“It’s not an overstatement to say that without one of my teachers, I might not be alive today.”
This is how John King begins his conversation with me in the latest episode of the Thriving Youth Knowledge Exchange: Deeper Learning and Equity podcast series. King — who created and led a first-in-class school, served as a state superintendent and U.S. Secretary of Education, and is now chancellor of the State University of New York — is not speaking in hyperbole. He is telling us what is actually at stake in the work of educating young people.
We often describe schools and teachers who change lives as sanctuaries. That characterization is accurate. But it is not precise enough. King says a caring teacher changed his life. That, too, is true. But it is also incomplete.
What King describes is not simply kindness.
It is something more structured, more sustained, and more consequential.
King grew up in circumstances that were, at times, frightening and unpredictable. What sustained him were classroom communities where adults showed up day after day as a steady presence. He experienced adults who were emotionally constant and intellectually demanding. Relationships that developed over time, not in isolated moments. Classrooms organized as a community, where students were known, expected to contribute, and taken seriously as thinkers. Daily engagement — reading, discussing, performing, exploring — sustained over years. And a school that allowed that kind of teaching to happen, rather than constraining it.
[Related: Structure, control and leaving room]
These classrooms did not simply buffer young King from instability. They engaged him in experiences that expanded his sense of himself and his future.
What King experienced was not accidental. But it is still often absent in our schools — and when present in out-of-school settings where learning and development also happen, it is often not recognized for what it is.
King’s experiences reflected a specific set of conditions for learning and thriving: consistent adults, relationships built over time, a setting organized for both community and intellectual engagement, sustained exposure to ideas, and the organizational conditions that enabled that teaching. Taken together, these conditions supported something more than safety and academic learning.
They supported youth development and thriving.
This distinction between promoting thriving and only addressing risk matters — for educators, for youth development professionals, and for anyone who works with young people across settings. Too often, when we talk about supporting young people — particularly those living with adversity — we narrow the work to protection, stabilization, and meeting basic academic needs. Protection and stabilization are necessary. Although important, they are not sufficient. And they are hard to move beyond.
What sustained King was not protection alone. It was the full set of developmental conditions that allowed him not just to get through a difficult period, but to imagine and build a different future. What he experienced included safety and stability. It also included challenge, belonging, intellectual engagement, opportunity, and coherence. That combination is what changed his trajectory.
Courtesy of David Osher
David Osher, RCC
Although King’s story is rooted in a classroom, the implications are not limited to schools. Learning and development are inextricably linked, and happen in and across settings — in relationships, experiences, and environments that young people move through over time. In those environments, youth workers and nonteaching staff are not peripheral actors. They are educators. They build sustained, consequential relationships. They create group settings where young people learn with and from one another. They design experiences that connect to youth identities, interests, passions, and aspirations — spaces consistent with our best knowledge about how young people develop and learn.
We know how to create these environments — and research confirms what such environments produce. “Investing in Adolescents” tracked over 160,000 Chicago students and found that high schools fostering socioemotional development — belonging, engagement, grit — nearly doubled their impact on graduation rates compared to schools that focused only on test scores. “Preparing Youth to Thrive” studied eight high-quality out-of-school programs and found that the same skills — empathy, teamwork, initiative, responsibility, emotion management, and problem-solving — grew consistently when the right relational conditions were in place. The conditions differ by setting. The developmental ingredients do not.
[Related: On sparks and social capital]
King’s podcast conversation surfaces the core ideas — about relationships, environments, equity, and thriving — that will be examined across more than 30 additional conversations in this series. My next blog continues this theme and addresses what it actually takes to build these conditions across all learning settings.
Helping young people thrive is not simply about meeting basic needs.
It is about intentionally designing conditions that prioritize relational consistency, intellectual challenge,
and collaborative agency — building robust opportunity structures across all learning settings.
Children need the bread that meets their material needs, but they also need the roses that touch their minds, hopes, and souls. That is what John King is describing: environments that are not just safe, but transformational. And it is what youth workers and educators work every day to build.
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The Thriving Youth Knowledge Exchange: Deeper Learning and Equity podcast series explores how to build the conditions for youth thriving more intentionally, in more places, for more young people. The first two pieces in the series can be read here:
An invitation to learn, reflect and act together for equity-centered thriving
David Osher has been an organizer, professor, dean of an experimental college and schools of human services, researcher, and a TA provider and organizational consultant. His work focused on building humanizing conditions and capacities for and individual and collective thriving and equity.
