Blog

by Dr. Ian Kelleher and Lorraine Martinez Hanley

Four weeks ago, the CTTL concluded its 2025 Winter Webinar series, Belonging and the Brain: Creating the Conditions for Student Achievement. Why this topic? Because being intentional about belonging is a powerful lever to improve much of what we deeply care about in schools—including, but certainly not limited to, students’ achievement, pathways, and well-being. Belonging helps students become the person who realizes their full potential.

Over three nights, we heard from three world-leading experts and tried out tools created by the CTTL to help you create cultures of belonging in your class or school. What were the big takeaways? For those who attended, here is a brief recap. For those who didn’t, yet, we hope this whets your appetite—recordings are still available and come with full access to the workbook and tools. Email our team at info@thecttl.org to request access.

Why should I care about belonging?

Belonging should be a non-negotiable as it helps each student reach their full potential. And it cannot be just a tagged-on event or a bought-in six week curriculum for home-room. It must be woven through the connections, routines, classes, and teams of each student’s learning journey. To do this, adults in schools need to be practitioners of belonging. Here are five reasons why.

(1) Research from schools

While belonging sounds like it might just be a warm, fuzzy “nice to have”, research shows that a sense of belonging increases motivation, academic performance, and school success. Students are more engaged in class and earn better grades. They perceive themselves to be more competent and autonomous. They have more positive attitudes toward school, classwork, teachers, and peers. They invest more of themselves in learning and have greater academic tenacity.

(2) Research on Human Development

Every child is born with a wide window of potential, possibilities of what they could achieve as their brains and body systems develop over time. One good example of this involves neuroplasticity, how our brain changes over time based upon the experiences we have. Another example involves epigenetics. Our genes and how they are expressed also change throughout our life based on the experiences we have. We will not die with exactly the same genes or the same brain we were born with. The environments our children are in shape the development of their brains and their genes. Think of the percentage of their life that students spend in school. This is a powerful call for us to design classes and schools that help students realize their potential and have them workforce, college, and life ready.

(3) The power of just one teacher

As Stanford professor Gregory Walton says, every child needs at least one teacher who has an irrational belief in them. Irrational, because the teacher needs to reflect back that belief with sincerity even when times are hard, even when the student messes up. Research shows that having just one teacher who has this irrational belief, who is an agent of belonging, can have a transformative effect on a child. It shifts their model of who teachers are and what school could be. 

(4) Research on how our brains and bodies work

Emotion and cognition are highly interconnected in the brain, so it shouldn’t surprise us that many important facets of being successful in school, such as attention, memory, motivation, decision making, and executive functioning, are deeply affected by emotion. The way our brain and body reacts to positive emotion can be like a coiled spring that helps propel us to success. Negative emotions, such as stress, fear or impostor syndrome (where you feel like an intellectual fraud even when you are clearly not), can shut down our ability to do even simple tasks that we take for granted—like recalling basic things you are sure you know or even the ability to talk. The CTTL’s Expanded Simple Model of Learning tool was created to help us visualize how emotion and prior experiences impact learning. It is also important to note that it is impossible to avoid all stress—it is one of the ways the body reacts as we struggle and strive to meet challenges. However, knowing that you are supported and belonging to a community can help navigate those stressful moments and adversity.

(5) Our spider-sense and wisdom as teachers

We know from our own professional experience the tremendous value of building a culture of belonging in our class—how it helps drive students’ engagement, motivation, willingness to take a risk, and persist tenaciously in the face of challenges. In our hearts and minds as teachers, we know belonging matters. Yet very few teachers have been trained on the new discoveries about how belonging impacts learning and the brain. We know so much more now. And, to quote Maya Angelou, Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.

These insights come from research in psychology, neuroscience, education, psychiatry, and human development. Think about that. And they align with our experiences as educators in a wide variety of schools in a wide variety of places. When insights from many different fields point in the same direction, we should take particular notice.

What can I do to be a practitioner of belonging?

Here are ten of our takeaways from the 2025 Winter Webinar Series.

1. Have a working definition of belonging for your school or institution. 

We like the elegant simplicity of this one from UVA professor Chris Hulleman: “The belief that one is academically and socially connected, supported, and respected.” This definition enforces the critical point that academic belonging and social belonging both need our attention. An even easier one to remember comes from Stanford’s Greg Walton,”Belonging is a relationship between a person and a place”, which should prompt us to think about all the social, emotional, and academic factors that could go into strengthening or weakening that relationship.

2. Bust common myths about belonging.

For example, (1) Belonging is not about making students feel happy all the time, it is not a feel-good, ego-building exercise. Belonging embraces the whole person—including their strengths, struggles, and emotions. It allows for discomfort, mistakes, and growth, and acknowledges vulnerability and imperfection. (2) Belonging is context dependent, not a monolithic thing that you either have or don’t have. Students may feel a sense of belonging in some classes and spaces and not in others. (3) Belonging is not about lowering the bar. As Stanford professors Carol Dweck, Gregory Walton & Geoffrey Cohen say, “Student outcomes are most improved when a caring and supportive environment is combined with a focus on learning and high expectations for student achievement.” In fact, we would even argue that belonging, done well, allows us to raise the bar.

