“I remember once reading a survey that asked students to name an adult at school who would be proud of them. The thing that was so distressing about the survey result was how few kids could name an adult who would be proud of them.”
John King said this in the same conversation where he told us that, without one of his teachers, he might not be alive today. The contrast is the point. King was fortunate to have teachers who knew him, challenged him and organized a classroom community in which students were taken seriously as thinkers and people. Too many young people have no one like that. Not because caring adults don’t exist, but because systems aren’t designed to enable genuine caring at scale.
My last column described what King’s teachers were doing: building relational consistency, intellectual challenge and sustained community — the conditions research tells us produce transformative, durable outcomes. This column gets specific. Across conversations with King, Linda Darling-Hammond and Bob Pianta — and the evidence behind them — five shifts emerge that every school, youth program and system can begin making now using resources such as the two design principles playbooks published by the SoLD Alliance to translate research into practice for educators and community program leaders.
Although the podcast centers a school leader, it discusses how settings and people support thriving and is equally relevant to everyone who works with youth in all settings. The conditions that produce thriving are the same across settings — and the failures described here show up in your work, too, because many of the young people you serve spend most of their day in schools shaped by exactly these dynamics. What happens inside those buildings is your context, whether it is your jurisdiction.
Shift 1: From compliance to connection.
Relationships are not soft extras. They are the foundation of learning — not ancillary to cognitive development but essential to it. King’s school and teachers built connection structurally — looping students and organizing classrooms as communities where students were known and expected to contribute, with the same teacher staying with students across multiple years. The first shift is recognizing that connection is not a precondition for the real work. It is the real work. And it is the real work of everyone at school as roughly half of students’ school time is outside core academic classrooms. Counselors, coaches, afterschool coordinators and other non-instructional staff are positioned to build the kind of sustained, low-stakes relationships that make young people feel known. That is a resource most schools have not intentionally deployed.
Shift 2: From standardization to personalization.
Darling-Hammond highlights the importance of addressing each student’s individuality. Every student has unique strengths and needs that a standardized pacing guide cannot accommodate. We have created systems for the management of learning rather than learning itself. The second shift is embracing that diversity is both the norm and educational asset, not the problem, and designing instruction accordingly.
Shift 3: From managing students to listening to them.
Pianta describes youth voice as transformative — not a program add-on but a force that activates development. When middle school students are surveyed about their interests, given authentic roles in school governance, or participate in shaping curriculum, they roll up their sleeves and get to work. The UChicago Consortium’s student surveys — now used across Chicago Public Schools — show that the schools getting the most out of student experience data are those that share it directly with students and discuss it with them. The third shift is treating students as co-designers of their experience, not recipients of it.
Shift 4: From measuring outputs to measuring conditions.
Pianta names a striking asymmetry: we have billions of data points on student performance on academic tests, and almost none that systematically describe the actual conditions of learning students experience every day. We measure credentials, class sizes, and curriculum — all of which are distal to what kids experience in the classroom. When we measure conditions — through classroom observation, student surveys and interaction data — and give that information back to teachers in supportive, non-punitive ways, classrooms change. The fourth shift is measuring what we say we value: not just what students score, but how they are learning, relating and developing.
Shift 5: From blaming teachers to supporting them.
Darling-Hammond is unequivocal: we should not blame teachers because they are in a system that needs to change. Teacher and student well-being are dynamically linked — and a system built on punitive accountability and impossible pacing guides stress students and teachers. In the podcast conversation, I describe a Sacramento teacher who wept near retirement because she could finally do what she had always known was necessary: teach the whole child. Where we invest in teacher preparation as developmental preparation — and trust teachers to practice their craft — shortages disappear and students show up. The fifth shift is treating teachers as the developmental professionals they are, not as delivery mechanisms for a standardized product.
Courtesy of David Osher
David Osher, RCC
These five shifts operate simultaneously at every level. At the classroom level, they mean relationships, agency and genuine engagement as daily practice. At the school level, they mean structural redesign — teams of teachers sharing students, advisory systems and community schools that Darling-Hammond describes as already working in thousands of places. At the system level, they mean accountability frameworks built around conditions for thriving — and the political will to trust the professionals we have trained.
[Related: Structure, control and leaving room]
If you work outside schools, the ask is specific: press for these shifts, partner with the schools your young people attend and resist the pressure to treat your program as a substitute for what schools should be providing. The goal is not parallel systems serving separate needs — it is a connected ecosystem in which every setting reinforces the same conditions. That means knowing which shifts your partner schools are making, sharing what you are learning from young people and advocating for the structural changes — staffing, time, accountability — that schools cannot make alone. It also means extending and deepening these practices within your own organizations. The 16 success drivers in the National Academy of Education’s “Building Supportive Conditions to Enhance Student and Educator Well-Being and Thriving” apply with equal force in CBOs and youth programs — offering a shared, evidence-based framework for the relational, equity-centered, trauma-sensitive and strengths-building approaches that the five shifts point toward but do not fully specify.
The survey King cited is haunting because it is measurable. We could change that number. We know how. The question is whether we are willing to design systems that make it possible for every young person to name an adult who knows them, believes in them and would be proud of them.
***
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 three pieces in the series can be read here:
What John King’s teachers were actually doing
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.
