Cultivating Relationships in Secondary Schools: Structures That Matter

Relationships Matter for Educational Success

The science of learning and development demonstrates the value of positive relationships for educational success and well-being. It suggests that when fostered between and among students, teachers, and families, positive connections support students in developing:

• higher levels of motivation, engagement, and academic success;
• greater social competence; and
• increased ability to take on and persist through challenges.

Cultivating positive relationships is especially important in adolescence, when youth are exploring their identities and have a growing need for connection and belonging. It is also especially crucial for adolescents experiencing the effects of poverty, trauma, racism, and other forms of discrimination, which can affect their relationship-building with school adults.

While research indicates that relationships matter for learning, many secondary schools are organized in ways that make it difficult for young people to be connected to a caring adult. This brief provides insights into how schools can counteract this pattern. Drawing upon Design Principles for Schools: Putting the Science of Learning and Development Into Action, it presents structures that secondary schools can institute or redesign to make relationship-centered schooling a reality. As the examples in this brief illustrate, there is no single way to integrate relationship-centered approaches. Instead, secondary schools can integrate an array of structures that enable positive connections and healthy attachments to grow in their unique contexts.

Personalizing Relationships With Students

Connections between students and school adults are at the core of relationship-centered schooling. To optimize student success and well-being, positive relationships should be:

• consistent and individualized, affording ongoing opportunities for students to be well known by and connected to educators and other staff;
   
• trustful, respectful, and reciprocal;
   
• focused on all aspects of young people’s development, helping to foster their cognitive, social, and emotional capabilities and a positive self-concept.

To provide opportunities for relationships with these characteristics to grow, schools can institute structures that create small learning communities, promote a sense of safety and belonging, support culturally sustaining and relevant education, and foster student voice and agency.

Creating Small Learning Communities

Small learning communities are a primary mechanism for promoting personalized relationships in schools. These learning communities are designed for staff and students to work together in smaller and closer-knit units, which create the conditions under which students can be known well. Research suggests that students—particularly those who face significant social, economic, and academic impediments—demonstrate stronger academic, social, and emotional development in smaller settings. Large, comprehensive secondary schools have several options for creating smaller learning communities:

• Develop cohorts that keep groups of students and, to the greatest extent possible, the same teachers or staff together throughout the school day. Middle and high schools may keep a student cohort—commonly called a “house”—together in one classroom and have teachers rotate between cohorts, or have cohorts move together in passing schedules. Although some houses in large comprehensive schools contain 300 to 600 students, the ideal would be to identify much smaller cohorts of 80 to 120 students.
   
• Establish advisory systems that provide each student with a home base, a caring community, and an adult liaison between school, student, and home. In effective advisory systems, each advisor serves as an advocate for a small group of students (usually 15–20), often over 2 to 4 years. The advisor facilitates an advisory class that meets regularly, promotes a sense of community among peers, and presents opportunities for students to receive support on academic and nonacademic issues.
   
• Implement looping, which allows educators to remain with the same students for more than 1 year. Commonly used in elementary schools, looping is equally beneficial for secondary students, who are better able to form strong relationships when they have the same subject matter teachers or maintain the same advisor beyond 1 academic year.
   
• Institute block scheduling—the practice of having fewer, longer class periods each day to reduce teachers’ overall pupil load and lengthen time for instruction. In schools with block scheduling, educators may have, for example, three 90-minute classes each day instead of six 45-minute class periods. This structure can foster consistent interactions and relationship-building during classroom instruction, especially when courses continue for a full year and teachers use the longer class periods to implement teaching strategies that support inquiry, help students obtain directed practice, and personalize instruction.

These structures provide opportunities for students and adults to connect in substantive and productive ways to support learning and development.

Promoting a Sense of Safety and Belonging

Relationship-centered schools do not solely emphasize individual attachments. They also systematically place care at the center of the school’s culture and integrate structures that enable inclusion and create a sense of social, emotional, and psychological safety for all students. Fostering a sense of safety and belonging requires the elimination of structures that segregate and separate students. Academic tracking and zero-tolerance and exclusionary discipline policies are among these harmful structures, as they have been shown to contribute to stigmatization, heightened stress, and disengagement among students as well as discriminatory treatment toward students of color and other student subgroups. In their stead, secondary schools can:

• Institute detracking to create heterogenous learning opportunities that support academic learning while allowing youth to make connections across socioeconomic, racial, linguistic, and ethnic lines.
   
