Students who have positive relationships with an adult at school are more likely to thrive not only socially but also emotionally, behaviorally, and academically. This has been affirmed time and time again through research conducted the past 70 years (Emslander et al., 2025).
It also makes a lot of common sense. Teachers can see the positive impacts they have as they build those relationships, one student at a time. Here at the Scanlan Center for School Mental Health (SCSMH), we see you having this impact every time we are with you. You have positively impacted countless lives in your career.
What we also see is how challenging it can be to meet the needs of every student all the time. The time and mental commitment required to build and maintain these relationships are significant, largely falling directly on the shoulders of teachers.
And we see that some students fall through the cracks, despite the amazing efforts of teachers. Indeed, according to the Iowa Department of Education’s Conditions for Learning (CfL) report in 2024, approximately 81% of 3rd-5th graders reported positively for Adult-Student Relationships, and approximately 39% of 6th-12th graders.
That means anywhere from 1 in 5 to 3 in 5 students do not feel like they have a meaningful relationship with at least one adult in their school.
The good news is that there are effective strategies to support educators and students in building and maintaining positive relationships. That, in turn, can markedly improve the overall conditions for learning in the school. In this blog post, I provide an example of a strategy called relationship mapping that schools and districts can use to ensure students do not fall through the cracks.
What are Conditions for Learning, and How Can Relationship Mapping Improve Them?
The idea that teachers should not have to shoulder the full responsibility of student well-being and outcomes is an important one. This is, at best, terribly inefficient, and, at worst, detrimental to teacher and student well-being.
A more effective and efficient approach is to take a systems perspective: looking at the whole school or district, and how all educators can work together to meet the needs of students. In the case of Adult-Student Relationships, there are two important system concepts to define: conditions for learning and relationship mapping.
I wrote a blog post last year that focused on conditions for learning. Positive conditions for learning in Iowa “…is defined as a school climate that fosters a safe, healthy, and welcoming learning environment, strengthens caring and respectful relationships, promotes adults to support high expectations, and enables students to thrive in academics and in social-emotional-behavioral health.” (Iowa Department of Education, 2022). In other words, conditions for learning is how school climate and culture impact student outcomes.
Relationship mapping is a strategy recommended by the Iowa Department of Education (2021) to improve conditions for learning. It is a reflective process that helps identify students who do (or do not) have a positive relationship with an adult at school. By using this process to identify these students, a school can then be intentional about ensuring all students have at least one adult with whom they have a positive relationship in school. This is not only good for the students but is also likely to result in an overall improvement in the conditions for learning for all students.
How Does Relationship Mapping Work?
There are different ways to engage in relationship mapping. For example, the Making Caring Common Project provides this helpful how-to guide to relationship mapping. As for me, I do it in four steps:
Step 1 – Preparation/Pre-Mapping
The purpose of this step is to gather a list of all students in the school or district, as well as a list of all adults who could become mentors to students who do not currently have a positive relationship with at least one adult in the school/district. This information can be gathered by individual teachers or by an individual or committee. This is also an opportunity to identify other helpful data about students, such as attendance and universal screening data in academics and social-emotional-behavioral health. These data can help identify which students may be at the greatest risk for difficulties in school, and therefore be prioritized for mentoring.
Step 2 – Mapping
The purpose of this step is to work collaboratively across the school or district to finalize the list of students presumed to be missing the vital relationship with at least one adult in the school/district. Included is a review of the additional data collected (e.g., attendance and universal screening data) for each student to understand any additional risk factors that might be present. Typically, each person participating in this process has the opportunity to independently flag students they believe are missing the adult-student relationship and are at additional risk. (One way to facilitate this might be dot voting.) The result of this step is a list of students prioritized for additional adult support.
Step 3 – Reflective Meeting
The purpose of this step is to pair prioritized students with an adult for additional support. The underlying idea is for those making the pairing decisions to look not just at the relationship mapping databut also at what effective adult-student relationships look like in a school. This starts with a framing recollection activity in which you consider a meaningful adult relationship you had in school and what made it meaningful. This helps you put yourself in a student’s shoes. Once in this mindset, you review the list of prioritized students during a reflective meeting and consider any specific or unique considerations for selecting the right adult support for each student. Finally, the group engages in action planning, identifying specific adult-student relationships to establish and what it takes to get that done (for example, training and implementing a mentoring program).
Step 4 – Follow-Up
The purpose of this step is to ensure everyone has the ongoing support they need to effectively build and maintain positive adult-student relationships with the identified students. For example, grade- or department-level teams may reconvene after one month, 3 months, and 6 months to discuss how things are going with students, and any changes that might be needed. It is important for administrators to be available to learn how things are going and to ensure that support for the adults is provided.
I’ve Relationship Mapped, Now What?
It is important that relationship mapping not be treated as a “one and done” experience. There will always be students who need more intentional support from adults, and we do not want them to fall through the cracks. There are three big actions your school or district should take to make sure its first relationship mapping is not your last.
- Gather Data for Continuous Improvement: The success of ongoing relationship mapping depends on learning lessons from the first effort. Gathering data like annual Conditions for Learning surveys, attendance, universal screening, and conversations with teachers and students alike can all contribute to continuous improvement efforts.
- Collaborative Action Plan for Ongoing Implementation: Having continuous improvement data helps us understand what worked well and what can be improved. Action planning puts that data to use, helping us be more intentional about implementing relationship mapping than we were the first time. Administrators and staff should work together to chart a course for ongoing implementation of relationship mapping.
- Bake it In!: Once schools and districts have figured out needed improvements to the process and developed an action plan to continue the work, you can work towards making it part of regular routines. Doing things like creating policies that require annual relationship mapping and building it into multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) processes can help set the expectations and provide the supports for the work to continue on as a matter of standard practice.
Call to Action
My goal with this blog post is to provide an effective strategy for improving the conditions for learning for all students, in particular for those students at risk for negative outcomes.
Regardless of your role within your school or district, you can play a part in improving the conditions for learning through relationship mapping.
- Be an advocate for the work. Share this blog post with someone in your school or district who can help move the work forward.
- Build Adult-Student Relationship Interventions into Your Routines. If you are a classroom teacher, you can use these strategies just for your class. If you are a superintendent, you can work to set policies and visions for district-wide implementation.
- Connect with the Scanlan Center for School Mental Health for Help. Reach out to us at the SCSMH. We are ready to work with you to learn about and implement relationship mapping. You can request a customized training that makes sense for you by completing this form.
References
Emslander, V., Holzberger, D., Ofstad, S. B., Fischbach, A., & Scherer, R. (2025). Teacher–student relationships and student outcomes: A systematic second-order meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 151(3), 365–397. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000461
Iowa Department of Education (2021). Reviewed Evidence-Based Practices and Critical Learning Concepts. Retrieved from https://educate.iowa.gov/media/7415/download?inline.
Iowa Department of Education (2022). Conditions for Learning Guide: Using the Continuous Improvement Process to understand results and build a plan of action. Retrieved from https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Raoaeuw-QDzSMWeTPCLI-tTI0kxyapkKwnVqiyKlAV4/edit?usp=sharing.