Meeting young people's developmental needs for safety, love and belonging, respect, mastery, challenge, power and autonomy, and meaning is a necessity that lies at the heart of all good schooling. While this is just common sense to some, to others, in our age of standards-driven educational reform and get-tough-on-youth social policies, it sounds like a radical notion. In this article Bonnie Benard describes these seven fundamental needs and offers practical suggestions for applying these principles in the classroom.

Schools need to teach our kids how much they matter. If they don't, we will see Santana and Columbine copycat shootings again and again.
-Meredith Maran 

These prophetic words, written barely two weeks before the latest school shooting in El Cahon, California, succinctly state the challenge for educators in America: to teach our young people that they matter-that their lives have a purpose and that they can make a difference in creating a better world. It is time to speak loudly and boldly to educators and policymakers alike. There is an answer to preventing the violence that has racked our schools and it lies in the principles and practices of Community Youth Development. Indeed, these same practices and principles are also those associated with students' academic success.

We will never achieve safe schools or high academic standards unless and until we employ the research knowledge we have gained on healthy child and youth development practices, and intentionally focus on the inborn developmental wisdom, the innate resilience, and the intrinsic motivation that drive the CYD process.

To achieve this goal we must create a school culture built on three simple and common principles: caring relationships, high expectations, and opportunities for participation and contribution (Benard, 1991). Specifically:

• Caring relationships involve having someone who is there for you-who listens, who pays attention, who is patient, and whom you can trust.
• High expectations convey respectfulness and a belief in your capacity. They challenge you to your personal best and signal you have everything you need within you to be successful.
• Opportunities for participation and contribution provide occasions to belong, have responsibilities, have a voice and choice, make decisions, plan, have ownership, and lead. This includes opportunities to give back your gift-to be of service to your community and world.

We must create a school culture built on three simple and common principles: caring relationships, high expectations, and opportunities for participation and contribution.

These three principles interact to form a synergistic human network called "community." Applying these principles allows us to tap into students' intrinsic motivation and drive to meet their seven developmental needs: safety, love and belonging, respect, mastery, challenge, power and autonomy, and meaning. The remainder of this article focuses in detail on these fundamental needs and offers methods for achieving them in the educational setting.

1. Safety
Young people, first of all, must feel physically and emotionally safe in their classrooms and schools. Research tells us that when children do not feel safe, their brain stays in a vicious fight-flight circuit (Caine & Caine, 1991). In order to engage higher-order thinking skills, creativity, and innate resilience, a child must feel safe. Making our schools into high-security prisons that search for future killers-youth who wear the wrong clothing, say the wrong things, carry the wrong books, draw the wrong pictures, and visit the wrong web sites-is counterproductive and further marginalizes these "different" youth, making them feel even more unsafe.

Achieving safety

• Implement a short student survey. Ask students, Do you feel physically and emotionally safe in your classroom? On the playground? In the restroom? In the hallways? In the cafeteria? Before school? After school? Where do you feel safe? What can the school do to make each of these places safer? Follow up with students, teachers, parents, and community focus groups to create reflection and dialogue across these groups and to begin the process of rethinking the school's culture.
• Create a student-led safety task force to act on the survey suggestions. Impose real partnerships in which young people are working in a leadership role with family, school, and community adults to rethink their school culture.
• Institute a zero tolerance policy towards teasing. Discounting by school personnel of teasing and harassment is done at great cost. Teasing and harassment were the major causes of the Littleton, Santana, and El Cajon shootings. Furthermore, teasing remains a major cause of fighting, dropping out, and suicide attempts (Fried & Fried, 1996). Enforce this policy by way of a restorative justice approach (see the discussion later in this article) rather than by expulsion, exclusion, or negative labeling.
• Help victims and perpetrators to discover their inner strength and innate resilience. Victims must realize they have the power to defuse bullying and teasing. Perpetrators must learn the skill of stepping back and getting perspective from their angry gut responses.

