Building Strong Foundations: The Importance of Relationships with Student Families

Introduction

The significance of positive relationships in education cannot be overstated. Research consistently demonstrates that strong connections between students, teachers, and families contribute significantly to a student's academic success, social-emotional well-being, and overall development. This article explores the importance of building strong relationships with student families, focusing on how schools can create structures and practices that foster these vital connections. By prioritizing these relationships, schools can create a more supportive and engaging learning environment for all students.

The Foundation: Relationships and Student Success

The science of learning and development underscores the value of positive relationships for student success and well-being. Cultivating these relationships is particularly crucial during adolescence, a period marked by identity exploration and a growing need for connection and belonging. Positive and caring relationships, when central features of a school, support student learning and development in multiple ways.

Counteracting Isolation in Secondary Schools

While research emphasizes the importance of relationships for learning, many secondary schools are organized in ways that make it difficult for young people to connect with a caring adult. This article provides insights into how schools can counteract this pattern by instituting or redesigning structures to make relationship-centered schooling a reality. There is no single way to integrate relationship-centered approaches, but the examples provided illustrate effective strategies.

Structures for Fostering Relationships

Several structures can be integrated into secondary schools to cultivate conditions that enable healthy attachments to grow. These structures aim to foster personal teacher-student relationships and build connections between staff and families, embedding relationships into the school's culture.

Small Learning Communities: A Personalized Approach

Small learning communities are a primary mechanism for promoting personalized relationships in schools. These communities are designed for staff and students to work together in smaller, closer-knit units, creating 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.

Read also: Importance of Education for Health

Implementing Small Learning Communities

Develop cohorts: Keep groups of students and, to the greatest extent possible, the same teachers or staff together throughout the school day.
Establish advisory systems: 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.
Implement looping: Allow educators to remain with the same students for more than 1 year.
Institute block scheduling: Reduce teachers’ overall pupil load and lengthen time for instruction by having fewer, longer class periods each day.

Example: Vista High School's House System

Vista High School, in Vista, CA, utilizes a house system to build relationships among teachers and students. The freshman class is typically broken into multiple houses of 100 to 130 students who share a set of four teachers who cover core subjects and one special education teacher. Each team defines how spaces in and around their classroom and house could be used to meet the learning needs of students and considers how the grouping of students and grouping of teachers can positively impact student learning.

Example: Oakland International High School's Looping Model

Oakland International High School in Oakland, CA, uses looping, along with cohorts and advisories, to support its diverse students. An interdisciplinary team of four core content area teachers stays with a group of 80-100 students for 2 years. In addition, the school assigns each 9th-grader to an advisor who works with the students for 2 years before transitioning responsibilities to other staff who will work with the students for 11th and 12th grade.

Fostering Safety and Belonging: Creating Inclusive Environments

Relationship-centered schools 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.

Strategies for Inclusion

Offer varied and enriching extracurriculars: Provide opportunities for students to form relationships and a sense of community with each other.
Implement restorative approaches to conflict resolution: Acknowledge and repair harm when it occurs and cultivate strategies for creating healthier, more positive interactions.

Example: Ralph Bunche High School's Restorative Approaches

Ralph Bunche High School, in Oakland, CA, has used restorative approaches since 2012. Under the guidance of a full-time, on-site restorative justice coordinator, the school has instituted a range of restorative approaches, including restorative circles.

Example: Hillsdale High School's Inclusive Structures

Hillsdale High School, in San Mateo, CA, engaged in a 3-year conversion process to institute relationship-centered and inclusive school structures. The comprehensive high school created three heterogeneous small learning communities for 9th- and 10th-grade students. In addition, the school eliminated low-track science classes and now enrolls all students in 9th-grade biology and 10th-grade chemistry.

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Culturally Sustaining and Relevant Education: Affirming Students' Full Selves

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.

Implementing Culturally Relevant Education

Implement a diverse and culturally relevant curriculum: Ensure that students can relate learning to their life experiences and understand other cultures and histories.
Provide professional learning: Educate teachers about students’ backgrounds, challenges, community, and cultural assets.

