Building Student-Teacher Relationships in New Visions High Schools
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.
The “Learning & Evolving” Series: Educators Share Their Stories on Keeping Students Engaged (Blog Posts)
- Wellness Groups: One Take on Making Advisories More Effective During and Beyond the Pandemic
- Deepening Connections Through One-on-One Advisory
- Listening to Students: Building Culturally Responsive Supports for a Diverse Student Body
- Strengthening Family-School Bonds through Two-Way Town Halls
- Advisory for Student-led Conferences: Building Ownership and Conflict-Resolution Skills
- Manifesting a Pedagogy of Love: Deepening Student-Teacher Relationships through a Postsecondary Team
Resources for Supporting and Sustaining Student-Teacher Relationships
Infographics
“So you want to build student-teacher relationships”
“So you want to build advisory”
Related papers & presentations
Licata, B., Hatch, T. (2023). Micro-Innovations as "Boundary Objects" for Sharing Educators' Expertise [Paper Presentation]. American Education Research Association, Chicago, IL, United States.
Licata, B., Hatch, T. (2023,). Educator-Developed Micro-Innovations to Strengthen Student-Teacher Relationships [Paper presentation]. American Education Research Association, Chicago, IL, United States.
Licata, B., Hatch, T. (2023). Micro-innovations for Strengthening Student-teacher Relationships in and Beyond the Covid-19 Pandemic [Paper presentation]. International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement, Vina del Mar, Chile.
Licata, B., Hatch, T. (2022). Lessons from the pandemic: Documenting and Sharing Micro-Innovations to Support The Transition to High School during COVID-19 [Paper presentation]. American Education Research Association, San Diego, CA, United States.
Licata, B., Hatch, T. (2022, January 4-5). Lessons from The Pandemic: Documenting and Sharing Micro-Innovations to Support The Transition to High School During COVID-19 [Paper presentation]. International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement, Virtual.