For the last several years we have heard how important it is to build a sense of belonging for our students. I see a sense of belonging as connected to building strong relationships and providing students windows and mirrors in our curriculums to ensure students feel welcomed in our school environment. It doesn't feel new to me, but I think I struggle a bit when we start hearing a phrase used more frequently but when it feels like we don't quite have a common definition or understanding of what it means to belong.
I started wondering about the explicit behaviors that help develop this sense of belonging and a shared way to measure or assess a sense of belonging for both students and staff. To avoid “belonging” becoming just another buzzword, I think we need to think about how we can foster and build a sense of belonging in a sincere way among a group of adults who are unique individuals. I was reminded of Zaretta Hammond's work around building Academic Mindset. One component of that being that students need to feel as if they belong to the community. She poses it as students need to feel that they belong to this community of learners. Several years ago I had brainstormed some statements that I could envision students reflecting on in order to gauge whether or not they feel as if they're a part of the school’s learning community. These statements were inspired by Hammond’s work but are ultimately my interpretation of the adult actions that contribute to students feeling as though they belong. When I was trying to imagine some ways that we could assess whether or not students feel welcomed in learning communities, then, I was thinking about how they feel received and perceived by their adults and classmates. I developed the statements below.
I belong to this community
Community can be defined as broadly as education in general, the whole school, your specific class or even a small group to which they’ve been assigned.
The teachers and other staff seem happy to see me when I come into school each day.
My teachers know and use my name when they speak with me.
My teacher seems interested to hear my responses to his/her questions.
My classmates ask me for my opinion and/or discuss classwork with me.
I have ideas and answers to offer my classmates.
My teachers' body language and words show that the questions I ask are valuable and worth answering.
That last statement, My teacher’s body language and words show that the questions I ask are valuable and worth answering, got me thinking about what a risk it can feel like to ask a question in a crowd and how easily we can encourage or really discourage students from this act. Students often hear adults say things like, “there are no dumb questions,” or “your questions will help somebody else.” But if our actions and responses to questions don't show that we believe those and instead they show frustration, aggravation or our response is, “You should know that by now,” or “I've already said that,” we can shut students down from asking questions. I see questions and our responses to them as a way to solidify a student's place in the community. For example, if a student asks a question, especially one that I realize in the moment is something I probably should have explained more clearly, I can use that as an opportunity to bring other people in. I might say “That is a really great question” and then depending on what the rest of the class is doing at that moment, I might even call the class back together. “Did you all just hear the question that was just asked? I want to make sure everybody hears this because this is a really great question.” Then I might ask the student who asked the question to repeat it again so that everybody knows where the question came from. If it is a question that the teacher does not necessarily need to supply the answer to I could throw the question out to the class and say hey, “Does anyone have thoughts about this question?” Giving the question back to the class allows the teacher to incorporate the Making Student Thinking Visible Operating Principles by asking students to agree, disagree, and add on to each other’s thoughts. The teacher could even return to the original student with the question and ask them to restate what the peers have shared to build an understanding for them. If it is a question that does have a clear correct answer and can be answered more quickly, in the end I certainly want to clarify that for the student who asked and all others, but offering the question up to the other students in the class, shows the student who asked the question and all the other students that they don't always have to come to the teacher for questions--that there are people in the room who they could rely on to have ideas, have thoughts, and that they can use each other as people to learn from. There are twenty-something students and one or two teachers in every room, so it's important in my mind to build the idea that they need to use each other a lot more often than they can use me. In her book Humanizing Classroom Management with Restorative Practices, Dr. Elizabeth Stein calls these “in-between” moments the classroom the “liminal moments.” Liminal moments are the spaces in between the learning activities and transition where we find opportunities for interactions between adults and students that remind us we are all just humans learning together. Although this could feel like belaboring a moment that could be handled more quickly, this is also an opportunity to develop the classroom culture where students learn that their questions are important enough to be heard and answered, they actively listen to each other, provide support to their peers, and learn that they belong to and play a role in this learning community.
Another part of academic mindset that Hammond describes is feeling like you can succeed at this work, that you have a sense of positive self-efficacy, that you are in fact competent and able to do the tasks put in front of you. I'm really thinking about how these parts of belonging and feeling competent translates to the group of adults in a school. When I reflect on the Professional Learning Groups (PGTs) I facilitate for small groups of teachers, I think we have been able to develop a community where all the members feel comfortable asking questions to the group and they rely on each other for learning. When teachers do ask me to join their planning or ask me a question, it’s usually something they’ve already discussed with their grade level peers and they are just looking for an outside perspective. These PGTs are small in number, meet frequently, and share the same content focus. It’s both implicitly and explicitly stated that all members of our PGT share the same goals for students.
