Getting Students Engaged: Making Time for Relationship Building
This post is part of a four-part series on Best Practices for Addressing Pandemic Learning Loss & Reengaging Students at Secondary Schools, sharing best practice strategies that can make a big difference for secondary students’ learning and engagement: dedicated time for relationship building, extra-time intervention, incorporating voice and choice, and scheduling strategically.
The research is clear: students care more about school when at least one adult at school cares about them. Students who feel connected to their school and teachers are also more likely to have higher academic achievement, have better school attendance, and stay in school longer. And while few kids look back as an adult and say, “Art 7 really changed my life!”, many more will say their art teacher made a lasting impression. Often, what makes a student like a class is the teacher’s personalized attention and their relationship more than the subject matter.
What it takes to build authentic relationships
Many students report that authentic relationships with their teachers are lacking—despite spending more than 1,000 hours with their teachers in a typical school year. Nearly all that time is dedicated to academics, so while teachers know those in their classrooms well as students, they may not have gotten to know them well as people.
Knowing a student as person means knowing what they do afterschool, who their friends are, what they worry about, and what interests them. Most middle and high school schedules are not specifically designed for this, so it is unsurprising that relationships between students and teachers are falling short.
How can schools better facilitate building authentic student-teacher relationships that truly deepen student engagement? A best practice approach is to build time into the schedule that is designated for this purpose. The most common example of time for relationship building in secondary school schedules is an advisory period.
Getting advisory right to facilitate relationship building
Done well, advisory can be a powerful tool for building authentic student-teacher relationships, which, in turn, increases engagement, learning, and life outcomes.
To design advisory that is effective in helping teachers to get to know students as people and in helping kids believe their teacher cares about them, be sure to:
Pair students and staff with common interests. Relationships form around shared interests.
Avoid previously strained relationships. It’s hard to build a friendship with frustration or animosity as a foundation.
Keep the groups small. Relationships are a one-to-one effort. Groups don’t form authentic relationships, individuals do.
Structure meaningful activity. Most friendships are formed while doing something with someone.
These best practices aren’t hard to grasp and are seldom controversial. What they are, however, is hard to schedule. A strategic approach to scheduling makes it possible to provide a best-practice advisory model that has a real impact on student engagement.
How a strategic approach to scheduling enables more impactful advisory
Often, middle or high school advisory is structured like just another class: a large group of kids, assigned to a room (perhaps by last name), meeting every day or every other day opposite a non-core class or intervention block, with a teacher asked to build a relationship while the kids sit at their desks. This prototypical advisory doesn’t meet any of the best practices, even if it is easy to schedule.
Consider these three ways to enhance the impact of advisory:
Prioritize quality of time over quantity
More isn’t better. Better is. One period a week of best practice advisory will be more effective than 45 minutes a day of typical advisory. Best practice advisory is very effective but can be hard to schedule if students are choosing their advisor or area of common interest. Hard is not the same as impossible. Seek out a skilled scheduler using low-cost or free software. Just like scheduling student choice for electives, effective advisory requires a skilled scheduler. Don’t let the scheduling challenge undercut the opportunity to keep kids engaged.
Be inclusive about advisory staff
Expanding advisory to include non-core subject teachers or even non-teaching staff is another way to get creative and make small-group advisory easier to schedule. In one school, the head of maintenance, a former star athlete, and the head of food service, a gourmet foodie, were two of the most requested advisors. By engaging all available adults in a school, advisory can drop to a dozen kids per class.
Think about what happens during advisory
What to do during advisory matters as much as who is in the room. All teachers care about their students, but that doesn’t mean they are skilled at facilitating a group get-to-know-you discussion or have the time in their already busy schedule to effectively prepare for advisory. Schools that ask a lot of teachers during advisory must either carve out time for them to collaborate and prepare or provide significant guidance, structure, and materials for teachers to use and reference. Creating structured activities and lesson plans can help teachers connect to kids and ensure advisory conversations are two-way dialogue, which is important since students react well when adults open up about their lives outside the classroom.
Other strategies for building stronger relationships
Schools can also consider other strategies to facilitate relationship building, such as recasting advisory as “clubs” during the school day and lunch with teachers. Teachers share topics that interest them, and kids sign up for Lego Robotics, discussion groups for long distance running, this week’s great British Bake Off, etc.
Be sure to assess the impact of advisory and other strategies
Whatever strategy is used, its critical to assess the impact. Only students can tell you if they believe someone cares about them as a person. Too often, principals and others visit advisory classrooms and comment to themselves how well things are going. They see students interacting with adults. It all looks good, but what are the quiet kids thinking? What are the disengaged students feeling? The only way to know is to confidentially survey them. Ask, and they will tell.
