When some students encounter a roadblock in school or college, they may take it as a sign that this whole education thing just isn't for them. That may especially be the case for students who are racial minorities.
That can be true with challenges like glitches in federal financial aid forms or a student registration system, says Greg Walton, a psychology professor at Stanford University. “Research shows that everyone is bothered by these kinds of things, but if you're a first-generation college student, that starts to raise concerns about belonging, because there's an uncertainty of belonging there,” he says. “They think, 'Is there something wrong with me? I can't even figure out how to sign up for classes, how am I going to graduate?'”
Messages in classrooms and the way discipline is handled can also play a role, he adds.
Walton has spent decades researching how to foster a stronger sense of belonging in educational settings. And it has helped develop a number of approaches and strategies that research shows can strengthen student-teacher relationships and a sense of belonging, which research shows can have significant impacts on students' academic achievement.
EdSurge sat down with Walton after a talk he gave this month at the SXSW EDU festival in Austin.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Cloudy, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you listen to podcasts, or use the player on this page. Or read a partial transcript, edited for clarity, below.
EdSurge: You maintain that small cues in educational settings can make a big difference in whether students feel like they belong or not. What is an example?
Greg Walton: Sapna Cheryan, a professor at the University of Washington, has worked on issues of gender and belonging. And one of the things he discovered is that in a study done at Stanford, he took over a small room in the computer science department and, on one condition, he populated this room with these artifacts of male geek culture, like a poster of Star Trek. and cans of Diet Coke. And when women and men entered that environment, women reported much less interest in computing than men.
But when he changed that setup and replaced the sign with a nature sign and put up water bottles, women became even more interested in computing than men.
And what was happening was women were looking at this space and saying, 'This is a geeky male space.' Who could I be here? What kind of overlap is there between who I am as a woman and what this space allows?' And that didn't look very good, and then they weren't interested.
Similarly, there are many stories about the uncertainty of belonging for students of color and first-generation college students. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson spoke at his confirmation hearings about his experiences (feeling out of place) at Harvard. And much of our history in education is written through racial and class exclusion, where people have been excluded from school environments and selective school environments based on race and class. And people have that history in their conscience and in the struggle that their communities have undertaken to be able to access education. And that leads to a psychological process where you ask yourself, 'Is this an environment where I can really belong and where people will welcome me, treat me fairly, and include me?'
What is the biggest obstacle to implementing ideas based on your research results?
Early on in my time at Stanford, I presented some research on social belonging and growth mindset and values-affirming interventions to a university committee in hopes of building a partnership with the university to begin implementing some of these interventions on campus, partly as a researcher. , but also partly as a Stanford student. And I walked into this meeting with frontline staff, very engaged and very excited about this, people who were seeing every day the ways that students were struggling with concerns about belonging. And the senior administrator basically looked at him and said, 'I don't think so.'
It's like what he saw was magic and he didn't believe in magic.
If I had been a physicist and used a bunch of complicated physics terms that she didn't know, she would have had to nod and agree. But she was talking about psychology (how people think and feel) and it was too soft and piecemeal, and her lay theories were too constructed to respond to the evidence I was providing.
That delayed the project a full year.
So I think, in part, it's fundamentally important to take seriously how people make sense of themselves and school situations. That's as important as anything else.
It is very difficult to drive change systematically throughout an entire system. You have many gatekeepers, like that individual manager, who can delay projects.
What can a university professor do to increase the sense of belonging?
Another type of norm has to do with how we respond to people who are different from us and how we value diversity. Sohail Murad, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Markus Brauer of the University of Wisconsin, have a series of studies showing that simply communicating diversity norms within college classrooms, whether with posters or with very posters short videos that describe students supporting diversity in general and valuing people from diverse backgrounds, which created a better and more inclusive learning environment for students.
So all students, and particularly students from racial and ethnic minority groups, from low socioeconomic groups, and from religious minority groups, reported that the environment was more inclusive and accepting of them, and that actually led to an increase in grades , reducing inequalities and achievements in these groups. classes.
So there are many ways we can think, very intentionally, what are the norms that we want to create in this space, given the goals that we have, and what is the role I have in facilitating that norm?
How does this play out in a K-12 environment?
The reason people go into education and teaching is largely due to the types of relationships they want to have with children and how those relationships can be spaces for the growth of those children, especially those of various types. from disadvantaged backgrounds. But if you look at the data, in many ways our schools don't have that experience.
A recent study using data from high school students found that children who in high school reported having a natural mentor were 12 to 26 percentage points more likely to go to college than children who did not, controlling for everything else. .
That's a massive effect.
And yet, only 15 percent of children had a natural mentor in high school, and that number was even lower for (low socioeconomic status students), even though the effect of having a mentor was even greater for they.
The reality for many of our children today is that school is a lonely, critical and evaluative space. In California, state surveys reveal that less than 60 percent of ninth graders report having a loving relationship with an adult. We have made no progress on that in the last 10 years. This is outrageous.
So I think educators see this and know the importance of relationships, and they know that sometimes we don't succeed in that, but there's kind of a mystery as to why and what's happening.
One of the things that's really exciting to me is that we've now begun to very clearly identify a limited number of critical turning points in relationships between students and educators. These are key junctures where relationships can improve and trust can grow and be maintained, or lost. And we're learning more and more how to get those junctures right.
Can you give an example?
An example is when there is conflict (if there is misbehavior) and the teacher is responding to the student. Teachers know that a great predictor of whether they are able to achieve their goals in the classroom is if the class is well organized and focused on their tasks. Children who misbehave threaten that. And in our culture it is very easy to take a punitive approach in response to a misbehaving child. In fact, we do this as parents. What parent hasn't said at some point: 'Go to your room'? That's all. I've had it even when maybe you know that's not really going to be the most useful and effective thing. He will not do wonders in the relationship with his son. It is not the long term solution.
And that's why at school we have policies like zero tolerance. We have policies that are based on this type of punitive approach. Well, our research led by Jason Okonofua, a former Stanford graduate student, has created a system for offering teachers what we call an “empathic mindset” about bad behavior. It doesn't mean not disciplining. It means that when you discipline, you do it in a way that brings the child closer and not away.
So maybe you pay attention to the child, but then you talk to him about it and hear what his experience was. And his goal is to maintain a strong relationship, even while upholding the norms that should exist in the classroom.
This was randomly assigned to high school math teachers and multiple randomized control trials, and reduces school-wide suspension rates over the year and even into the next. That is a critical turning point. Your teacher is responding to you, is he dismissing you or does he maintain that relationship with you and listen to you?
It matters.
