Written in collaboration with Lorraine Martinez Hanley, Ian Kelleher, and Meg Lee.
In 2007, during a strategic planning session at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School, we asked ourselves this generative question: What is the next frontier for teacher training—to take good teachers and make them great and great teachers and make them experts? People were surprised at our answer, which was to train 100% of our teachers in the science of how the brain learns. Our goal went beyond simply elevating teachers’ knowledge of the science of learning—there has to be an impact on each student’s school experience. So we set about helping teachers use this knowledge to validate, inform, and transform their instructional design and daily practice. Importantly, we knew from the start that this work should benefit all students, so making it work for the complex diversities and learner variability that exists in every classroom, school, and district was critical.
From its very first days, the CTTL has helped teachers take the most promising principles, research, and strategies in the Science of Teaching and Learning and find ways to apply them to students in their unique context—from preschool through 12th-grade, and now college and university. For example, here are some of the principles that inform teachers’ work:
- Demystify learning by teaching students about neuroplasticity and the fundamentals of neuroanatomy
- Demystify learning further by teaching students effective and efficient strategies for learning alongside content—and help students use these strategies with increasing independence
- Recognize that emotion and cognition are interconnected in the brain
- Provide high-quality feedback at any age to improve the learner, which, when done well can also motivate the learner
- Understand that memory is informed by making connections in the brain
Since we began, we have learned from research about the massive impact that having a high-quality teacher and collective teacher efficacy can make on student outcomes. We have also learned that in a typical school, teacher effectiveness plateaus after about three years, whereas in a school with a high-quality professional learning environment teacher effectiveness keeps on growing. Our mission to make St. Andrew’s a place where good teachers come to get great and great teachers come to get even better seems validated.
A few years later, St. Andrew’s asked itself a second question: What are two things no student will ever forget to bring to school each day? The answer, after someone says “cell phone”, is their brain and their ever-developing identity. And while there are many factors in a student’s daily life that shape these two things, I want to just focus on one important factor here — the student’s sense of belonging at school.
I was not aware of the research around the sense of belonging mindset until introduced to the work of the organization formerly known as the Mindset Scholars Network. In What We Know About Belonging from Scientific Research by Carissa Romero, the author writes:
“Students with a sense of belonging in school feel socially connected, supported, and respected. They trust their teachers and their peers, and they feel like they fit in at school. They are not worried about being treated as a stereotype and are confident that they are seen as a person of value.” (1)
As well as being a vital factor that helps all students do better, I was also interested to learn that a sense of belonging is not a monolithic thing that you either have or don’t have at school. Rather, each student will feel a sense of belonging in some spaces but not in others, on some days but not on others, in some classes but not in others. Belonging is nuanced, often fluid, and a necessity if we are to help students reach their fullest potential.
“Belonging” has proliferated throughout many schools and districts in the post-COVID years, but seems to be falling into the “Year of the Brain” Trap. The CTTL, however, continues to work hard at making belonging a constant in the minds of educators. When you explore all the aspects that may feed into whether a student feels like they belong or don’t belong, it is clear that this is not something that we can tick off and say, “we’ve done belonging now!” This has to be the way we design our schools moving forward. When you explore the idea that a student’s sense of belonging varies depending on where they are and what they are doing at that point in the day, it becomes clear that every adult in the school community must be a practitioner of belonging—and must continue to train and practice to be so.
The CTTL’s pathway to modeling and facilitating belonging is based on the idea of connecting insights and strategies from MBE (Mind, Brain, and Education), and Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB). Both of these research-informed fields provide insights and strategies that help make our classrooms and schools better places that help foster students’ sense of academic belonging and social belonging. These insights and strategies help set the conditions for student achievement and positive social, emotional, and identity development. We must remember that building belonging is a pedagogical strategy, and good pedagogy is a belonging strategy.
