MENTOR’s Relationship-Centered Schools: What is it and why now?
September 27, 2021
Imagine a world where every young person had adults in their lives who appreciated them, honored their identity, and cared whether they succeeded. MENTOR’s mission is to create that world through quality mentoring and the intentional creation of mentor-rich environments. We work across sectors, organizations, and communities, meeting young people and the adults who serve them where they are. And our mission includes education systems. One of our biggest initiatives is a partnership with American Student Assistance (ASA) who awarded us a three-year grant in 2020 to elevate a framework we call Relationship-Centered Schools. The purpose of the initiative is to work with school districts and schools to identify relationship assets and gaps and collaboratively create detailed plans of action to enhance existing work or design new relationship-centered opportunities. We do this through a consultative process that helps organizations and people prepare to be positive forces in the lives of youth – to create mentor-rich spaces for youth inside and outside of school buildings.
With deep intentionality, schools can be empowering and inclusive environments that create positive opportunities for development — opportunities where children and youth can explore a wide range of possibilities for what they can become. We believe the best way for inclusive environments to be created or sustained is for all youth to have a network of people who are there to listen, encourage, connect, and advise them. While students spend a lot of time with their teachers, in some cases more than 50% of staff in schools are adults who are not teachers. The opportunity for students to begin building a diverse network needs to be strategically planned out and implemented.
Recently, The Forum for Youth Investment in partnership with Learning Policy Institute, Turnaround for Children, and the SoLD Alliance released Design Principles for Community-Based settings: Putting the Science of Learning and Development into Action. This is exciting new research that backs our approach. In the guidebook, they note, “A strong web of relationships between and among young people and their peers, families, and practitioners, both in the school and in the community, represents a primary process through which all members of the community can thrive. Community-based settings can be organized to foster positive developmental relationships through structures and practices that allow for effective caring and the building of community” (p. 11).
Relationship-Centered Schools supports districts, schools, community members, families, and students in building that strong web of supportive relationships that will create empowering and welcoming environments for everyone to be seen and heard. For these spaces to exist, there must be commitment, intentionality, and a belief in the power of relationships to bolster the overall well-being and success of students. One of our partners in this work, Julia Freeland Fisher, Director of Education research at the Clayton Christensen Institute and author of the book “Who You Know: Unlocking Innovations That Expand Students’ Networks” shares, “Schools and youth programs have been scaling standards-based approaches to keep students on track to graduation and drive test scores since the passage of No Child Left Behind. That, and other widespread reform efforts, always treated relationships — with educators, mentors, tutors and even peers — as inputs to development and learning. That means relationships can be inadvertently treated as one-offs, disposable and even at risk of automation. If relationships are instead treated as outcomes, we’ll start investing in institutional designs and intervention models through which relationships are deliberately nurtured and outlast one-time interventions.”
How can relationships be deliberately nurtured and be sustained over time?
For change to happen, our partner districts and schools must be willing to take action to improve upon what they are already doing and/or to try something new. Our process starts with an analysis of the assets and gaps through custom inventories, a review of data, and discussions with key stakeholders including students and teachers. Based on the intel we receive, we draft a high-level plan for how to address the needs and goals. This plan is presented and discussed during a design lab where we bring key stakeholders together including community partners to refine and mold the plan. Once we are satisfied with the plan, we begin to implement. We don’t do this in a vacuum. The objective is to include school and district personnel, existing community partnerships, local MENTOR Affiliates, and the team at MENTOR National when appropriate.
We are currently piloting our consultative process with Fresno Unified School District’s Office of Mentoring in partnership with MENTOR California. This office provides 4,000 K-12 students with mentors. Its programming is a blend of in-person, hybrid, and online mentoring. The district’s peer mentoring programming is a model used by other districts throughout the country, and has opportunities for middle school-aged youth, and students who are newcomers learning English to be mentored by high school students. The office is doing great work, but they are committed to becoming more relationship-centered because the district has 76,000 K-12 students. Too many for every student to be matched with a mentor.
In a recent survey to help us better understand the supportive relationships youth involved with the peer mentoring program have in their lives, there were 70 respondents. Six out of the 70 said they did not have one person they could ask for help. This is six too many. Every young person in school should have at least one person they can go to for any reason. Our ambitious goal is to make sure that all students have a caring adult they can turn to in times of celebration, and, more importantly, in times of need.
Fresno’s Office of Mentoring is committed to improving and expanding upon their current work. They want to lead their district in taking actions that provide all youth in Fresno Unified more opportunities to build supportive relationships. To date, we have done a Landscape Analysis. We have encouraged the Office to engage their key stakeholders and champions. And, we are facilitating Design Lab sessions that provide their stakeholders the chance to share different ways they can expand their work to include relationship-centered actions. We are currently working with the Office of Mentoring to finalize their Action Plan for this year. Part of that plan includes MENTOR California providing coaching, such as professional learning opportunities in the coming year(s). As the work scales, other partners may be brought in to create a comprehensive web of relationship support.
MENTOR has had the privilege of working with a team of key experts, including representatives from MENTOR Affiliates in Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, and Southwest Pennsylvania, who have been sharing their deep expertise in collaborating with local school districts and schools. We are also partnering with Boston University’s CERES Institute who is creating evaluation criteria to measure the efficacy of our consultative process, and to gauge the outcomes districts and schools experience when using a relationship-centered schools strategy to ensure all of their students are supported and known.
To learn more about how you can bring Relationship-Centered Schools to your community, visit our Education landing page, contact Dudney Sylla or learn about starting or enhancing a youth mentoring program through the OJJDP National Mentoring Resource Center.