S2 Ep1: The Necessity of Supportive Relationships

01/02/23 • 33 min

As we kick off season two of the Designing Education podcast during National Mentoring Month, Bob Balfanz is joined by Tim Wills, Chief Impact Officer for MENTOR, the leading organization in the nation working to scale high-quality mentoring in and out of school.

Positive relationships enable trust, which enables cooperation, and collective and engaged effort. They also serve as a buffer to the impacts of trauma and life's challenges. It is becoming more and more recognized that positive supportive relationships with adults are essential to school success. The pandemic drove home how important supportive relationships in schools between adults and students were to the wellbeing of all. Yet, middle and high schools have not been designed to support and enable strong adult-student relationships. Teachers often see 120 to 150 students a day, students interact with six to 10 or more adults every day for short periods of highly scripted time, which leaves little time or opportunity for students and teachers to get to know each other. As a result, everyone tends to interact with each other based on their role in the school. Thus, only about half of high school students report there is an adult at school who knows and cares about them as a person, with only about one third of students from historically underserved populations saying this. Those that said they had a supportive adult at school reported half the mental health challenges during the pandemic as those who did not. We can see that relationships really matter. They are not nice. They are necessary. So how do we close the relationship gap in schools? Tune in as we dig deep into this question.

Previous Episode

S1 Ep11: The New ABCs: Drawing on Street and Institutional Data to Scale Effective Student Supports

Traditionally, schools have been designed around a set of standard practices and expectations. When students do not fully benefit from these practices or conform to the expectations, schools either add on supports or establish consequences to try to modify behaviors and outcomes.
Over the past 15 years, researchers, school officials, and school teams have developed an approach that pools the knowledge of teachers, counselors, students, and families to identify solutions to support students more proactively, using predictive indicators of important outcomes like high school graduation or college degree attainment. This approach has been called different things, including early warning intervention systems, on-track systems, or multi-tiered student support systems. Pioneers of this work now seek to further develop it in ways that incorporate recent learnings from the brain sciences and adolescent development to create more comprehensive, inclusive student success systems.
In the 11th and final episode of season one, Carla Gay, Director of Innovation & Partnerships for the Gresham Barlow School District in Oregon, addresses some of the important elements needed to go deeper and provide better student support and school improvement initiatives.

Next Episode

S2 Ep2: Chronic Absenteeism and Keys to Reengaging Students

The evidence is clear. Students need to attend school on a regular basis to succeed. If the purpose of school is to help students learn and development, then being there is important.
Until quite recently, however, we did not regularly measure the extent to which the students enrolled in a school were attending on a regular basis. Until 2017 or so, the most common measure used to measure a school’s attendance was average daily attendance (ADA), or how of the many students enrolled in the school are present on the typical day. It turns out that this measure hides as much as it reveals. This is because it’s very possible for a school to have an ADA in the low 90’s, but still have 20% of its students chronically absent -- missing ten percent (or about a month) or more of the school year.
Since the mid 2000’s, Hedy Chang and her organization, Attendance Works, has called attention to chronic absenteeism, its consequences and prevalence, and optimal solutions.

Designing Education - S2 Ep1: The Necessity of Supportive Relationships

Transcript

Bob (00:01):

Hello, and welcome to the Designing Education podcast. In today's episode, we're talking to Tim Wills about school-based mentoring and how we can design schools where every student feels supported and known. We can't wait to jump into the conversation, but before we start, we want to take