When I first started teaching, I had a simplistic view of my job and how students learn. I had a major in History from Dickinson College and had been a high-level collegiate soccer player. This obviously made me qualified to teach AP United States history and coach varsity Boys’ Soccer on day one of my teaching career, right? The fact is, I was unprepared to teach and to support student learning. I would spend hours creating content outlines for each class period, but when I look back at those notes, they lacked something—the pedagogy. What teaching strategies would I use to make the content stick and the learning enduring? Few moments were created for formative assessment and retrieval practice. I didn’t use many modalities to teach and assess, and my feedback was cognitively overloading.
If you had asked me about my educational philosophy back then, I might have said something like, “My job is to teach, and my students’ job is to learn.” I did not understand the complexity of a student’s learning brain, or the complexity of the developing identities they brought to class, or how both these factors impacted their readiness and motivation to learn.
On our journey within the CTTL, we have explored MBE research from Daniel Willingham, Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa, Paul Kirschner, Mary Helen Immordino Yang, and many others. We have explored DEIB research from Tanji Reed Marshall, Floyd Cobb, John Krownapple, Claude Steele, David Yeager, Christopher Emdin, and many others. “Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain” remains an anchor text for those who see belonging as a fundamental part of great teaching and learning. As Zaretta Hammond points out:
“Cultural responsiveness is not a practice; it’s what informs our practice so we can make better teaching choices for eliciting, engaging, motivating, supporting, and expanding the intellectual capacity of ALL our students.”
This is just one of an increasing number of voices calling us to consider MBE and DEIB not as two disparate silos, but rather as complementary lenses and toolkits that help us design school experiences that help every child grow to achieve their fullest potential.
But just saying MBE and DEIB are connected is not enough. We need tools, frameworks, and strategies to help us do the work in our schools. It is why the CTTL has created a collection of tools, including the Belonging Braid shown below, that we will use in our 2025 Winter Webinar Series, Belonging and the Brain: Creating Conditions for Academic Achievement. Over three 75-minute sessions, we will unpack this tool and present new ones that can help teachers and school leaders better set the conditions for student learning and achievement in their classrooms and schools.
What does belonging actually look like in the classroom? In 2024, my colleague, Lorraine Martinez Hanley, the CTTL’s DEB Research Lead, and I wrote a piece called Belonging is a Pedagogical Strategy in Think Differently and Deeply, Volume 5. This piece sought to provide specific questions for educators to consider. Read through this list and take a moment to think about how you or your colleagues would respond to them?
1. Does every student hear their name during each class period (beyond just taking attendance)?
2. Where might your biases impact the class and your engagement with students, and what can you do to mitigate this?
3. Have you built a culture where every student feels emotionally and physically safe in your classroom and in your school?
4. What do you do to build your students’ trust in you?
5. What do you do to get to know your students?
6. Do you set a high, and achievable, academic bar for all of your students?
7. How do you let each student know that you have high expectations for them, and that you believe in their ability to reach these expectations over time?
8. How do you discover, through conversation or formative assessment, where each student currently is with essential knowledge, skills, and content?
9. How does your oral, written, and expressive feedback support each student’s sense of belonging and potential for growth?
10. How are students able to express their voice in your class?
11. How do your classroom and hallway walls foster a sense of belonging (have you designed for belonging and not just decorated)?
12. What does your homework look like? Does it align with research on what effective homework looks like? Does it account for home life and outside-of-school life?
13. Do you regularly use formative assessment to identify current learning gaps and then address them?
14. How do you prepare students with the most effective strategies for summative assessments?
15. Before including something on a summative assessment, do you always make sure you have done a formative assessment on it first to check that your teaching landed well?
16. Can students see themselves in the assignments and readings that are selected to meet the learning objectives for your class?
