students understand what is expected of them as members of the classroom community.
   
• Using restorative practices to address emerging problems and to repair harm. While restorative circles are a cornerstone of restorative approaches, educators and staff can use daily practices to resolve conflict in ways that sustain relationships and build community. These include the use of shared vocabulary that both staff and students can use to express feelings in a productive way. Teachers can also hold impromptu conferences during instructional time to redirect a student’s behavior with minimal disruption.

Instituting approaches and routines like these can build trust among and between students and school staff while allowing students to develop greater ownership, engagement, and responsibility in their learning settings. In addition, consistent use of these practices fosters predictability, which reduces stress and cognitive load among secondary students and thus enables greater capacity for them to engage in learning, problem-solving, and relationship-building.

Celebrating and Sustaining Student Identity and Interests

Practices that promote identity safety also foster a sense of belonging and relationship-building, as they acknowledge and build upon students’ identities and interests. Identity-safe environments reflect, respect, and celebrate different cultures, which can build student confidence and encourage a broader embrace of cultural pluralism. Teachers can integrate identity-safe approaches into their practice in several ways, including using:

• Diverse and culturally relevant content and materials during instruction so that students can relate learning to their life experiences and deepen their understanding of other cultures, histories, and communities.
   
• Physical spaces that reflect and embrace cultural diversity. Classroom displays should reflect cultural plurality and the diversity and history of the student population.
   
• Pedagogical activities that enable learning about and from students and their communities. For example, personal or community history projects allow students to explore their identities and backgrounds during academic learning.
   
• Community-based projects, which often begin with teachers posing a question or asking students to identify equity-focused issues impacting them and their communities. They often provide opportunities for students to propose solutions and share their learnings.

Culturally sustaining and relevant approaches help interrupt the effects of discriminatory practices that cause students to feel unwelcome and that undermine their learning and development. In this way, these approaches can pave the way for enhanced relationships, learning, and engagement.

Fostering Student Voice and Agency

Positive relationships are developmental, whereby they foster student voice and cultivate youth agency so that every student can become a confident and independent individual and advocate. Teachers can create daily opportunities for young people to grow their voice and agency. For instance, teachers can offer students choice and flexibility as they engage in intellectually demanding inquiries and help students develop strategies for monitoring and managing their own learning.

The practices described throughout this brief elevate youth voice and agency to varying degrees. Other notable opportunities for fostering youth voice and leadership in the classroom include:

• Student-led learning activities that allow students and teachers to codesign the experience and learn alongside each other. Examples include community walks that immerse teachers in students’ home environments as they educate teachers about students’ backgrounds, community, challenges, and cultural assets. Student-led learning activities can give teachers a deeper understanding of who students are and what they bring to the learning setting. This understanding, in turn, can help teachers continue to provide culturally relevant and sustaining learning experiences.
   
• Student-led conferences, where young people actively participate in and facilitate teacher–family discussions on their progress. Effective student-led conferences are held more frequently (e.g., 2 or 3 times per year) and at times that family members can attend. They are used as opportunities for students, families, and staff to plan together for children’s goals, rather than communicating judgments about how children are doing.

Attending to Students’ Physical and Emotional Well-Being

Teachers in secondary schools can enhance a culture of care and connectedness through daily routines that promote student well-being. These routines include:

• Breathing or movement exercises at the beginning of class or as a break from instruction to support emotional awareness and regulation.
   
• Restoration spaces in classrooms where students can go to monitor or redirect their attention so they can productively engage in learning and peer collaboration.
   
• Mindfulness and other calming or recentering practices that focus on breathing techniques and contemplative practice.

These types of practices benefit the brain’s architecture, learning, and stress management, and they may be particularly helpful during adolescent development.

Conclusion

This brief describes practices that secondary school teachers and staff can use to build personalized, caring, and trustful relationships with students that can enable them to grow and thrive as individuals and learners. When coupled with school-level structures that create ample opportunities for positive connections between students and school adults, these relationship-centered approaches can optimize student learning, well-being, and agency.

While this brief focuses on approaches that build teacher–student relationships, practices that build personal connections among teachers and between teachers and families are also important to enhancing student achievement and healthy development. Educators and staff in relationship-centered secondary schools make a concerted effort to strengthen their connections with colleagues as they work to support student progress. Educators and staff in these schools also prioritize building relationships with families, taking strides to maintain consistent, meaningful, and culturally responsive communication with parents and guardians to form a supportive foundation for student learning and thriving.

Cultivating Relationships in Secondary Classrooms: Structures That Matter (brief) by Laura E. Hernández and Linda Darling-Hammond, with Natalie Nielson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

This research was supported by The California Endowment and the Stuart Foundation. Core operating support for the Learning Policy Institute is provided by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Heising-Simons Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Raikes Foundation, Sandler Foundation, Skyline Foundation, and MacKenzie Scott. The ideas voiced here are those of the authors and not those of our funders.