• Offer varied and enriching extracurriculars with minimal barriers for participation so that students have more opportunities to form relationships and a sense of community with each other. Evidence suggests that extracurriculars are socially supportive when they are forums that affirm students’ identities, strengthen interpersonal skills, and, in some cases, foster future career skills and credentials.
   
• Implement restorative approaches to conflict resolution that acknowledge and repair harm when it occurs and cultivate strategies for creating healthier, more positive interactions. These evidence-based approaches can take many forms. They can include impromptu conferences to redirect students’ behavior to minimize disruption to instructional time or the use of shared vocabulary to enable individuals to express feelings in productive ways. In addition, restorative circles and conferences are cornerstone practices that are structured and facilitated to support reflection, communication, and problem-solving.

Structures like these promote relationships, safety, and belonging while mitigating the sense of differential worth that can emerge amid academic tracking or harsh disciplinary policies.

Supporting Culturally Sustaining and Relevant Education

Relationship-centered schools also affirm and nurture students’ full selves. Structures that promote culturally sustaining and relevant education are essential features of a whole child approach that recognizes the everyday experiences and knowledge of students as valuable resources for learning and development. These approaches build on students’ backgrounds and experiences, helping to foster a greater sense of safety and belonging and an engaging atmosphere for learning. In addition, young people are more able to learn and take productive risks when they and their culture are a valued part of the school community. Secondary schools can cultivate these educational experiences by:

• Implementing a diverse and culturally relevant curriculum so that students can relate learning to their life experiences and understand other cultures and histories. Curricular content and materials should reflect and respect the legitimacy and accomplishments of those from different backgrounds and empower students to value all cultures.
   
• Showcasing cultural pluralism in the physical environment by ensuring that school walls, displays, and names reflect the diversity and history of the student population.
   
• Providing professional learning that educates teachers about students’ backgrounds, challenges, community, and cultural assets. This professional development should also support educators in incorporating culture and diversity into the heart of the curriculum, instead of treating it as peripheral content.

Instituting culturally sustaining structures can pave the way for educators to disrupt the effects of discrimination as they build student confidence and a broader embrace of cultural pluralism—all in the service of student learning and well-being.

Fostering Student Voice and Agency

Relationship-centered schools are also those that enable students to develop independence and self-advocacy so that they become confident and self-directed individuals. While these competencies can be fostered during the learning process, school structures play an important role in signaling the importance of student voice and perspectives. To cultivate student voice and agency in a school environment, secondary schools can:

• Establish or redesign decision-making structures to include youth by, for example, increasing youth representation on hiring committees, student advisory boards, and school culture and climate teams. Strategies to include youth representatives from a broad cross-section of the campus (e.g., recruiting from varied clubs, rotating representation) can help ensure that the most vocal or visible student leaders are not the only voices represented.
   
• Create shared learning forums that enable adults and students to grow their knowledge, skills, and relationships together. Practices can include inviting students to regularly scheduled staff meetings and establishing new forums to encourage relationship-building, collaboration, and shared learning.

When used in conjunction with instructional practices that cultivate student agency, structures like these provide opportunities for students to express what they have experienced, know, think, care about, can do, and aspire to do. Moreover, they position youth as partners and elevate the knowledge and expertise they bring into schools.

Supporting Relationships Among Staff

Relationship-centered secondary schools also build a healthy community for staff, enabling practitioners to build relationships as they support each other in their professional and personal growth. Research suggests that these relationships are important in schools. When staff maintain strong relationships and have frequent opportunities to collaborate, they are more effective in supporting student learning and well-being. In addition, approaches that support collaboration and teacher leadership contribute to staff retention, which fosters relational trust by enhancing the stability of a school community.

Facilitating Productive and Positive Staff Collaboration

Structures that enable staff collaboration are central in relationship-centered schools. Positive staff collaboration includes making opportunities for staff to develop collective expertise, which is generated through a process of sharing, attempting new ideas, reflecting on practice, and developing new approaches. It also necessitates ongoing efforts to ensure everyone on the staff feels known, heard, and valued. Effective structures for building productive collaboration include: 

• Allocating consistent collaboration time for educators to build collegial relationships as they plan together and/or codevelop curriculum and lessons for their students. In addition to departmental collaboration, structures should connect practitioners who work with the same group of students across content areas, so that educators can discuss the ways they might design learning experiences to better support students.
   
