Ideas that incorporate Belonging

Focus on building relationships that are rooted in safety and connection.

Teachers should focus on activities that build relationships, such as holding community circles. Community circles can provide a safe space for students while promoting respect, empathy, and communication skills.

A classroom theme, flag, song, flower and animal totem.

Sample pulse check questions:

I feel like I belong at my school

I can talk to an adult at my school when I have a problem

I look forward to going to school

I have a friend at school I trust

Students at my school care about me

Staying healthy at school involves following a whole list of safety protocols, from hand washing, proper distancing, wearing masks, etc. You’re going to need help monitoring this aspect of returning to in-person learning. Empower your students to be part of the process. Establishing classroom norms and procedures together will help students buy into the new climate. Have students rotate through jobs that help keep the classroom safe, like making sure the hand washing station is clean and stocked, keeping track of mask breaks, and reminding each other about safe distances.

Having the option to learn online was super helpful when there was no other choice. Now, though, we have a lot of great options beyond sitting in front of a computer. Nix passive learning by centering your classroom around active learning experiences. Set up stations (here’s a great article about how to do that while maintaining social distancing), conduct experiments (another great read), do readers’ theater (simple to spread out and do). Give students the opportunity to collaborate and actively participate (while maintaining social distance, of course!) in the learning process.

One thing that virtual learning has taught us is that being able to work independently is an incredibly important skill. And most of our students have done an amazing job and grown as learners. Now that we’re back to in-person learning, we want our students to hold on to that feeling of being in charge of their own learning. Maintain a balance between shared and independent learning by building solo work into your daily lesson plans.

Once again, if things shift and schools have to go back to virtual learning, you want kids to be able to proceed with learning in a constructive way. Integrate technology, on a more limited basis than virtual, into your daily routine so that kids will be able to shift seamlessly to online learning if necessary.

Make instructional decisions promptly after collecting assessment information. At a minimum, use assessment data to refine ongoing instruction at least weekly. Recent assessment information has more impact on student learning. For example, assessment data regarding a student’s accuracy in answering math problems could be plotted on a graph that the student, parents, and teachers review each week.

In Bobby Shaddox’s seventh-grade social studies class, shared classroom norms—a set of about 10 attributes, like communicative, focused, and serene—is developed by the group at the beginning of the year to guide their behavior and learning.

“By having children themselves create the norms, you are creating a pathway toward belonging for every single child in that class, and they have a role in this learning community that they had a share in building,” says Pamela Cantor, MD, founder and senior science adviser of Turnaround for Children, emphasizing the importance of academic identity. It’s both a compelling civics lesson and a practice that can have a big impact on classroom management, says Shaddox: “The classes that go really well are the classes when I start off reflecting on the norms and using those norms to articulate how our class will run well.”

Education researcher and author Robert J. Marzano suggests narrowing academic choice down to focus on three key areas: choice in the tasks that students perform, choice in assessment, and choice in learning goals. “Choice in the classroom has been linked to increases in student effort, task performance, and subsequent learning,” Marzano writes in his blog. “However, to reap these benefits, a teacher should create choices that are robust enough for students to feel that their decision has an impact on their learning.”

For example, while an oral or written report is often the assigned format, students might instead have the option to use their mobile device to record video or audio reports. Or consider opening up assessment options to include different types of graded products—building models, drawing diagrams, or creating flowcharts—so that all kids, including those who are spatially gifted, have an opportunity to shine.