When a student feels a sense of academic and social belonging in a classroom they are likely to be more motivated to learn. This correlation is supported by two main theories of motivation – Self-Determination Theory (Deci and Ryan, 1985 (2) & 2017 (3)) and the Expectancy, Value, Cost Theory (Barron and Hulleman, 2015(4)). Deci and Ryan (1985) speak of “three innate psychological needs—competence, autonomy, and relatedness—which when satisfied yield enhanced self-motivation and mental health and when thwarted lead to diminished motivation and well-being.”
Relatedness aligns with the concept of social belonging. Developing a sense of academic belonging aligns with developing a sense of increasing competence. Autonomy within constraints (which is what Deci & Ryan meant by this) is supported by helping students find ways to see their voice, their story, and their world in a class. In Deci & Ryan’s (2017) own words:
“School climates that support autonomy foster more self-motivation, persistence, and quality of learning. Structure, as a scaffolding and support for competence, is shown…to complement autonomy support. In fact, classroom climates supporting autonomy, providing high structure, and conveying relatedness and inclusion foster personal well-being and feelings of connection to one’s school and community. The implications of [self determination theory] for parenting, classroom teaching behaviors, and school policies and reforms are manifold and cut across age and cultural lines.”
Alignment with Expectancy, Value, Cost Theory is also strong. Building expectancy in the classroom results in students thinking, I can do it. Building value results in them thinking, I want to do it. Addressing costs refers to finding and removing barriers to learning. I think it is clear that we work to meet these goals by fostering each student’s sense of social and academic belonging. And underpinning this is the teacher’s rock-steady belief in every student’s ability to improve. As a teacher, I have my “expectancy, value, cost” radar on in the background all day every day—and this has been transformative.
One great example of the power of fostering belonging comes from David Yeager’s, “10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People”. Yeager points out the importance of wise feedback, and how it creates a sense of belonging for a student and belief in their ability to improve, thus increasing their motivation for learning. This was evidenced in the study, Breaking the Cycle of Mistrust: Wise Interventions to Provide Critical Feedback Across the Racial Divide (5), which shows the willingness of a student to revise an assignment based on the teacher giving wise feedback. But the most amazing thing about this was that increases in a range of student-outcome measures continued for years following that one initial, simple intervention. This study always makes the CTTL wonder, if one simple action can have such an impact for so many years, what would it be like if a whole school designed for belonging—every teacher for every student every year? What might be possible then?
Teachers must know the content in their subject or subjects, for sure, and keep up-to-date since subjects evolve over time. They must be constantly developing their practice, and doing so in a way that is informed by evidence on what works best. And they need to be aware of their power and privilege in a learning environment, and their ability to set the conditions for optimal classroom learning—something I did not consider early in my career. Using the most promising research and strategies from a combination of the Science of Teaching and Learning and Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging helps us do this by creating classrooms and schools where every student feels they belong — an essential foundation for helping all students thrive and meet their academic potential.
References
- Student Experience Network. (2015). What we know about belonging. https://studentexperiencenetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/What-We-Know-About-Belonging.pdf
- Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L., “Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being,” American Psychologist 55, no. 1 (2000): 68–78, https://selfdeterminationtheory.org/SDT/documents/2000_RyanDeci_SDT.pdf
- Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L., Self-Determination Theory: Basic Psychological Needs in Motivation, Development, and Wellness (Guilford Press, 2017), https://www.guilford.com/excerpts/ryan.pdf?t=1.
- Barron, K. E., & Hulleman, C. S., “Expectancy-Value-Cost Model of Motivation,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd ed., ed. J. D. Wright (Elsevier, 2015), 503–509, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/58290cf0b8a79bc71b31a705/t/5abd344cf950b7676de8c689/1522349133045/BarronHulleman_EVC_Model_of_Motivationtoshare.pdf.
- Galla, B. M., Plummer, B. D., White, R. E., Meketon, D., D’Mello, S. K., & Duckworth, A. L., “The Academic Diligence Task (ADT): Assessing Individual Differences in Effort on Tedious but Important Academic Tasks,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 143, no. 2 (2014): 601–620, https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/xge-a0033906.pdf.