2. Love and Belonging
Love and belonging refer to basic affiliation and attachment needs-to be part of and participate in a meaningful community, to be connected to people and places that ultimately give all of our lives meaning and hope. Nel Noddings states it eloquently (Noddings, 1988):

At a time when the traditional structures of caring have deteriorated, schools must become places where teachers and students live together, talk with each other, take delight in each other's company. My guess is that when schools focus on what really matters in life, the cognitive ends we now pursue so painfully and artificially will be achieved somewhat more naturally . . . It is obvious that children will work harder and do things-even odd things like adding fractions-for people they love and trust.

Two recent studies, summarized below, help bring home the theme of love and trust for CYD educators.

Love and Belonging: Two Case Studies

The National Longitudinal Study on Adolescent Health (Ad Health)
This federally mandated research is the largest study (90,000 students in grades 7 through 12) on adolescent health (Resnick et al., 1997). Researchers from universities across the country examined both risk and protective factors in the individual, family, and school as they relate to four domains of adolescent health: emotional health, violence, substance use, and sexuality. Researchers looked at the following school variables:

• Connectedness
• Student prejudice
• Attendance
• Parent teacher organization (percent of parents involved with PTA/PTO)
• Dropout rate
• School type (comprehensive public, magnet, parochial, technical, other)
• Teacher education
• College (percent of students who are college-bound)
• School policies

Overall, only one variable was consistently associated with better health and healthier behaviors: feeling connected to school. The researchers concluded,

What seems to matter most for adolescent health is that schools foster an atmosphere in which students feel fairly treated, close to others, and a part of the school . . . It is the perception by students that teachers care and have high expectations for their performance.

Student prejudice was the only variable identified as a risk factor and was associated with both emotional distress and suicide attempts in both middle- and high school-age youth. This study validates findings of resilience research and foreshadowed the tragedy of Columbine High School.

The Power of Relationship: Mentoring
The Big Brothers/Big Sisters mentoring study (Tierney et al., 1995) found that youth ages 10-16 matched with mentors, who provided a listening ear and high expectations, and allowed youth to make decisions, were far less likely to initiate alcohol use, drug use, and violence. Additionally, they were more likely to do better in school. In other words, youth who were connected to a caring adult relationship were doing better across both health-risk behaviors and academic success.

Achieving love and belonging

• Put relationships at the heart of your work in schools. This means creating inclusive classroom communities where all students feel welcome. The Councils or Tribes group processes are promising approaches for this classroom community building.
• Implement restorative justice approaches. This approach, which moves away from punishment and towards restoring a sense of harmony and well-being to those affected by a hurtful act, is being used by many school districts in place of more traditional approaches to discipline. Techniques include peacemaking or sentencing circles, teen courts, and classroom constitutions (Pranis, 1998).
• Commit to smaller classes and schools. Smaller classes and schools give educators more opportunities to connect with their students, which is a powerful strategy for building love and belonging. It may take multiple forms, but the goal is to create small, heterogeneous groupings and communities in which everyone has a place and diversity is honored.
• Offer after-school activities. Well-structured after-school activities can provide a great opportunity to promote caring relationships between adults and youth and among youth themselves. Activities can range from support groups to interest-based groups to community service groups.

3. Respect
The need or drive to be respected is a powerful motivator. Lack of respect-along with lack of caring and boredom-are usually the top three reasons students say they dropped out of school (Stevenson & Ellsworth, 1993).

If we want good outcomes in the traditional 3 Rs of Reading, 'Riting, and 'Rithmetic, we need an additional set of 3 Rs: Relationship, Respect, and Responsibility. Debra Meier's turnaround school in Harlem, Central Park East, put both relationships and respect at the heart of her school's mission (Meier, 1995).

If we want good outcomes in the traditional 3 Rs of Reading, 'Riting, and 'Rithmetic, we need an additional set of 3 Rs: Relationship, Respect, and Responsibility.

Achieving respect

• Be attentive. Listen to what a student has to say.
• Value the student's perspective. Acknowledge, when a student has concerns or is upset, that he or she has a valid perspective based on his or her experiences. Even if that perspective is not in agreement with yours, listen to it and don't judge it.
• Provide honest feedback. The companion to good listening is valid and honest responses. Young people need our guidance and mentoring and assessment is part of that.
• Honor the Golden Rule. Do unto your students as you would have them do unto you.

