At Mexico High school we talk about and build all kinds of connections every day. As educators, we talk about how we connect with our students personally and how to connect our students to the content of our classes. As mentors, we talk about connecting our student’s life after school and adulthood. As people who care about kids, we focus on how we can make sure our students are connected to each other and to positive influences. We even use #MHSconnections as a common hashtag on our social media posts. Connections are what we are all about.

Connections to each other are critical to success in school and in life. Often, the number and strength of connections we have are referred to as our ‘social capital’. Social capital is defined as the …show more content…
How do we help our kids build much-needed relationships with people then leverage those relationships into opportunities for growth?

Trust is at the core of social capital. As we all know, all positive relationships have trust and we have to work hard to ensure that trust. For instance, at school, we need to make sure that we do what we say we are going to do. When we tell a student that we want them to feel safe at school, we need to do our best to make sure they can feel safe. We all need to model dependability and personal responsibility.

We all also need to model and teach appropriate social skills. This sounds simple and in some ways it is. However, it becomes difficult when conflicts and disagreements arise or when we have to have kind of difficult conversation. For instance, I was so proud of our teachers at the high school this past week when we had a consultant in the building giving our teachers individual feedback on their classroom practices. With students watching, in many cases, our teachers modeled what it looks like to accept feedback and what those conversations should look