Town Hall Recap: Relationship Mapping

On the recent Getting Smart Town Hall, the team was joined by Julia Freeland Fisher (Clayton Christensen Institute), Edward DeJesus (Social Capital Builders, Inc.) and Tyler Thigpen (The Forest School) for a discussion of innovative approaches to relationship mapping and analyzing students’ existing networks as a way to build more asset-based pathways. 

Together we tried to answer the following questions: Do you know who your students know? What if schools could authentically engage with all of the people their students already know beyond the four walls of the classroom? 

As schools strive to ensure that all young people have access to supportive relationships, work-based learning opportunities, and postsecondary options, they often rely on scarce support staff and educators who are stretched thin, but learning how to build networks doesn’t just have to be about students meeting new people. Students can focus on having new types of conversations with people they already know.

Throughout the event our guests shared a number of outstanding resources, ranging from examples to frameworks and provided actionable tips for making a dramatic difference in the lives of your students. They also shared some outstanding tech tools to better understand who your students know. Check out the links below!