Description:

Purpose: The purpose of this project was to iteratively develop and pilot a brief professional development training that is called RELATE. This training is intended to enhance teachers' skills in establishing, maintaining, and restoring relationships with high school students, a critical protective factor during the transition to high school. The RELATE program helps teachers implement concrete relationship building skills with high school students, particularly those from marginalized racial/ethnic groups.

Project Activities: The research team adapted previous work in this area by focusing primarily on developmental appropriateness and cultural responsiveness for the existing Establish-Maintain-Restore (EMR) model. In the first phase, the researchers reviewed and refined previous iterations of the intervention through a stakeholder summit.  In the second phase, they demonstrated the intervention to stakeholders to continue making refinements.  In the third study, the team investigated the impact of the intervention on teacher behavior.  Finally, they pilot tested the intervention to estimate the impact on student social and behavioral outcomes.

Key Outcomes: The main features of RELATE and findings of the project's pilot study are as follows:

• Using stakeholder input to guide the cultural and contextual adaptations, the resulting professional development training for high school teachers, RELATE, involves six hours of live, interactive group training on the Equity-Explicit Establish-Maintain-Restore (E-EMR) model; monthly professional learning communities (small groups of 5-8 educators per school); and weekly reminder emails.
• RELATE was successful in changing teachers' practices. Based on teachers' reports, their use of E-EMR practices increased throughout the school year and reached an acceptable level of fidelity in all schools.
• In the pilot randomized controlled trial (6 schools, 94 9th grade teachers, 417 9th grade students), there were no significant benefits of RELATE overall on student–teacher relationships, sense of school belonging, academic motivation, or academic engagement. However, RELATE did appear to benefit Asian, Latinx, multicultural, and Black students, as well as those who were struggling at the beginning of the school year.

Structured Abstract

Setting: The study took place in a large urban center in Washington State.

Sample: As this project was designed as a set of studies, each study includes a different sample.  In the first study, participants included 7 ninth grade teachers, 8 high school administrators, and 7 researchers. In the second study, participants included 10 ninth grade students, 7 parents of ninth grade students, 8 ninth grade teachers, and 8 high school administrators. The sample for the third study came from one high school and included 16 public school teachers and a subset of ninth graders taught by those teachers (N = 133). In the fourth study, all teachers who primarily teach ninth graders in 6 participating high schools were asked to participate, and at least 179 of their ninth-grade students were recruited. The total sample in study 4 included 94 ninth grade teachers and 417 ninth grade students. In studies 2–4, a probability stratified sampling approach was used to ensure diverse samples.

Intervention: RELATE is an adapted version of the Establish-Maintain-Restore (EMR) intervention for use with high school teachers. The adaptations respond to three major problems of practice: 1) there is a precipitous drop in student engagement at the ninth-grade transition; 2) this drop has dire consequences for some students, who end up dropping out of school entirely; 3) this drop is especially problematic among historically underserved groups, including Black and Latinx students. The adaptations made in this project primarily focus on developmental appropriateness and cultural responsiveness.

Research Design and Methods: The researchers conducted four studies to iteratively develop and pilot the intervention. In Study 1, the research team convened researchers and stakeholders to review and provide feedback on preliminary intervention components using a survey and focus group meetings. In Study 2, the researchers refined the components and practices using feedback from teachers, administrators, students, and parents through semi-structured focus groups. In Study 3, the researchers examined the impact of the EMR training on teacher behavior through a multiple case-study design and structured observations. Study 4 was a small-scale school-level randomized controlled trial (RCT), where researchers estimated the impact of the intervention on student outcomes, including process variables (e.g., student-teacher relationships) and risk indicators for later school dropout (e.g., course failure).

Control Condition: In the fourth study of the project, a waitlist control condition was employed.

Key Measures: The key outcomes are risk indicators for school dropout (attendance, behavior, grades, and credits earned) and process measures (student-teacher relationships, school belonging, student engagement, and achievement motivation).

Data Analytic Strategy: The research team used qualitative analyses in early phases of the project in the iterative development of the intervention.  They used descriptive analyses to determine intervention feasibility and basic psychometric analyses were used to validate fidelity measures. To determine RELATE's promise for improving student outcomes, the effects of RELATE versus wait-listed control at post-intervention were assessed using hierarchical linear models, statistically controlling for student characteristics at Level 1 and school-level characteristics at Level 2. The research team assessed potential moderation of intervention effects by student characteristics by including cross-product interaction terms in the student-level portion of the model.

Products and Publications

ERIC Citations: Find available citations in ERIC for this award here.

Selected Publications:

Duong, M. T., Gaias, L. M., Brown, E., Kiche, S., Nguyen, L., Corbin, C. M., Chandler, C. J., Buntain-Ricklefs, J. J., & Cook, C. R. (2020). A cluster randomized pilot trial of Establish-Maintain-Restore among high school teachers and students. School Mental Health, 14(4), 951–966. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12310-022-09516-3

Duong, M. T., Nguyen, L., Benjamin, K. S., Lee, K., Buntain-Ricklefs, J., & Cook, C. R. (2020). Using stakeholder input to guide cultural and contextual adaptations for a universal school-based intervention. Urban Review, 52, 853–879. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-019-00547-w

Duong, M. T., Pullmann, M. D., Buntain-Ricklefs, J., Lee, K., Benjamin, K. S., Nguyen, L., and Cook, C. R. (2019). Brief Teacher Training Improves Student Behavior and Student-Teacher Relationships in Middle School. School Psychology, 34(2): 212–221.

Gaias, L. M., Cook, C. R., Nguyen, L., Brewer, S. K., Brown, E. C., Kiche, S., Shi, S., Buntain- Ricklefs, J., & Duong, M. T. (2020). A mixed methods pilot study of an equity-explicit student-teacher relationship intervention for the ninth-grade transition. Journal of School Health, 90(12): 1004–1018 https://doi.org/10.1111/josh.12968