Example: Oakland International High School's Professional Development

Oakland International High School, in Oakland, CA, creates professional development opportunities that support educators in implementing culturally sustaining and relevant educational experiences. For instance, the school regularly engages staff in student- and family-led community walks to educate teachers about students’ backgrounds, communities, and cultural assets.

Fostering Student Voice and Agency: Empowering Students

Relationship-centered schools enable students to develop independence and self-advocacy so that they become confident and self-directed individuals. School structures play an important role in signaling the importance of student voice and perspectives.

Strategies for Empowering Students

Establish or redesign decision-making structures: Include youth by, for example, increasing youth representation on hiring committees, student advisory boards, and school culture and climate teams.
Create shared learning forums: Enable adults and students to grow their knowledge, skills, and relationships together.

Example: Oakland High School's Student Representatives

At Oakland High School, in Oakland, CA, student representatives play an increasing role in the school’s culture and climate team. With the addition of student representatives, the culture and climate team more proactively explores issues of equity by elevating the perspectives of students who bring challenges to their attention.

Building a Healthy Community for Staff: Supporting Collaboration

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.

Read also: Strategies for Lifelong Learning

Structures for Staff Collaboration

Allocate consistent collaboration time: Allow educators to build collegial relationships as they plan together and/or codevelop curriculum and lessons for their students.
Give attention to staff wellness and relationship-building: Integrate these elements during meetings and professional development.

Example: Oakland High School's Linked Learning Pathway Structure

Oakland High School, in Oakland, CA, leverages its Linked Learning pathway structure to create opportunities for staff relationship-building and interdisciplinary collaboration. The school’s pathways dedicate a team of teachers and administrators to a smaller group of students and allot educators in each pathway 90 minutes of common planning time every other day.

Example: McLane High School's Restorative Approaches

At McLane High School, in Fresno, CA, leaders integrate opportunities for relationship- and community-building during professional development, particularly as educators learn to implement restorative approaches to school discipline.

Collective Decision-Making and Teacher Leadership

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.

Creating Shared Decision-Making Structures

Create shared decision-making structures: Support continuous improvement or strategic planning through site-based committees in which teachers serve.

Example: Social Justice Humanitas Academy's Advisory Structure

To support its advisory structure, Social Justice Humanitas Academy, in San Fernando, CA, designates teacher leads for advisories as part of its distributed leadership structure. Advisory leads design the advisory curriculum and collaborate with other leads from each grade level to manage and improve the content in advisory.

Engaging Families: A Vital Component

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.

The Importance of Family Engagement

Research shows that involving families in their children’s education is paramount to student success. When families are meaningfully and continuously engaged in their children's learning and development, it has a positive impact on their child's health, academic, and well-being outcomes. Family involvement has been shown to benefit children from diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds.

Overcoming Barriers to Family Engagement

In order to better collaborate with families, districts and schools need to better understand the needs, obstacles and challenges facing caregivers. The most common barrier to engagement is a lack of time, with a significant percentage of parents and guardians reporting that their busy schedule is a problem for becoming involved in their child's school.

Strategies for Enhanced Family Engagement

Invite feedback from all families: Use family surveys to invite caregivers to document their perceptions of their child's experience in school.
Offer flexibility: Provide options for helping during and after school hours.
Ensure timely and impactful communication: Two-way communication is crucial to conveying care and building trust.
Utilize technology: Communication Tools and Video Tools can make it possible for teachers to virtually bring parents into the classroom.

The Benefits of Partnering with Families

Establishing relationships with a student’s family offers numerous benefits, especially for students who learn and think differently.

Connect lessons to a student’s background knowledge, interests, and culture: Families are valuable sources of information about what can make neurons fire for children.
Identify appropriate accommodations or supports: Families can provide insight about supports that have worked well at home and in prior years at school.
Empower families to support academic goals at home: Regular communication can help bridge that gap.
Develop effective and consistent methods for addressing behavior: A strong connection between school and home is crucial.
Set the stage for high expectations: Helping families set high expectations for their child is hugely important.

