The Key to Helping Boys at School: Make Them Feel Safe to Belong

Then another said: “I like to play with my younger siblings.”

Then: “A little known fact about me is that part of my lung is missing.”

In some classrooms on campus, girls-only and all-gender counseling meet; students choose which category they are assigned to. During these gatherings of faithfulness, students cannot opt ​​out of sharing, because this first moment sets the tone for the day. Students will rely on each other for support to complete assignments due at the end of the day, and teachers and administrators like Razavi want students to feel safe to be vulnerable with each other.

Immediately after sharing time, each boy tells the group about the class activities they have to complete. Classmates offer advice, encouragement or just approval.

“This is where growth happens,” said Razavi, a humanities teacher and the school’s assistant principal. Growth happens by accident. This is where children feel like they belong in the community and it is a sign that children feel important.”

Experts agree that a sense of belonging – meaning that students feel welcome, respected and supported at school – is essential to academic success. This is perhaps even more true for boys, who are more likely than girls to repeat kindergarten and participate in literacy and are less likely to graduate from high school.

But this safety eludes many boys who get the message at a young age that they are not good students.

“Something happens over time so when they get to high school, boys don’t feel like they belong in institutions of higher education,” said Ioakim Boutakidis, a professor of child and adolescent studies at California State University, Fullerton, and researcher at the American Institute for Boys and Men, a nonprofit research and policy group. “And that hurts academic identity, the idea that you’re ready to succeed in these learning spaces.” (Rise Together, a fund established by the American Institute for Boys and Men founder Richard Reeves, is one of the many sponsors of The Hechinger Report.)

At Oakland Unity Middle School, teachers are trying to break that cycle with a relationship-building program, designed to stop male violence and support boys to be themselves, instead of what they feel is expected of them. Just over 140 sixth, seventh and eighth graders attend the school, almost all of them from East Oakland – one of the most socioeconomically diverse neighborhoods in the Bay Area.

The program, Ever Forward, was founded in 2004 by Ashanti Branch, then a first-year teacher in nearby San Lorenzo, to embrace a philosophy of “radical positivity.” As of 2021, according to the Branch, it has led more than 300 workshops, mostly in Northern California, reaching more than 30,000 teachers and educators.

“I feel like this school is my second home,” said Unity eighth-grader Adrian Polanco, who wants to study business in college. “We always have someone we can look up to, who has a back, which I think is really good and it is very important for the school to have him.”

No one is saying that emotional support for boys alone will help them do better academically, but experts say programs to improve friendships could be the key to closing the gender gap in academics.

Warmth and communication are very important to boys, even if they don’t always express these needs by responding to questions and expectations the way girls often do, Boutakidis said. Boys may not seem to care what adults think of them, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want to communicate.

This can make it difficult for some teachers to connect with boys in the classroom and even study boys’ behavior as non-aggressive and defiant, said Matt Englar-Carlson, professor of counseling psychology and director of the Center for Boys and Men at Cal State Fullerton. This may be especially true for adolescent boys.

“If you think what’s going on is disrespect in the classroom, the truth is it’s usually not, because they’re not doing it for you,” Englar-Carlson said. “They play with their peers around them, he knows how to make fun of you and keep his name in front of his friends and pretend he doesn’t care.”

Once teachers start to notice when this is happening, they can adjust their teaching, he said, such as asking boys questions differently. Instead of yelling at a male student in front of the class, teachers may walk around the classroom and talk to him calmly, at his level.

He said: “Now it’s a private conversation between the two of you, and you really don’t need to announce immorality.”

The Ashanti branch learned early on the challenges faced by male students. A wrestler and football player while attending East Oakland public schools, he now wears his hair in long braids and has an easy, warm smile and laugh. After graduating from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Branch worked as a civil engineer before teaching.

As one of the few male teachers at San Lorenzo High School about 20 miles south of Oakland, Branch quickly learned that male students took their anger and frustration out on him.

“I saw smart young men, but the way they played in front of the class was really difficult,” he said. “I said to them, young man, you want to fight with me because it looks good to your peers, I did not come to fight with you, I am not your enemy, you are a high school student, I am older and have a job, why are we arguing, I want you to succeed.

He invited male students to lunch with him once a week and asked them how he could be a better teacher. They told him that their lives are too difficult for school to be prioritized. Students described “crashes” – sudden bursts of anger and emotion – after experiencing one emotional “world bomb” after another.

