Seen and Known: The Power of Caring Adults in K-12 Schools
by Michael McLaughlin
Schools & Parenting Programs Manager, Making Caring Common
If you’re an educator, you’ve likely found plenty of proven programs that support social, emotional, and moral development in your students. The problem? Many schools don’t have the funds or the capacity to implement these programs. The cost is too great, and the lift is too heavy. What schools commonly need are strategies that are simple, research-backed, easy to implement, and energizing for both educators and students.
When I think about my own school experiences as a child, my years teaching in the classroom in Pittsburgh, and what we’ve seen in our research at Making Caring Common (MCC), I find myself returning to a simple idea that can make a profound difference.
A positive, trusting relationship between a student and at least one adult in their school can improve a whole host of student success indicators. Conversely, when a student starts and ends the school year with zero trusted relationships with adults in their school, the indicators head in the opposite direction.
There may, in fact, be nothing more important in a child’s life than a positive and trusting relationship with a caring adult. Intentionally and strategically building these types of relationships at your school can boost students’ academic and social-emotional capacities and even transform lives.
I’ll share a little later about MCC’s Relationship Mapping Strategy and Caring Schools Network, two programs we offer to help schools build stronger relationships with students and create more caring communities. But first, a little additional backstory.
The teachers we remember
Thinking back on our childhoods, many of us likely have one or two special teachers who stand out as positively impacting our lives. I was a student with a ton of energy, a short attention span, and a rebellious spirit. And many of my teachers saw these traits as a problem. But not my 6th-grade teacher, Mr. Clark, and my 8th-grade English teacher, Mr. Wright. They invested time to get to know me and to establish a caring relationship with me. They learned about my interests and then helped me explore those interests in their classes. As a result, the way I showed up for their classes was dramatically different than many of my other classes. I still remember them because of the care they put into knowing me and because those relationships made me more engaged in their classes. I’ll never forget Mr. Clark’s experiential science competitions or exploring transcendentalists in Mr. Wright’s class.
Measuring our impact as educators
When I began teaching third grade in Pittsburgh, I spent a lot of early spring concerned about things like end-of-year standardized tests and the other ways our school would evaluate how students grew academically that year.
What we lacked as educators, though, was a way of evaluating the impact we’d had on the actual experience our students had in our school, particularly in their relationships with their peers and with school adults. Of course I was concerned about my students’ academic growth. But I also found myself thinking just as much about the relationships my students had (or hadn’t) built that year. I thought a lot about what it felt like to be a student in our school and what I wanted for my students when they came back in the fall. I’d ask myself questions like:
How might I build a culture where all of my students feel cared for and that they belong?
How can I cultivate a more caring and empathetic peer culture, where students support each other and develop stronger relationships?
How can I build stronger relationships with every student?
Even early in my education career, my intuition was that these questions (and their answers) weren’t just “nice-to-haves.” They were a core piece of overall student success and well-being. I could see firsthand that students who were relationally connected to one another and had trusted relationships with teachers or other school leaders tended to be the students who thrived.
Research and Resources
Beyond my time in the classroom, I’ve spent a large part of my career working alongside researchers, listening to educators, school leaders, parents, and students around the United States to understand what types of practices and resources lead to improved academic, social, emotional, and relational outcomes in students.
Making Caring Common (MCC) develops evidence-based resources and partners with K-12 schools to promote caring school communities, stronger relationships, and key moral capacities, including empathy and a commitment to justice. To date, MCC has provided direct support to over 1,800 schools worldwide and conducted research to uncover what makes the biggest difference in transforming a school into a community where every student knows they belong.
Time and time again, our and others’ research, along with what we hear from schools, reveal that one of the single greatest drivers of student success and overall wellbeing is having a positive, trusting relationship with at least one adult in their school. Students without close relationships with school adults:
Demonstrate lower academic engagement, motivation, and achievement, and are significantly more likely to drop out of school. [1]
Experience higher rates of anxiety, depression, and behavioral problems. [2]
Show reduced ability to regulate emotions and navigate conflict. [3]
In our work, we’ve also seen that many K-12 schools currently have neither the tools by which to identify students who are currently lacking a trusted relationship, nor a system to measure the impact of educators’ efforts at building student relationships.
A little over five years ago, MCC developed our Relationship Mapping Resources—simple but powerful tools that ensure every student is anchored to at least one caring adult within their school. These resources give school leaders a detailed implementation plan and simple mapping process to:
Identify students who do not currently have any positive relationships with school adults (about 1 out of every 10 students).
Identify staff who will volunteer to build a stronger relationship with these identified students.
Help each staff volunteer build and strengthen their relationship with the student throughout the year.
Our research consistently shows transformative outcomes: In schools that implement our Relationship Mapping Strategy, over 70% of students who lack a trusting relationship at the beginning of the school year develop at least one by the end of the year—a measurably higher percentage than in our control schools—and over 90% of educators report forging closer relationships with students.
Don’t leave connections to chance.
Looking back, I know I was one of the lucky ones. I was the kind of student who could have slipped through the cracks. Thankfully, I had a few teachers along the way who saw me and invested in me. And it made a tremendous difference in my life—then and now.
But I find myself thinking about those kids in our schools who we miss. Not because we don’t care or we’re not looking for them. Simply because there are a lot of kids in most of our schools, and their needs are often great. If we leave making connections with these students to chance, we’re almost certain to miss. But with a solid tool and a small investment of time and intention, we can ensure that every student has a positive, trusting relationship with at least one adult.
And for that student, and our schools, that will be the difference.
Learn more about Making Caring Common’s Relationship Mapping Strategy and other resources for educators, including MCC’s:
Student-to-Adult Relationship Mapping process, which allows schools to collaborate with MCC to hear directly from students
Caring Schools Network, which gives educators access to our full suite of K-12 lessons, resources, and support! (including Relationship Mapping)
[1] Archambault et al. (2009); Reschly & Christenson (2012)
[2] CDC / MMWR (2023)
[3] Vandevelde et al. (2022)
