About the Building Student-Teacher Relationships in New Visions High Schools Project

What can schools do to support strong student-teacher relationships in and beyond times of crisis?

Since the school closures of the COVID-19 pandemic, high schools participating in New Visions for Public Schools College Readiness Network for School Improvement (CR NSI) have been using a continuous improvement approach to develop new structures, practices, and resources to re-engage students and strengthen student-teacher relationships. Working in partnership with New Visions,  researchers from NCREST interviewed educators and coaches from the New Visions’ network and documented these new developments in a series of blog posts, infographics, and related resources (The “Learning & Evolving” Series: Educators Share Their Stories on Keeping Students Engaged). The blog posts and resources focus on what we call context-specific “micro-innovations” made at six high schools in the network, but the experiences across all six made clear that no single new strategy or initiative was sufficient. Each school quickly found that they had to make building strong student-teacher relationships and student well-being a central part of a comprehensive infrastructure for supporting students’ academic, social, and personal development overall. That infrastructure included things like advisory periods and one-on-one check-ins – that focused directly on reconnecting teachers and students – but it also encompassed new developments that helped establish a climate of trust and facilitated communication and collaboration among teachers and school staff.