4. Mastery
The drive for accomplishment, to be good at something, is inborn in all of us. Educators and parents have too narrowly defined what that "something" can be. Howard Gardner and his colleagues at Harvard University (1993) identified eight categories of strengths they refer to as "intelligences," common to all human beings and that vary in degree in each person.

The Eight Intelligences

Verbal/Linguistic - Capacity to think and learn through written and spoken words; has the ability to memorize facts, fill in workbooks, take written tests, and enjoy reading.

Logical/Mathematical - Capacity to think deductively, deal with numbers, recognize abstract patterns, and reason well.

Visual/Spatial - Capacity to think in and visualize images and pictures; has the ability to create graphic designs and communicate with diagrams and graphics; sensitivity to color, line, shape, form, space, and relationships between these.

Body/Kinesthetic - Capacity to learn through physical movement and body wisdom; has a sense of knowing through body memory; uses hands to produce or transform things.

Musical/Rhythmic - Capacity to perceive, discriminate, transform, and express musical forms.

Interpersonal - Capacity to perceive and make distinctions in the moods, intentions, motivations, temperaments, and feelings of other people; relational skills.

Interpersonal - Capacity to enjoy and learn through self-reflection, metacognition, working alone; has an awareness of inner spiritual realities.

Naturalistic - Capacity to observe, understand, differentiate, sort, and organize patterns in the natural environment; may show expertise in the recognition and classification of plants, animals, or human objects.

Educationally, we have assigned greater value to mathematical and linguistic intelligences than to the rest. However, Howard Gardner and his colleagues tell us that we need to discover and nurture students' strengths-their intelligences-in order to maximize their development.

Achieving mastery

• Create opportunities for success based on students' strengths (intelligences). Introduce school activities that allow you to assess the interests, strengths, gifts, and dreams of each of your students. At Park Brooke Elementary School in Osceo, Minnesota, for instance, every student from kindergarten through sixth grade takes a multiple intelligence assessment and learns just where their special strengths and interests lie.
• Value the unique gifts each student brings. Deploy strategies for displaying and honoring works of students across the intellegences and not just those within specific categories. Artists need to have their work displayed as much as scientists; skateboarders as much as football players.
• Create after-school clubs. Students need after-school activities where they can explore their interests in small groups. The Plainfield Community Middle School in Plainfield, Indiana, offered sports teams open to anyone who wanted to play. Over half of the student body now participates in sports. Some schools and communities, such as in Newburyport, MA, are helping students fundraise to build skateboard parks.

5. Challenge
Challenge is a drive related to mastery but specifically refers to taking risks. Adolescents especially need to have opportunities to take healthy risks. Oddly, adolescent risk taking is often on lists of risk factors for problem behaviors-yet it is also one of the characteristics of successful people! A wonderful study of adventure learning illustrates how outdoor experience programs like Outward Bound produce healthy behavioral and academic outcomes. In addition, in contrast to many educational and prevention interventions, these programs also have important long-term effects on positive youth development (Hattie et al., 1997).

This compelling research supports the importance of risk taking by offering ropes and challenge courses in school-based after-school programs and makes the case for other forms of classroom-based experiential learning, including arts-based learning, project-based learning, service learning, cooperative education, career/technical apprenticeship, and cooperative learning, to name a few.

Achieving challenge

• Structure opportunities that allow each student to create challenging and specific goals. Use your creativity and the context of the setting here.
• Make the experience as fully participatory as possible. The impact of the experience is greatly enhanced by its intensity.
• Provide plentiful and immediate feedback. This is where your coaching role comes into play.
• Provide for reflection, dialogue, and action. Reflection, along with the support of the teacher and peer group, are key elements to helping young people to succeed and move on to the next level.

6. Power and Identity
This is the need to find one's identity and discover oneself as an autonomous person. Youth who feel a sense of their own worth don't need guns to feel powerful; they don't need to hurt others or themselves to prove they exist and matter.

