Parsons District Schools

Awareness has risen, especially in the last decade, regarding the lack of connection many students feel at school socially and emotionally, impacting their academics, social development and overall well being. 

Students with no solid teacher relationships can feel isolated, unsupported, and unmotivated to engage in learning. For students facing trauma at home, these feelings can be intensified.
Kansas has actively focused on Social Emotional Learning (SEL) since 2012, when the Kansas State Board of Education adopted "Social, Emotional, and Character Development (SECD)" standards, making it one of the first states in the country to do so and the first to integrate character development with SEL. 

Garfield counselor Marcie Ryan said, included in its SEL professional training, USD 503 has spent the last decade focusing on cultivating stronger student-teacher relationships. Those relationships are important as they are proven to improve academic performance, foster critical thinking, create a positive classroom climate, provide mentorship, and allow students to develop more positively by being motivated and engaged, among other positive impacts.

There are a wide array of challenges in establishing positive student-teacher relationships, such as recognizing personal unconscious biases, or students who've had poor experiences with adults in the past diminishing their trust, or students having behavioral and learning disorders sometimes making communication more difficult. 

Whatever the challenges, Parsons district schools have been meeting those head on, seeking the solutions.

To ensure every student has at least one teacher to turn to, the district has offered many professional development opportunities to help educators prioritize building positive, trusting relationships with each student. 

For example, teachers have been educated in trauma informed teaching, and in learning to more actively listen to student needs and provide individualized support where needed. Teachers have also sought to create more inclusive classroom environments, and foster open communication channels, allowing students to feel comfortable approaching them with concerns or questions. As well, they have created positive academic and behavioral reinforcements supporting students' best efforts in the classroom, and schools have developed new measures, such as recovery rooms to manage difficult behaviors and help students learn to self-regulate, rather than situations escalating in a classroom.

Knowing the person(s) in the building a student feels comfortable talking to can help students recover more quickly if they are experiencing something that may be impacting their mental state or behavior in the classroom.

Measuring the impact of their efforts to know if they were making a difference was key. The district began doing annual Relationship Surveys beginning with teachers' impressions of their relationships with students. Then about 6 years ago, students were also surveyed and asked to determine how many school personnel they feel a good, trusting connection with. 

Administration refers to the efforts as DOT and Reverse DOT Connections. DOT stands for developing a positive relationship by taking the time to 1) Discover individual interests, 2) Observe student needs, and 3) Talk openly and respectfully", thus creating  a supportive learning environment where students feel seen and understood by their teacher. District Assistant Superintendent Jeff Pegues said The district began with the DOT surveys with teachers.

“That then evolved to the Reverse Dot Intervention, where students were surveyed” Pegues said.

Those surveys provide additional insights into the relationship-building between students and teachers, to continue to guide them.
All of the districts’ efforts as a whole have led to much more positive feedback from students on the surveys relative to whom they feel comfortable turning to, whether sharing their triumphs or traumas, Ryan said.

Ryan explained that students from second grade through middle school are given a Google form listing everyone in their school they come into contact with daily, or almost daily, including secretaries, custodians, and even volunteers. They are then asked to put a check mark beside the picture of everyone they feel a close connection with, that they feel they can trust with important things. 

To provide scope, at Garfield, students this year choose from among 52 people they feel the strongest connections to.

“The people they select are people they would feel comfortable sharing all of life's moments with, good, bad, ugly, etcetera. I stress to them that these adults are adults that they know truly care about them and that it is okay to have just one, but it is also okay to have multiple caring adults in their lives,” Ryan said. “I explain that they typically will not pick everyone because everybody is not ‘your person’, and I explain that even as adults, we have to be able to know the difference.”

When the surveys were first given, the results surprised many.

“It showed us that not many kids felt they had a good connection with us, so we needed to step up our game,” Ryan said.

The surveys have served to elicit change. For example, if teachers learn that few students in their own class chose them, it raises the question of what they need to be doing differently to connect with their students, Ryan said. On the other hand, if there is a teacher that only has one class of 17 students, but 100 students are choosing that teacher, then the question is, “What are they doing right?”

“It’s been pretty eye opening,” Ryan said, and has led to a lot of changes. ”We’ve done it every year I’ve been here and every year our numbers grow in the number of adults students choose. Our connections with students have grown. 

“It’s been kind of awesome to see the growth,” Ryan said. “And as they do the survey it brings to mind for the kids, ‘Hey that is someone I can talk to.’”