Creating Tools for Teachers to Build Belonging in Middle-Schoolers

The Learning Sciences Exchange (LSX) is a problem-solving platform with a fellowship program that brings together experts from five sectors (journalism, entertainment, education systems, social entrepreneurship, and the science of learning). In 2022-24, these fellows hailed from multiple countries, learning about each other's fields and sharing insights about their work. Fellows are grouped into teams that collaborate on research-based and innovative projects that advance children's learning. This blog post describes one of those projects; our YouTube channel shows avideo story about the project and is embedded below. For more on LSX, seenewamerica.org/lsx

Getting students back to school after the COVID pandemic continues to be a huge challenge in school systems around the world - raising big questions about what leads students to want to come to school in the first place. Two years ago, a group of five fellows in the Learning Sciences Exchange decided to tackle this problem head-on.

The issue they settled on was belonging. When we started brainstorming, says LSX fellow Oana Negru, one of the topics that resonated most was "detachment of kids from their schools." As LSX fellow Jenny Anderson points out, this was a problem emerging from "issues percolating long before COVID."

It soon became clear that building a sense of belonging was both grounded in science and could be an integral way to solve the problem. The students who want to be in school are "kids who have a strong sense of belonging," says LSX fellow Fernande Raine; they have an understanding of themselves "as someone who is a learner and someone who can succeed."

The group recognized that giving youth more agency and more chances to use their voices and employ their ideas would be critical to building belonging. But they also realized that it would help tremendously if students' teachers understood this point. "So the project moved to teachers and parents, giving them the tools to help them understand how kids try to express themselves," says LSX fellow Henry Mafulul.

The result is Building Belonging, a new and growing website with a suite of resources for educators. It features a 10-minute video for "time-stretched teachers," that "gets into the neurobiology of why belonging matters, how it directly affects learning, and what teachers can do to promote it in whatever time frame they have," Anderson says.

The site also features curriculum materials that prompt activities in classrooms, all in support of students' growth and development of their identities, highlighting the assets they bring to school and to their social circles.

"We've created lesson plans for 5, 15 and 45 minutes depending on how much time teachers have," says LSX fellow Jon Hutchinson. "These are some practical tools for teachers to start this in their classrooms right away."

The group is already working with national and international partners including Re-imagining Migration to disseminate these free resources and build upon them for many contexts. "We want to continue to get this message out in as many ways as possible," Hutchinson says.

The LSX fellows who developed this project are:Jenny West Anderson,Jon Hutchinson,Henry Samson Mafulul,Oana Negru-Subtirica, andFernande Raine.

See more of their story in the video below and tap into the resources this group has designed and published at the group's website,Building Belonging.