How do we build this sense of belonging and sense of self-efficacy among a larger group of adults, though? Who is the facilitator who is cultivating this environment in the way that I believe teachers can in a single classroom? Does this responsibility fall solely on the building principal? The team of administrators? Could members of the Instructional Leadership Team help build a sense of belonging? Thinking back to the statement about how we respond to students' questions with our words and body language, I'm not sure how that translates to adults. Our staff meetings are really few and far between, only five in an entire year, so we don't have that same “whole class- the teacher at the front of the room setting” that we might have for students to build or teachers to build that response to questioning in the classroom. How do we do this in the in-between times, in the professional group time meetings, or in the day-to-day moments? This has to go beyond the superficial icebreakers or the formal circle setting, rather, I think we need to focus on the smaller day-to-day interactions with each other, the liminal moments among adult interactions. Thinking about the liminal spaces between adult interactions reminded me of a PGT activity we engaged in last year. We had established that our values as a staff were Communication, Connection, and Support so we generated examples of what it looks like when we live out our values. A colleague and I who are pretty different personality wise, both ended up writing the same thing, which was that we greet our colleagues in the hall. It has become pretty common to pass each other in the hall and have a colleague not acknowledge a greeting from someone or just initiate a hello. The longer you go without talking to somebody the more difficult and awkward it can become when you do. I don't think that we want students going so long without speaking to their classmates, students talk to each other. Yet we do it as adults all the time and then we go into our pockets and we talk about how these kids have no social skills.
The other element in the sense of belonging that maybe isn't as clear to me or that I'm struggling with and I think we probably need to just define what we mean when we say belong. I think that's why when I read Zaretta Hammond's book and was thinking about academic mindset. I love how she breaks that up into the different components of academic mindset and how those all need to be in place for students to believe that they are Learners. I think those belonging is just one of them, but I do think that for teachers we also need to think about their sense of self-advocacy because I feel that that has to impact your sense of belonging. I remember being a twenty-two year old brand new teacher surrounded by veterans. When I came into teaching, I was the youngest in my building by at least a couple of years and the majority of the staff members were decades-long veterans. Obviously, I didn't have the same capacity or knowledge as them because they had years of experience on their side. The only way I saw to get to the point where I would feel like I belonged in that community was to learn from the people around me. I was fortunate to have both a building principal and a number of veteran staff members who were more than willing to let me into their classrooms and pester them with dozens of questions to help me learn from them. Similar to the way I feel building relationships for teachers has become a bit of a confusing and superficial phrase, I think we could also run the danger of focusing on “belonging” but only in a very superficial way. For example, if we think of a sense of belonging among staff being measured in ways such as I attend all the social staff outings and I have a strong group of friends, we could miss the deeper components of belonging to a community. I imagine another part of feeling like you belong to a group is also feeling:
I am capable of pulling my weight in the large and small tasks.
I can help students be successful learners.
I am working to hone my craft.
I seek out help from colleagues or I have colleagues I feel I can learn from.
If you're not feeling in your core that you can actually be successful at this whole reason that we're here, which is to teach kids to learn, then it seems to me it's going to be fairly difficult to ever feel like you truly belong in this profession in this building. When we're talking about building a sense of belonging we also need to think about our adult staff members as a group of learners. Recalling the classroom scenario where we called the class together to share their responses to a peer question and built community and interdependence among the student learners, makes me wonder how we can explicitly cultivate this among staff. It can be so easy to fall into the pocket of colleagues who you naturally connect with but we’re missing opportunities to learn from each other.
I am interested in discussing what it actually means to build a sense of belonging among a diverse group of adults, so that we don't focus on too many of the superficial ways that we think make people belong. If we can be more explicit about this, I think we can get to the heart of the core components that people need to feel like they belong to this community and that they have a sense of purpose and competency in this profession. During end of year reflections I heard several staff members say something to the effect of, "It starts with us," when discussing the behaviors we want to develop among students. It can feel counterintuitive in a profession where time feels like we're always fighting against time to say, let's step back and focus on the adults rather than rushing to bring this to the students. If we actually want to develop a sense of belonging for both the veteran and newer staff members in a building that lasts beyond a single school year, we have to invest the time in our adult learners and believe that it will transfer to our student spaces.
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