“A child is pushed down the hall, they don’t pay attention, they don’t pay attention to you, and suddenly they turn and yell,” said Gatsheni, showing the explosion with both hands. “Then he gets into trouble, doesn’t he?”

Gatsha remembers that when he was a teacher he was encouraged to leave his own problems in the “glove room” before coming to work.

“I tried to do that, but I realized I was a fake,” he said. Rather, he was honest with his students in the way he conducted himself. “I used to tell them, ‘I had a tough weekend. A lot of drama happened in my life. Today is not a good day.’ He calls this approach “normal vulnerability” – an important step for young men to become themselves as people and as students.

The branch turned weekly lunches with students into a club, the Ever Forward Club, where young men met to process feelings. He spent ten years developing the program and expanding it to many schools, eventually leaving his job to build the program and provide professional development for teachers.

At the heart of Ever Forward Club is a project-based tool Branch called Masks, Emotions and Statistics. During the workshops, the Branch guides young men to explore the ways in which they present themselves to the world while hiding their difficult feelings from view.

Since the club began in 2004, every participating student has graduated from high school and 93 percent have gone on to college, the military or trade school, Branch said. He expanded the work to include the development of teachers for teachers, calling it the Million Mask Movement.

Tony Farrell, principal of Stuart Hall High School – the boys’ section of the school in San Francisco affiliated with the Schools of the Sacred Heart* – recalls an event led by a branch at his school ten years ago. Two hundred male high school students were sitting in a large circle in the school’s gymnasium, Farrell said, and Gatsheni pulled out pens and papers. He instructed the students to write on one side of the paper how they appear in the world. On the other hand, he said, write things the world doesn’t know about.

Then they devoured the papers and threw them at each other.

“It was a snowball fight,” Farrell said. “We had an incredible amount of crumpled paper.”

Each boy then picked up a ball of paper, straightened it and, one at a time, read what the other boy had written.

Farrell remembers the boys reading, “You wouldn’t know by looking at me that my parents are getting a divorce” and “You wouldn’t know by looking at me that grandma is really sick.”

“Not to get woo-woo, but it was like an electric field,” he said. “It was really powerful.”

Two years ago, the Branch led the Masks, Emotions and Math event at Oakland Unity Middle School. Since then, teachers at the school have integrated aspects of the Branch’s work into regular activities, including how the school handles disciplinary matters. This is also where Razavi got the idea of ​​offering single-sex counseling sessions.

Some boys need a place where they can open up to other boys, without the social dynamics that can come with all-gender groups.

“If you know that things are important, and you know that there is this decrease in the idea of ​​being boys over time, we have to work to make boys feel that they don’t belong,” he said. “And we have to work on that early.”

Eighth grader Fierre Hill transferred to Oakland Unity after her old middle school closed. He wants to go to college and study something related to life. He describes the support he received from his teachers at school as “warming.”

He said: “You can tell them things that you wouldn’t be able to tell other people, and they have this different energy that makes you feel at ease.”

“I can hear that,” agreed seventh grader Jubran Sulaiman. “We can all know, what’s the word? Reveal yourself.”

On Wednesdays, Hill and other students go to the school’s Learning Lab, where they get help completing any homework they haven’t learned. Chris Bibbens Williams is the teacher in charge of the Learning Lab. He said the Masks, Emotions and Math event led by Gatsha at the school helped shy students to connect more with their peers.

“You will have children who are confident by speaking in front of everyone, but even the children who were not confident, it was obvious that the place was good, it was an opportunity for them to say how they felt at that time,” she said. “One thing I love about this school is that we really let the kids be themselves, and we build those deep relationships.”

When he’s not in the Learning Lab, Williams can be found all over campus — playing basketball with students and hanging out with them in the cafeteria.

“When you build that relationship, kids come to you,” she said.

Recently, Williams spoke with an eighth-grader who was not completing his language arts work. Was he not doing the work because it was too difficult, or because he lacked confidence?

“I told him to come and read for me,” said Williams, “and I found out that he was the only one who was not confident in his reading.”

With Williams sitting with him, the student entered the passage and read unfamiliar words. Since then, Williams has seen a change in the boy’s confidence level.

“You’re trying more,” he said, “and that’s all I could ask for.”

Contact editor Christina Samuels at (212) 678-3635 or samuels@hechingerreport.org.