Achieving identity

• Create ongoing opportunities for students to participate and contribute in the classroom. While approaches such as cooperative learning, peer helping, and service learning provide practical examples, the bottom line is to create the greatest number of opportunities for students to gain personal control.
• Allow students to develop some of their own classroom projects. Create opportunities within the curriculum for individuals and groups to identify, plan, initiate, and assess their own projects.
• Listen to your students. Employ the simple strategy of asking students their opinions, their needs, their ideas-and acting on them.
• Invite students to create the governing rules of the classroom. When a problem develops in the classroom or on the schoolyard, bring the students in on it and invite their ideas on how we, as a classroom and school community, can solve it.

7. Meaning
Last-and certainly not least-is the need to find meaning. We are "meaning-makers." We must find purpose and relevance in what we do or we experience a disconnect-a sense of alienation from our true sense of calling. This loss of meaning probably plays a role in the hopelessness experienced by so many adolescents, the rising rates of adolescent depression (National Mental Health Association, 1997), and the fact that suicide is the third leading cause of death during the adolescent years (Surgeon General, 1999).

Achieving meaning

• Help students with critical spiritual or existential questions. For instance, Who am I? What is my true nature? This is the human search for identity. What do I love? What are my interests and dreams? This is the search for one's calling. How shall I live? What values do I wish to live by? This is the search for one's morality. What is my gift to the family of the earth? What are my strengths and gifts? How can I make a difference? This is the search for one's purpose. In introducing the spiritual or existential dimension, we help students to make the deepest connection of all-the sense of interconnection to others, to nature, and to life itself.
• Honor students' process. Several schools are using the process of Council to create a small-group climate of safety, respect, and honor to reflect and share these deep yearnings in a community setting.
• Make room for creative expression. Provide experiences that allow students to give their gifts to the world through theater, dance, photography, video production, art, music, storytelling, and creative writing. Several national, large-scale research studies have found that young people involved in the arts, regardless of their educational and economic backgrounds, do better academically, socially, and behaviorally (Catterall, 1997, Heath, 1998).
• Create meaningful partnerships. Community service learning is perhaps the most powerful Community Youth Development strategy used in schools. Community service learning in its best form creates a partnership of young people, their teachers, and community adults in a shared goal of community betterment. School gardens are a great example of this kind of partnership. Several statewide evaluations, along with the national evaluation of Learn and Serve programs across the country, have documented the positive impacts of service on students both academically and developmentally.

Where Do We Begin?
We begin locally. Here are four suggestions to get you going.

Forge connections to schools. The only way community-based youth-serving organizations can influence schools is to work in partnership with them. This is happening on an ever-growing scale through school-based after-school programs such as the U.S. Department of Education's 21st Century Community Learning Centers or through more intense partnerships like the Beacon schools in New York City, San Francisco, and elsewhere.

Educate our schools in the principles of CYD. In this age of standards-driven educational reform, CYD is the best way to connect students with their learning and thus achieve positive academic outcomes.

Create a school mission. Work with schools and those in your community, including youth, to create a mission grounded in caring relationships, high expectation messages, and opportunities for participation and contribution.

Support teachers and school staff. Teachers naturally care when they are cared for, naturally believe in their students' capacities when administrators believe in their own capacities, and naturally share power with students when they have power to make their own decisions in their classrooms. In fact, Milbrey McLaughlin and her colleagues at Stanford found, in their nationwide study of school supports, that teacher collegiality was the most significant factor promoting student achievement and maintaining school reforms (McLaughlin & Talbert, 1993). Facilitating teacher support groups, wisdom circles, and learning networks are all ways we can help support those who have such considerable impact on the lives of our young people.

Teachers care when they are cared for, believe in their students' capacities when administrators believe in their own capacities, and share power with students when they have power to make their own decisions in their classrooms.

The challenge ahead for our field, and for all who care about the well-being of our young people, is to get the message across that there is an answer to the crisis in schools and communities. It is working together, in partnership, with our creative, energetic young people to create a world we all want to-and can-live in.

Bonnie Benard, M.S.W., is a nationally- and internationally-known figure in the field of prevention theory, policy, and practice, particularly for introducing and conceptualizing resiliency theory and application beginning with her monograph, Fostering Resiliency in Kids: Protective Factors in the Family, School, and Community (1991). Currently, she is a senior program associate with the Human Development Program at WestEd's Oakland, California office.

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