Key Takeaway: This study provides unique and actionable insight to how teachers fostered belonging, community, and the psychological space for middle schoolers to create positive interactions and connections with others. The rich descriptions will resonate with school leaders and teachers.
Criteria: In depth qualitative study with actionable themes, specific application of dignity & belonging concepts and literature to middle school students.
Resource: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19404476.2018.1505402
Title: The High Tide Raises All Ships: Middle Grades Teachers’ Perspectives on School Belonging in Early Adolescence
Year: 2018
Author: Keonya Booker
Primary Author: https://teachered.cofc.edu/faculty-staff-listing/keonya-booker.php
Summation and Insights: How do middle school grade teachers create a sense of belonging amongst their students, who have needs distinct from both small children and more experienced teens? Middle schoolers, after all, are experiencing an especially fraught age, one filled with all the tensions that child development models tell us come from formulating a sense of self as well as increasingly turning to their peers for validation and for their most important social relationships. This qualitative study turned to five dedicated middle school teachers and examined some of the significant techniques that they used to create a sense of belonging for their middle school students. Fostering belonging amongst middle schoolers ultimately facilitates psychological connection and community among students, and between students and teachers. Belonging and classroom community in this research piece were attuned to the developmental needs of middle school students but are also crucial for supporting students’ social and emotional well-being at large.
From interviews with these five dedicated and well-respected middle school teachers, four concrete themes emerged as crucial to helping middle school students develop a strong sense of belonging and a positive adjustment to the school community. The first theme was an increased emphasis on community building activities. Community building activities took place both inside and outside of the classroom. Inside the classroom, a common thread was that many teachers employed call and response techniques. As one teacher, Dana, stated, “We do a call and response for each class . . . I let them select what their call and response will be . . . so we have a variety . . . there were things like ‘I’ve got you…’ and then the kids say ‘Bruh.’ Each class selected their own call and response . . . it was a way for them to know that we connect. If we get dispersed, we are going to connect back to this call and response.” Other common community-building techniques inside the classroom included creating time for self-reflection/reflexive activities or the development of classroom social contracts that give students a say in how they want to be treated. Social contracts could also be meaningly referred back to if students were having an off day or getting out of hand.
Community building was by no means limited to inside the classroom, and several teachers mentioned things like attending student sporting and extra-curricular events or creating informal moments of connection that carried over into the classroom. As one teacher, Eric, put it, “Having those one-on-one conversations that aren’t structured . . . go sit at a random table of kids at lunch. . . have a conversation with them . . . how is their day going . . . if they are on a sports team . . . make your face present and show interest in who they are outside of your class. . . yes, they may be the next scientist or whatever. . .they may be really awesome at what’s going on in your class, they may not . . . but there is so much more to them than that . . . than your subject area . . .that’s not all they want to talk about.”
A second major theme emphasized by the middle school teachers interviewed in this study was the importance of modeling a positive attitude/positive behavior for their students. Many teachers both modeled positive behavior and had open conversations about the value of it with their students. As one teacher, Dana stated, “[we had] very serious conversations about the things I expect from them around kindness and community. . . supporting each other and one of the things we talked about was this sort of colloquialism about the high tide raises all ships. . . I grew up knowing that when some of us do well, we should all do well . . . we should all be lifted up . . . we’ve talked about it in a lot of different ways . . . if there is a need for you to tear somebody down for you to feel good then we’re just doing it wrong . . . we need to re-approach it . . . look at it some way different.”
A second component that emerged in relation to modeling positive attitudes for middle school students was creating strong relationships and outside support systems with their parents and caregivers. Each teacher recounted connecting with parents and caregivers personally and how this move created support for the types of positive behavior that they were modeling in the classroom. In the words of one teacher, Eric, “My big thing is parent contact . . . positive or negative. I try to make more positive contact than negative so if I do have to send that negative e-mail, I try to send two positive ones . . . and they [students] know that now. They’ll ask…what do I need to do to get a positive e-mail? I’ll have all of these little deals with them…if you have three good days, I’ll talk to mom. By this point I’ve talked to pretty much everybody’s mom or dad for some reason or the other and I can pull that name out . . . if they’re being off one day, I can say, ‘you know Sheila and I are best friends . . . she is on my speed dial.’ Just knowing that little bit about their lives helps.”
The third major finding of this study, which is in keeping with the specifics of middle schoolers’ social and psychological development, is the importance of understanding peer relationships in the classroom. The middle school teachers interviewed in this study actively understood this and had several strategies that took it into account. The most common one was a variant of praising students publicly, but criticizing or providing necessary corrective feedback privately. This was immensely helpful with an age group which is sensitive to their peers’ opinions of them. Another common strategy was identifying key students, or gatekeepers, so to speak, and winning them over. Doing so encouraged other students to follow rules, model good behavior, and actively participate, as much for the sake of their peers as their teachers! As one teacher stated, “The first thing that pops into my head is knowing who the kingpins are…and going after that.”
Finally, the teachers interviewed in this qualitative research piece emphasized that making course content relevant to students’ lives is also a key element in fostering dignity and belonging. One key way to do that is to let students have a say in what they study, and several teachers mentioned creating opportunities for actionable feedback regarding how to make the class (and the students within it!) more successful. Feedback via technology platforms, such as Google forms, was also cited as useful and had the additional benefit of creating more spaces for connection outside of the classroom. Taking the time to get to know students was also conducive to teachers’ ability to establish the relevancy of course content. As one math teacher stated about a conversation with her students, “So I was like, you want to be a basketball player, right? That’s your goal . . . Let’s talk about what that looks like, you got an agent, right? Is he going to run all of your money or are you going to need to know what your money looks like? They were like, ‘okay, okay . . . I’m not going to trust everybody, I’m going to keep my bank close to my pocket’. . . it was cool to see how the boys sort of lit up and responded to that method of applied mathematics.”
In conclusion, belonging is an especially important aspect of educational experience for middle school students, who are quite literally exploring their identities and figuring out who they are going to be. Each of the teachers quoted in this qualitative account fostered belonging, community, and the psychological space for middle schoolers to create positive interactions and connections with others. To recap, the four general themes that emerged as conducive to fostering belonging were a) increased emphasis on community building activities, both inside and outside of the classroom, b) modeling of positive attitudes (of which a subtheme was enlisting the support of parents and caregivers in order to do so), c) encouraging positive peer relationships, and d) making course content relevant to students’ lives.