Community Board High Five

Teachers have long known that feeling safe and secure in school helps students focus their energy on learning. And the research bears that out: A found that when teachers deliberately foster a sense of belonging by greeting each student at the door of the class, they see “significant improvements in academic engaged time and reductions in disruptive behavior.” Edutopia, and we’ve shared many other ideas from teachers for ensuring that every student in the classroom feels like they belong. Some of the activities below take less than five minutes.

They’re divided up among the grades, but many can apply across all of the years from kindergarten to 12th grade. Elementary School Shout-Outs: This is a quick way for students to celebrate each other for doing a job well or for attempting something difficult.

Shout-outs can be incorporated at any point in a class. First-grade teacher Valerie Gallagher of Providence, Rhode Island, rings a chime when she wants to get the class’s attention to ask who has a shout-out. “It’s not just me as the teacher saying, ‘You’re doing well’—it’s a way for them to interact with each other and celebrate positivity,” says Gallagher. Friendly Fridays: Elizabeth Peterson, a fourth-grade teacher in Amesbury, Massachusetts, uses as a simple way for students to lift each other and themselves up. Peterson has her students write a friendly, anonymous note to a classmate, practice using positive self-talk, or use storytelling to give a peer a pep talk.

Pesnyu peredelku pro druzhnij kollektiv. Sharing Acts of Kindness: Fifth-grade teacher Marissa King, of Tulsa, Oklahoma, shares. In the first, the teacher gives students secret kindness instructions, such as writing an anonymous note to a peer who is struggling in one of their classes. The second activity revolves around noticing others’ acts of kindness: When a student sees a peer tidying up in the classroom, for example, they can post a thank you note on a shared digital “kindness wall.” Both activities coach students to be kind to their peers in the hope that they’ll begin to practice kindness unprompted. A mock-up of a classroom Twitter profile When the class does this activity—which takes about 45 minutes to set up the first time—Fletcher has them respond to prompts about their current mood or new things happening in their lives, and then their followers respond. Class Norms: Bobby Shaddox, a seventh-grade social studies teacher at King Middle School in Portland, Maine, has his students develop a set of norms for themselves—adjectives that describe them as a community of learners. Having students come up with their own norms creates “a pathway toward belonging for every single student in that class,” says Dr. Pamela Cantor, founder of Turnaround for Children.

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“Instead of a top-down list of rules that a teacher gives a class, these are words that we generated together,” says Shaddox. “It helps us own the behavior in the classroom.”. Group Salutes: A moment shared between two or more students at the beginning or end of an activity, a is a teacher-prompted interaction that is a quick, low-prep way to cultivate community. The shared gesture can be physical—like a high five—or social—a teacher could ask students to express gratitude to their group members.