3. Use the Belonging Braid tool as a visual focus for the work that needs to be done.

The CTTL’s Belonging Braid reminds us that: (1) We need to know our students, and should consider both the social identities and the academic identities that are in the class. We need to strive to create conditions that allow students to share who they are with teachers and peers. (2) When designing our class, we need to be intentional about including strategies that foster academic belonging, and strategies that foster social belonging. (3) One of the joys of teaching is that no class ever goes exactly as planned, so when things happen consider strategies from both the academic belonging and social belonging strands to apply to the situation.

4. Pay attention to five key turning points.

Professor Gregory Walton reminded us that there are five “turning points” that have disproportionate consequences, and we need to pay particular attention to these when working to create cultures of belonging:

1. Transitions—for example, between grade level, schools, or even different parts of a student’s school day
2. When students get critical feedback on their work
3. At points of academic setback
4. In times of conflict
5. When we are working with groups who are stereotyped as less able than others

5. Use the Belonging Strategies Toolkit to help foster academic belonging and social belonging.

The CTTL’s Belonging Strategies Toolkit presents twenty strategies and mindsets to help support academic belonging, and twenty strategies and mindsets to help support social belonging. Use this tool as (1) a self-reflection, (2) to plan professional development that you might do, or (3) to design your upcoming classes or your course for next year.

6. Small gestures matter

Small gestures that convey to a student, you are seen, your contributions are noticed and valued, can make a large difference. We often think that there’s something big that has to happen to do belonging work. And while there are changes to routines, spaces, policies, curriculum, and daily practice that need to be addressed, don’t ever forget that small gestures matter too. Students tend to hold some version of this in their heads: Is the person I am and the person I want to be compatible with this space I am in right now? This is often a precondition for them to deeply engage in learning. Your small gestures can help the student answer “yes” to this question.

7. Develop students’ capacity to be fully learning.

When students feel they are just “doing school”, you do not have the prime conditions for fostering their sense of belonging. Instead, develop students’ capacity to be fully learning and build their intellectual courage to be deeply part of the learning. Helping students understand the why is essential, so explicitly state the purpose of the lessons you teach and the work you assign. Find ways to make learning relevant to students’ real lives. Find places in the flow of your year where you can include “transcendent thinking” in your class. Give feedback in ways that grow the person; connect the feedback to students’ development as a human being. Be intentional about building students’ motivation and capacity so that, in the words of professor Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, “the horse needs to be the one pulling the cart.” 

8. Avoid “contingency belonging.”

Mary Helen Immordino-Yang suggests that schools often provide “contingency belonging.” For example, a sense of belonging may depend on how well students do academically grade-wise. Remember that all students deserve and flourish when they feel a sense of belonging, so it is vital that we work purposefully to avoid contingency belonging. Start with an honest self assessment: what are the policies, practices, and procedures we implement as a school or in our classrooms that make belonging contingent?

9. Empower students to build belonging themselves.

Find ways where students can own belonging and build it themselves—for the benefit of both themselves and others—rather than it being just something that teachers dole out. You will probably have to be one “doling it out” at first, but be intentional about passing more of this responsibility onto students as their sense of belonging grows. Start modeling this in the first few weeks of school by setting the norms for the learning space in ways that include students’ input. Revisit at times throughout the year, particularly after vacations. 

10. Be aware that psychological safety and trust underpin belonging

Belonging is not the end point—each child’s school success, identity development, and the amazing journey they are on is. Neither is belonging the starting point. It is underpinned by students’ sense of physical and psychological safety and trust—and this requires intentional work from us all the time. It also compels us to know our students. You need to invest in each student to develop a deep connection for those times when you need to correct and redirect. As you do this, remember that students come with past experiences and existing models in their brains of what a teacher is and does. How will your students know that you see potential in them and value what they bring? And there’s more. To do all this really well, we need to spend time thinking about our own identity. All these underpinnings of belonging, illustrated in the CTTL’s ELF tool (Elevating Learning Framework), need regular intentional work. 

Belonging might be one of the best kept secrets in education. A wealth of research from a diverse range of fields speaks of its immense potential. There are a great many levers we can use to foster belonging in our classes and schools, many of which are simple to implement with very little cost. These strategies for belonging tend to make sense to most teachers—and they quickly see their value. What’s not to like? In the words of USC professor Mary Helen Immoordino-Yang, it’s time to metabolize the science of learning—turn it into nutrients and energy to feed back to your kids. This, by the way, is the mission of the CTTL. We are with you for your journey.

Who were our guest speakers?