Building Positive Teacher-Student Relationships

Building positive relationships with students should be a top priority for every K-12 teacher. Strong teacher-student relationships create a nurturing classroom environment, fostering trust, respect, and open communication, which can motivate students and lead to academic success.

Strategies for Building Strong Teacher-Student Relationships

Morning meetings: Check in with students and set the tone for the day.
Student surveys: Show students you’re genuinely interested in them as individuals.
Positive mindset: Express belief in every student’s ability to succeed.
Personalized greetings: Greet your students at the door with a smile and personalized acknowledgment.
Providing choices: Give students a sense of autonomy and control over their learning experience.
Empathy: Respond with empathy rather than frustration.
Humor: Share a joke, enjoy light-hearted moments in class, or laugh together at funny stories.
Positive communication with parents: Calling home for positive behavior can be even more impactful.
Share personal stories: Allow your students to connect with you as a person, not just as their teacher.

The Goal of Parent and Family Engagement

The goal of parent and family engagement is to work with families to build strong and effective partnerships that can help children and families thrive. These partnerships are grounded in positive, ongoing, and goal-oriented relationships with families.

Principles of Effective Family Engagement

Mutual respect and trust: Base relationships on these foundations.
Focus on families’ strengths: Build on a shared commitment to the child’s well-being and success.
Developmentally appropriate practice: Acquire knowledge about each child through respectful, reciprocal relationships with children’s families.

Strategies for Educators

Establish respectful, reciprocal relationships with families: Encourage and support families to get to know each other.
Welcome family members in the setting: Create multiple opportunities for family participation.
Share knowledge of the particular child: Support families in ways that maximally promote family decision-making capabilities and competence.
Learn about the community: Use the community as a resource across all aspects of program delivery.

Effective Communication Strategies

Effective communication is pivotal for effective communication with families.

Personal Contact: A call to parents at the start of the school year can significantly enhance this effort.
Clarity and Consistency: Parents appreciate communication that is clear and consistent.
Regular Updates: Sharing positive progress can keep parents engaged and informed.
Constructive Dialogue: Emphasize the successes and achievements of the student.
Address Barriers: Identify and address potential barriers in order to maintain effective communication with all parents.
Maintain Professional Boundaries: Upholding a professional boundary is essential for creating a positive and effective school environment.
Encourage Parental Involvement: Inviting parents to participate in educational experiences provides valuable insights into their child’s educational setting.
Celebrate Successes: Celebrating student successes goes beyond academic achievements.

Parent-Teacher Conferences: A Collaborative Approach

Parent-teacher conferences are crucial for fostering collaboration and open communication.

Preparing for Parent-Teacher Conferences

Prepare in Advance: Both parents and teachers should come prepared with relevant information.
Set Clear Objectives: Begin the conference with clear objectives.
Discuss Academic and Social Development: Address both academic performance and social skills.
Create a Collaborative Atmosphere: The conference should be a dialogue, not a one-sided conversation.
Create an Action Plan: End the meeting with an action plan.
Follow-Up After the Conference: Reinforce their sense of worth and confidence.

Benefits of Parent-School Communication

Positive parent-school communications benefit parents by providing ideas on how to help and support their children, and by learning more about the school’s academic program and how it works. Perhaps most important, parents benefit by becoming more confident about the value of their school involvement.

The Teacher's Role in Family Engagement

Research shows that parental involvement can free teachers to focus more on the task of teaching children. Also, by having more contact with parents, teachers learn more about students’ needs and home environment, which is information they can apply toward better meeting those needs.

Strategies for Teachers

Timeliness: Make contact soon after a problem has been identified, so a timely solution can be found.
Positive Communication: Parents are not accustomed to hearing unsolicited positive comments from teachers about their children, especially in a phone call from the school.
Preparation: Before making a call, write down the reasons for the call.

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