• Giving attention to staff wellness and relationship-building during meetings and professional development. Staff convenings can be designed to include activities that bolster staff culture and promote their social and emotional wellness. 

Through structures like these, teachers and school staff can share and reflect on their practice and attempt, develop, and inform new approaches while building their interpersonal connections.

Elevating Staff Expertise

Involving staff in decisions about how the school functions also contributes to a relationship-centered staff culture. Structures that support collective decision-making and teacher leadership are not only associated with increased achievement, but they also provide concrete ways for those closest to students to inform policy decisions. Structures that elevate staff expertise include:

• Creating shared decision-making structures in which teachers serve on site-based committees that support continuous improvement or strategic planning. Committees and work groups can have changing membership to increase representation and involvement.
   
• Providing opportunities for distributed leadership, such as by having teachers organize and manage school committees; lead grade-level or departmental teams; and play lead roles in professional development, instructional improvement, and curricular implementation. 

Shared decision-making and distributed leadership models embody the collaborative and democratic principles that effective teachers expect their students to develop, which further integrates a relationship-centered focus into a school’s culture and fabric.

Supporting Regular and Meaningful Family Engagement 

Building trustful, reciprocal, and culturally affirming relationships between practitioners and students’ families is another essential ingredient of relationship-centered schooling. Families are critical to providing deeper knowledge of youth and greater alignment between home and school values, norms, and practices. In addition, positive school–family relationships have been shown to support school improvement and are associated with a range of positive student outcomes.

There is no single strategy for cultivating effective family engagement. Yet secondary school staff can institute approaches that enable regular and meaningful engagement. These include: 

• Having diverse communication tools in place (e.g., emails, text messages, written notes, phone calls, web forums) so that families can easily and consistently learn how their child is doing and find important information about school operations and events. Communication should be conveyed in families’ home language wherever possible.
   
• Creating time for virtual or in-person meetings to support school–family communication. These meetings should not only occur in response to a negative incident but rather be conducted proactively to build rapport and interpersonal connections. Choosing times thoughtfully and, to the extent possible, at times matched to parent or guardian availability, is particularly important, as is making additional supports (e.g., translation services, babysitting) available for meetings to increase family participation.
   
• Reimagining student–teacher–family conferences to improve their ability to engage families and support learning. This can include enacting student-led conferences in which youth are active facilitators and participants in teacher–family discussions, as well as using conferences as opportunities to learn from family members and plan together for children’s goals, rather than communicating judgments about how children are doing.
   
• Including families in decision-making or strategic planning forums that distribute power and responsibility, such as school site councils or strategic planning committees. Schools must work to ensure that all families can lend their voices to school efforts—including families who face impediments to being deeply engaged in their child’s school. In addition, it is important that shared decision-making forums are not merely forums for families to express their opinions; rather, they represent opportunities for the knowledge and expertise of families to substantively inform a shared school vision and community.

Structures that provide opportunities for regular and meaningful family engagement are essential for all schools, but they hold particular relevance in communities where interpersonal and institutional trust has been violated. Approaches like these point to the ways staff can institute structures that seek to build or rebuild trust through proactive processes as well as honor the expertise and cultural assets families bring to bear in school settings.

Putting It All Together

This brief describes an array of structures that secondary schools can put in place to create conditions that can foster relationship-centered schooling. The structures are treated separately here, but they are most powerful when used in combination to realize a school’s unique vision for creating personalized and inclusive learning environments. 

The existence of relationship-centered structures alone does not guarantee their success. The nature of relationships matters greatly, and schools also should ensure that student–practitioner interactions are trustful, empowering, reciprocal, and culturally responsive for every student. Only then can the promise of positive relationships be fully realized to support learning and development. Thus, the companion brief, Cultivating Relationships in Secondary Classrooms: Practices That Matter, focuses on day-to-day practices for educators. 

This brief concentrates on actions that members of secondary school communities can take in their settings. Yet redesigning schools to be more relationship centered has implications for the educational ecosystem—from the school to the district, and the macrosystems that work together to improve the quality and character of learning environments. A concerted effort across the system to enable the implementation of relationship-centered approaches is needed to ensure that secondary settings build and sustain relationships as a foundation for learning.

Cultivating Relationships in Secondary Schools: 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.